"Housing is Pain", or "Why We Can't Have Nice (Instanced) Things"

[Colt47]

I mean we already basically have instanced housing with the apartments. Which are widely not used so idk why SE doesn't just put the space of 2 apartments together or even three and there would be still enough empty once to give people a immersive housing experience.

But i can see why they don't want to do instanced housing when it comes to houses, since that would mean for every house there would be also the landscape etc. that would put extra stress on the servers. And that for every player can get really bad really fast.

So for the love of hydaelyn SE please let us upgrade the apartments to be a bit bigger, heck let players pay 1m gil for the first upgrade would be even a nice gilsink that most people would definitely use. I think that would make many if not most players happy for now.

That's the thing. There are no gameplay loops involving the apartments that are significant enough to make them relevant. Even the existing housing barely has any gameplay loops to speak of and people just want them as trophies or as places to RP in. The fact that housing is an actual materialized thing in a ward gives it at least some value.

[Heavenchild]

I don't want instanced housing. I like it to have neighbours and to run around in the wards. :3
Also I think that people are just so much into housing because it is not something every player can easily have.
We have no right for a plot, just because we pay a sub. We also have no right to have an ultimate weapon just because of we pay a sub. (and so on)
Housing was all in all fine. We just needed some actions against all those damn resellers who made it impossible to get M or L plots.
And after so may new players came to FF14 there were just too less wards. I never wanted that lottery and in some points its the drama as I expected.
(abused by people with money and multiple service accounts and so on)

But I really would like to hear more about Island Sanctuary. They are so silent about this. That scares me. xD

[Oizen]

I don't want instanced housing. I like it to have neighbours and to run around in the wards. :3
Also I think that people are just so much into housing because it is not something every player can easily have.
We have no right for a plot, just because we pay a sub. We also have no right to have an ultimate weapon just because of we pay a sub. (and so on)
Housing was all in all fine. We just needed some actions against all those damn resellers who made it impossible to get M or L plots.
And after so may new players came to FF14 there were just too less wards. I never wanted that lottery and in some points its the drama as I expected.
(abused by people with money and multiple service accounts and so on)

But I really would like to hear more about Island Sanctuary. They are so silent about this. That scares me. xD

Its hard to see anyone say "Housing is fine" when it excludes an overwhelming majority of players from partaking in it.

[Shibi]

...This is why I'm fond of suggesting instanced airships for FCs. You still likely run into the same issues, but they're mitigated since there's a much smaller number of active FCs above a certain rank than there are players overall. (Whether they're mitigated enough to be solvable? That's something no one except SQEX has the info to know.) If that is viable, though, by removing all the FCs from housing wards, you'd at least free up a bunch of houses for personal housing... and you'd ensure every FC that ranks up enough to get an instanced airship could have a company workshop, gardens, etc...

Instanced airships, phüh! I want overland airships, I'd love to park over limsa and drop water balloons on the all the horny hyur. /s

Otherwise, agree, as always. EQ2 like housing would be nice, Qho optional.

[KurohNeko]

People greater underestimate the toll and cost on servers instanced housing would take when we just had a problem playing the game itself when Endwalker launched due to the influx of new people. Not to mention the issue you brought up of people buying a house changing the wallpaper or something and never logging on again or not logging on for months taking up server resources. I don't think instanced housing like that will be possible anytime soon, maybe if it were a separate subscription rate you pay on top of your current subscription but I can already hear the bitching from people.

As for housing locked game features, that's not really broken considering it doesn't hamper the rest of the game and is a nice exclusive feature for those who got a house. Same goes for free companies and air ships and submarines and stuff.

[Heavenchild]

Its hard to see anyone say "Housing is fine" when it excludes an overwhelming majority of players from partaking in it.

So you would say...Ultimate, its rewards and stuff is also not okay, because it excludes an overwhelming majority of players from partaking in it?
As I've already said, it was no big problem to get a house before so many new players joined the game. (and they disabled the housing timer)

And housing would not be so demanded if it would be a thing that everyone can easily have. People are just like this. Idk why. xD
The new lottery makes it at least just worse all in all. People with much rl money have big advantage now. :c And the rest can just wait..., wait....wait...., without their Gil.

I already have a small house for a long time. And I camped very often with other players, when they tried to get a house. And they always got one. It was just a question of some observing and patience.
Never took more than 2 weeks and the people did not 24/7 try. We needed some more wards (or servers), a 90 days rule for fc's leader change (for new fc members), and a second lil timer for relocation. (And a shorter main timer. It was really too long)

Instanced housing would just destroy the value of housing completly and people will lose that big interest. But maybe SE is going to implement something similar with Island Sanctuary. We will see :3

[Skivvy]

Gonna preface this by saying I know nothing of coding and the like, and it will probably show, buuuut.......as far as our "instanced" options in XIV, are the inns, apartments and house interiors not on the same playing field so to speak? Functionally speaking, inns are incredibly limited, but you're still popping off into your own little space, no? :X

I can begrudgingly accept that what I consider to be "proper instanced housing" will never exist in this game due to <reasons>, but I would still like to see things tweaked so that all players have access to the various activities that are currently only available if you own a house (cross-breeding, making higher-tier buffs and the workshop). I'm hoping island sanctuary takes care of the cross-breeding concern, but perhaps they need to look into building a stand-alone workshop instance where those poor homeless FCs can do the other activities.

