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

[SamSmoot]

I don't want instanced housing. I like it to have neighbours and to run around in the wards.

Fix: Instance the plots, all in one ward. Each plot can have thousands of owners, and once you go out the front gate, you're on the same street as everyone else. Lotgs more folks in the neighborhood.
If you're in your yard, it would be nice if you could still see the street activity (Not sure that could be done.)
If you're on the street, you see a random collection of the houses on those plots, but you can select one to display via the placard (with thumbnails)
Your own house always loads for you when you arrive, but you can still select others on the same plot location to visit as well/

One issue for SE though is increased storage costs, Tens of thousands of houses with all their furnishings and positions to store. I suppose some of that could be alleviated by keeping each player's house data on their local systems, but I suspect that may not be an option on consoles.

[Packetdancer]

Fix: Instance the plots, all in one ward. Each plot can have thousands of owners, and once you go out the front gate, you're on the same street as everyone else. Lotgs more folks in the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, this actually makes the technical issue with instanced housing worse in several ways.

First off, it's still instanced housing. It's instanced housing with an open-world entrance, but it's still instanced housing. So every one of the existing "instanced housing plus this game's server architecture won't play well together" problems still applies; none of that changes. Moreover, if you still have houses and yards separate (which I suspect are very difficult to untangle server-side), you now have actually doubled the number of things that can be instantiated -- not just houses, but yards too.

Even if that part's solved, you've now introduced a new technical/design issue: how do you handle the yards when someone is outside the plot.

My FC has a large house with a lovely big yard, and it actually serves as a very active hub for our FC. While waiting for a roulette to pop or a PF to fill, people will chill around the fire-pit in the yard or sit in the treehouse. They'll use the jumping puzzle we built to get up onto the balcony and do their raid-pot crafting there. They'll run laps around the house on top of the fence. They'll step outside of the yard to go visit the marketboard or retainer bell directly across the street from us.

And they'll have conversations while they do this.

Now imagine your scenario. If you have 5 people in our FC house yard, and 1 person in the yard of another house in the same plot, and one more person walks past... what do they see?

Do they see a yard chosen at random from those in the plot, with six people standing in it (the five from our FC and the one from the other)? Do they see the FC house because there's "more people" there, and the person in the other house is invisible? If there's two people in the other house's yard and they're talking to each other, and five in the FC house yard and they're talking to each other, do the conversations overlap; we hear theirs when we're in our yard, they hear ours when they're in theirs? Or if someone dashes out of the FC yard and over to the marketboard, do the rest of the folks in the FC yard just... disappear, and they can no longer hear the conversation?

Do you just pick a random house exterior to be shown from the outside, and entering the yard is a loading operation (like going into a house already is), so you click on the glowy "Entrance" ball outside the yard before you can see anyone, and have to click on the glowy "Exit" ball to load back outside and get to the market board?

You can absolutely solve all those problems, but not easily. Add a housing score system based on the "value" of decor items, and only show whatever has the highest score from the outside, without any people, and force you to load into the instance to see if there's anyone actually in the yard. Etc.

This is why in games that do have instanced housing with open-world entrances, you rarely really have a front yard in any implementation I've seen. And there's all sorts of caveats as to how the instanced housing interiors co-exist with the open-world exterior.

In Black Desert Online, for instance, I have a couple of homes; one is a small apartment in Calpheon, right along the river. It's lovely. (Despite the horde of NPCs borderline-rioting outside, because my apartment is technically in the slums.) The apartment has two balconies, one overlooking the river, and one overlooking the street (where I can wave to the rioting NPCs). Because both balconies are technically outside of the house itself, as soon as I walk out onto either, if I turn around and look back inside my apartment... I see an empty one. As soon as I step back through the door, all my furniture reappears.

(Hilariously, it reappears by having all the decor literally drop from the sky into the proper positions. Which will never not slightly amuse me.)

