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

[Packetdancer]

Okay, so... if the alternative isn't viable, but they don't think it's a good system... why not try to go for an "option C"? Like, Instanced Housing won't really happen because, well, read above. And housing is borked. So why not make a new version instead?

I know it's probably an ignoramous-level question, but I am one and I am also legitimately curious.

Unfortunately, I'm guessing the reason is simply that no one has figured out what a viable option C is.

If you have an infinite amount of houses... you've got instanced housing, in one form or another.

If you have a limited number of houses... you functionally have the same issue we have now, where it's a finite resource, and it's possible there are no houses left to have.

The only possible quantity of houses other than "a finite number" and "an infinite number" is "none at all". And if option C were "just nuke the housing system from orbit, salt the earth, and walk away" I suspect that there's a lot of people who wouldn't really like that option, either.

[Iscah]

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.

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

If I can speculate on why they would want to limit access to gardening and airship building, I think it would be to limit the daily flow of "making gil out of nothing" into the game, same as things like levequests have a daily limit. Tying it to the finite number of houses could therefore make sense, especially as the system was originally intended to be strictly for FCs while personal housing would be implemented in some other way that either never eventuated or was supposed to be limited to personal rooms and apartments.

If that was the intended approach and they had stuck to it, then theoretically every house would be occupied by an FC and there could be someone in every FC tending a predetermined maximum number of garden plots and airship voyages.

[Packetdancer]

If I can speculate on why they would want to limit access to gardening and airship building, I think it would be to limit the daily flow of "making gil out of nothing" into the game, same as things like levequests have a daily limit. Tying it to the finite number of houses could therefore make sense, especially as the system was originally intended to be strictly for FCs while personal housing would be implemented in some other way that either never eventuated or was supposed to be limited to personal rooms and apartments.

That's a fairly astute observation. I hadn't considered it, but I actually should have, because I've done stuff like that to try to put economic limits on things in games before. Not professionally developed games in this case, but just the sort of "written in spare time" games that folks throw out there on the internet.

(It doesn't work, for the record; the best you can do is slow it, at least in my experience. If you set up a sort of invisible "central bank" and put any money paid to NPCs or taken as market tax or whatever into that central bank, you can pay out from that when people sell to NPCs or whatever. But that creates the possibility that if the "central bank" runs out, people can't sell to NPCs any more. Or that running things/questing doesn't give you money anymore, because there's none to give. Have the bank just create more money when it runs out, and you're right back to "money out of thin air" at which point you might as well not bother with all the effort of some sort of central bank. ANYway.)

But even if that was the original intent, which I can believe, I'd argue that the airship has sailed on that. (Ha ha.)

Submersibles and gardening are the least of the economic balance problems on this game, and I suspect that locking folks out of those systems does more harm (bitterness/resentment of the housing system blocking people from stuff) than good (some degree of slowing the literal money-faucet creating money out of thin air); I'd thus argue it's proven to not be a good design. And that is something that can be changed.

[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.

[Driavna]

That's a fairly astute observation. I hadn't considered it, but I actually should have, because I've done stuff like that to try to put economic limits on things in games before. Not professionally developed games in this case, but just the sort of "written in spare time" games that folks throw out there on the internet.

(It doesn't work, for the record; the best you can do is slow it, at least in my experience. If you set up a sort of invisible "central bank" and put any money paid to NPCs or taken as market tax or whatever into that central bank, you can pay out from that when people sell to NPCs or whatever. But that creates the possibility that if the "central bank" runs out, people can't sell to NPCs any more. Or that running things/questing doesn't give you money anymore, because there's none to give. Have the bank just create more money when it runs out, and you're right back to "money out of thin air" at which point you might as well not bother with all the effort of some sort of central bank. ANYway.)

But even if that was the original intent, which I can believe, I'd argue that the airship has sailed on that. (Ha ha.)

Submersibles and gardening are the least of the economic balance problems on this game, and I suspect that locking folks out of those systems does more harm (bitterness/resentment of the housing system blocking people from stuff) than good (some degree of slowing the literal money-faucet creating money out of thin air); I'd thus argue it's proven to not be a good design. And that is something that can be changed.

Gardening and FC ventures don't create gil out of thin air (not in any relevant quantity, their npc value usually is double digits), their value come from the market place and it has a tax attach to it already. Said tax remove some gil from the economy.

Problem here was SE repurposing a concept designed to be exclusive and out of reach for your regular solo player.

[Azuri]

Gardening and FC ventures don't create gil out of thin air (not in any relevant quantity, their npc value usually is double digits), their value come from the market place and it has a tax attach to it already. Said tax remove some gil from the economy.

Oh, you sweet summer child. So who is going to tell them?

I recommend doing a bit if research before making such absolutist statements. You can print 400k gil per day quite literally out of thin air with the right knowledge.

[Driavna]

Oh, you sweet summer child. So who is going to tell them?

I recommend doing a bit if research before making such absolutist statements. You can print 400k gil per day quite literally out of thin air with the right knowledge.

Please educate me and tell me what items do you get to vendor to an NPC that amount to 400k per day from gardening and FC ventures.

[Azuri]

Please educate me and tell me what items do you get to vendor to an NPC that amount to 400k per day from gardening and FC ventures.

This.

[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.

[Driavna]

This.

I stand corrected then, thanks. Still, IMO 400k should not be a justification to limit access to do that content when said content is just an independent instance.