Anyhoo, going back to the inns, I think it would be spiffy if they gave those an upgrade so that you could actually decorate the interior at the very least. This would essentially give every player some very basic housing using an already existing feature. If loading personalized rooms into each of the various inns is too much (again, NO idea how all that works...), have the player set a city as their main hub or something, then have the other inns just show as default decor when they visit (à la XI).

[Heavenchild]

but I would still like to see things tweaked so that all players have access to the various activities that are currently only available if you own a house (cross-breeding, making higher-tier buffs and the workshop).

Most people with houses don't do crossbreeding. It's just too..., complicated. :')
Most do when they have their house 'new'. And then never touch this again. xD

(same for the higher buffs)

[Packetdancer]

Gonna preface this by saying I know nothing of coding and the like, and it will probably show, buuuut.......as far as our "instanced" options in XIV, are the inns, apartments and house interiors not on the same playing field so to speak? Functionally speaking, inns are incredibly limited, but you're still popping off into your own little space, no? :X

So far as I can tell, inn rooms are handled solely on the client side, akin to various other things that have no persistent state. (E.g., your squadron barracks, various little one-off instances in the middle of questlines or waiting to enter a trial, etc.) Which is actually why they forget what orchestrion roll you have set.

It's the same reason that if you and a friend are both standing outside of the Waking Sands, then both go inside, you will not see each other any longer; the individual personal instances for places like that seem to exist only on the client.

Those things don't need to be on the server, because none of their state is relevant to anyone or anything but your specific game client. I would not be surprised if the server basically took everyone in personal instances (inn rooms, trial-arena waiting areas, etc.) and basically metaphorically dumped them into a giant empty void. That way the server could still handle things like gearset changes, retainer interactions, and so on, but leave everything else about running the personal instances -- like "what is the player location within this space, etc." -- up to the client.

Housing, unfortunately, does need to be on the server -- at least, so long as you want to be able to decorate permanently. Or let anyone else visit your house.

As for house interiors, apartments and such... we already know there's a practical limit. If we hit it, you can't go inside houses until people leave some and a slot frees up to load a house again. During the glut of activity around Endwalker's launch, this actually started happening fairly frequently, with people being locked out of their houses.

So you would say...Ultimate, its rewards and stuff is also not okay, because it excludes an overwhelming majority of players from partaking in it?

Not the one you're quoting, but I don't think the analogy is quite the same.

If you look at the ability to do airships (for an FC) or gardening to crossbreed (for anyone) as being the "rewards" for housing, then I'd say the analogy would be to imagine that Ultimate had a limited number of clears. You weren't around when UCoB was current? Welp, sorry, too many people have cleared it. You can't go in to try to get those rewards until one of the people who cleared it deletes their account.

The Ultimate weapons being gated behind Ultimate is fine; anyone who wants to try to for those rewards can get them, because an unlimited number of people can clear those Ultimates. It doesn't "run out" of clears to hand out. Thus, no one is actually excluded from Ultimates -- not in the sense of being excluded from housing-related stuff -- because if they want to do them, they can go unlock them and start trying to do them.

But I'd argue that gardening and FC airships aren't "rewards" for housing, but other systems on their own. And the reason I say this is that there are people who do not care about housing -- they don't want to do interior decoration, they don't care about how the house looks. But they do care about doing airships, or crossbreeding seeds, or whatever. I don't think it's a benefit to gate those behind housing when the result is you end up with people buying houses who don't actually use them as houses, just a place to have a garden plot or for their FC folks to work on construction projects.

Imagine if running Ultimates was gated not behind clearing the savage tier but, say, completing the fishing log. Want to do UCoB? Hope you're ready to figure out all the baits and correct time/weather windows to get all those rare fish, first! Now imagine that the fishing log has a limited number of clears. So not only do you need to do that fishing log, even if you don't care about fishing, but you have to do that fishing log before the fishing clears run out.

Worse, that ends up meaning you take up one of these 'fishing clear' spots despite not caring about fishing, locking out someone who might, simply because you have to do that to get to the thing you actually want.

And that seems a design flaw, at least to me.

[Packetdancer]

Most people with houses don't do crossbreeding. It's just too..., complicated. :')
Most do when they have their house 'new'. And then never touch this again. xD

(same for the higher buffs)

This is not actually entirely true, in my experience. I'm sure it's true for some folks, yes!

But my FC often has a Thavnairian Onion loop going in one stage or another, because we keep the FC chest stocked for newcomers who are leveling their chocobos. I also spent the better part of a year gathering the materials (via submersible) to stockpile the Grade 3 company buffs for XP and reduced teleport costs, as well as charging them up ahead of time. We were thus able to have chonky buffs up constantly for quite a while when Endwalker launched (month and a half or so, I think it was). And I know of at least three other FCs who did the same sort of buff stocking, albeit in less obscene quantities than I aimed for.

(I grant I won't bother with the grade 3 buffs again until like... probably somewhere in patch 6.3, but once we're there I'm absolutely going to start that long project once more, to prep stockpiles for whatever 7.0 might be.)

And I know quite a few people who enjoy the gardening system and tinker with it. The "tenant" slots on my house are actually all used up by friends who do not have a house and like to play with gardening; I just use the FC plots for my own gardening projects (as they're basically always on behalf of the FC), and let the friends in question use my yard for theirs.