If someone else had the same apartment and was on at the same time, and they walked out of their apartment onto the balcony, I would see them through my window standing on "my" balcony. If I walked out, they'd see me walk out the door onto "their" balcony. During the various stretches of time where I'm actually playing BDO, I actually do chill on that balcony; a friend owns the apartment right beside and below mine, which means I can see his riverside balcony from mine. If one of us is waiting for the other to show up to try to do something together, waiting on the balcony is a natural thing to do; when the other shows up, hey, just pop out onto the balcony and wave! I'm certain that if anyone else sharing 'my' apartment was online at one of those times, it would seem weird to them to look out the window and see me pacing around idly on "their" balcony.

In New World, before I gave up on it, I had a lovely little place in Windsward overlooking the main square. It, too, had a balcony... but the balcony was considered part of the instance. If I stood on the balcony, no one in the main square of Windsward would see me; I could see them, but they'd look up and see an unfurnished balcony so far as I know. (I think the housing decor system there was supposed to have the person with the highest decor score have their instance shown to the outside world. So far as I know it never worked right while I was playing, because it only ever showed emptiness when I looked in the windows of houses.)

And while there are houses in New World that have yards, it was always a back yard for the ones I saw. In order to go into that yard you had to go through the house, thus picking which instance of the house you were visiting, and from the viewpoint of anyone wandering around the street, all yards were empty (and all houses were empty if you looked in the windows); you had to actually attempt to walk into the house and then choose an instance from the menu that popped up.

Now, in BDO and New World, the open-world entrance to instanced housing makes sense even with any caveats, because in both cases the instanced housing is inside the buildings you already have in a given open-world hub. BDO is frankly insane inasmuch as they have a few major cities nearly the size of entire FFXIV zones, and you can basically enter every single building in the game (and buy most of them). New World's hubs are very small, but again, most of the buildings at least have interiors you can get.

But in both cases, from the viewpoint of someone walking past (at least in my experience)... every house is empty. You see nothing in the yards, if you peek in a window you see an empty, unfurnished interior. You don't really get that feeling of "neighborhood" because... well, everything's empty. You don't see your neighbors.

FFXIV's open-world entrances are in housing wards already separate from the main world. Even if the instanced housing were practical, going to the housing ward, walking through the streets and seeing nothing but default houses and empty yards... what would be the point? You might as well just go full instanced, with no open-world entrances, and cut out at least a little of the overhead.

[Jojoya]

But in both cases, from the viewpoint of someone walking past (at least in my experience)... every house is empty. You see nothing in the yards, if you peek in a window you see an empty, unfurnished interior. You don't really get that feeling of "neighborhood" because... well, everything's empty. You don't see your neighbors.

That's already a problem with the ward system for most house owners. They don't get to see their neighbors, usually because the neighbors aren't online at the same time or they're doing other content or they're even inside their own house instead of standing outside.

Trying to make the empty plots not look empty is possible. We've already got plenty of examples of that from NPCs scattered across the open world zones that are loading client side and so aren't always in sync for players that enter an area at slightly different times. A friend and I had fun one day trying to chase the carbuncle around Mor Dhona but it was always in a different place for each of us. The Firmament is another example of how we can watch NPCs walk around doing various tasks between different locations, usually on a loop (was common with the NPC workers carrying around stone blocks) but sometimes just appearing/disappearing (the Vath Deftarm who will appear by the entrance, walk to the Skybuilder Board, look at it then walk back to the entrance and disappear if you've got Vath reputation high enough and complete the related Firmament side quest). No reason the same activity couldn't happen if the wards were being used as the gateway to instanced house plots.

There's also the question of whatever happened to that housing technology in development that YoshiP talked about during the EU 2019 Fanfest Q&A that was supposed to simulate exterior activity from within an instance. I find it hard to believe that it was being developed only so the 1% of players with a mansion could use their upper floor balcony door. At this point I'm guessing that maybe it's getting used in Island Sanctuary? Hard to say since we don't have enough info about Island Sanctuary's design yet.

You'd also be far less likely to end up in completely empty wards if hundreds of players were accessing their housing through the same ward instead of just 30. The more players that need to pass through a ward, the greater the chances of having a random encounter with another player and staying to chat.

The only place I would see negatives would be with the RP venues that host hundreds of players both inside and out because the interior player limit is too small to let everyone in at the same time. I honestly don't know how many RP venues are operating on that scale but I doubt it's that many, and the convenience of a few hundred players shouldn't be a reason to provide hundreds of thousands of players a worse housing experience.

[Packetdancer]

That's already a problem with the ward system for most house owners. They don't get to see their neighbors, usually because the neighbors aren't online at the same time or they're doing other content or they're even inside their own house instead of standing outside.

Yeah. I admit I was the odd case when I first got my house; I ended up in a weirdly active corner of one housing ward, where about 4-5 houses directly around me were owned by people who quite actively used those houses.

When I bought the house and was poking around with setting it up that evening, my neighbors saw the plot wasn't empty anymore and came over to welcome me; I got some housewarming gifts (decor items!) to welcome me to the neighborhood. And for a while, folks would come over and chill in the yard of my house (I have a very nice little sitting area) to hang out while waiting on party finder or whatnot. We'd periodically just settle into our own yards while crafting raid consumables, or shout stuff over the fences. ("I'm out of <material>; do you have any I can borrow so I don't waste the rest of this buff?" "Sure, I think I have some; give me a few to go check my retainers.") We even grouped up and ran roulettes together!

It was nice, and as a result I do get what the devs were probably going for when the system was conceived.

But most of those neighbors wanted bigger houses, and as people idled out and lost houses, or new wards were opened, most bounced to get a medium or large plot elsewhere... and now my neighborhood is as quiet and empty as any other. (My former neighbors are still on my friends-list, and have remarked their new areas are also quiet. All of us have found we actually kind of miss the strangely active little neighborhood we used to have, but given how housing works here, there's really no way to recreate it.)

So at this point, the housing plots around me are just... sort of scenery. Nothing more. And that seems to be the case in... well, not all housing, as my own earlier experience demonstrates the (rare) exceptions that exist. But it's definitely the case in the vast majority of housing.

[SamSmoot]

All visible houses and yards could be part of the same neighborhood instance, just like the yards are now. No load screen delays when entering any yard or house. When you pick another house to view from the placard, then there's a load screen while the previous one is removed from the instance and the new one is added.
People in the yards should be able to see everything on the street because they're part of the same overall instance. Sort of like virtual memory.

[Packetdancer]

All visible houses and yards could be part of the same neighborhood instance, just like the yards are now. No load screen delays when entering any yard or house. When you pick another house to view from the placard, then there's a load screen while the previous one is removed from the instance and the new one is added.
People in the yards should be able to see everything on the street because they're part of the same overall instance. Sort of like virtual memory.

This would actually be far more complicated on the server side than what we have now. Keep in mind that if you want to see people in the yards moving around (and hear them, and whatever else), you now need to have every single house (or at least, every single house that someone in the zone has picked on a placard or which has anyone in the yard) loaded on the server all at once.

Wards work that way now, of course -- all the houses/yards are loaded, because they're part of the ward itself -- but you can't switch the houses around.

But let's say you and I are standing outside of a plot. I have it toggled to my FC house (and I'm standing outside the gate at the marketboard, chatting with my FC-mates in the yard while shopping) and you have it toggled to your friend's house (and are chatting with them while you use the retainer bell by the marketboard). From my point of view, I should see:

• Anything I /say to my friends in the FC yard.
• Anything you /say to your friend; you and I are standing right next to each other at the marketboard and retainer bell.
• Anything my friends in our FC yard /say to me.
• All the decorations in the FC yard.
• My friends who are online and in the FC yard, as they move around (and maybe climb the jumping puzzle we built.

From your point of view, you would see:

• Anything you /say to your friend in their yard.
• Anything I /say to my friends in our FC yard (because you and I are both standing on the sidewalk right next to each other).
• Anything your friend might /say to you from where they're chilling in their yard.
• