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

[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

[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.

[Amenara]

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

Everytime I hear someone say this, all I can think is "I have a house and don't want anyone else to have one so I can continue to feel special". You are advocating for me to have access to less of the game not through skill or gameplay but through an arbitrary RNG system. If I wanted to clear an Ultimate fight I could potentially put forth the effort to get amazing at my job, find a like minded group of people and keep attempting it until we beat it. With housing I either have it or I don't. There is nothing more I can do to influence my ability to get it.

All I am saying is that I should have the ability to fully engage with the game if I pay the same sub as you do.

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

There is no monetary value to housing other than the ability to garden for a personal plot and/or do the airship/submersibles for FCs. If the value is you feeling special because you were lucky enough to get one back in the first come first serve days, how does myself having an instanced house change that? That I didn't spend hours not playing the game but instead sitting at a placard for a shot to get a house against others doing the same thing? Just because you had to suffer to get a house doesn't mean everyone should have to.

[Jojoya]

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)

One set of players doing Ultimate does not stop another set of players from doing Ultimate because there is no limit on the number of Ultimate instances the game can make available.

One set of players obtaining houses does prevent another set of players from getting houses because there is a hard limit on the number of houses in the game.

Getting a house was a problem on many worlds on occasion in the past, sometimes on all worlds. It's not unique to the past 2 years. But it's also true there were some periods where there was no problem as well - but only because SE had added more wards or a new housing district at those times. The only time it was easy to get a house was 4.2 through 4.4 because SE had increased the number of wards by 50%. Since then, houses have disappeared quickly even with new ward additions.

It's hard to say what state things would be in right now if the lottery was working as intended. Certainly all houses in personal purchase wards would have disappeared, and it's the demand for personal houses that is the highest. Part of the FC demand is inflated by players that can't get the personal houses they want so they resort to using shells FCs for the purpose.

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

Housing has no value to a player that wants but cannot obtain it. It becomes a negative in their game experience and places them one step closer to quitting the game if there are other issues with content making them unhappy.

If your line of thinking is correct, then it would actually be in SE's interest to use instanced housing so there would be less demand. Less demand means less need to obtain more/update hardware for the housing servers, no need to have a complicated lottery system for purchase when all the wards could go back to FCFS because there would always be empty plots, more players satisfaction because those who actually care about housing as content wouldn't have a problem getting it, etc.

That's nothing but a financial plus for SE. It's not like this is a housing centric game. While it's a nice feature, few players are basing their purchase decisions solely around access to housing so it would likely have minimal impact on their revenue stream.

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

I'd actually say it's true that most don't cross breed from my experience. Touring wards shows a general lack of garden patches in use (if even placed), and when I do come across them it's usually not any crossbreeding going on.

Larger FCs would be an exception, doing the same as yours, but FCs only account for about 30% of house owners and many of those aren't truly active FCs.

I've offered my friends who want to crossbreed access to my house at times if they didn't have their own house. Only two have ever taken me up on it, and they didn't stick with it more than a couple of weeks.

Players may think they want access to crossbreeding; most don't take advantage given the opportunity.

It will be interesting to see if the "farming" in Island Sanctuary is based on the gardening system in housing, or if the system will work completely differently with no reliance on weather conditions.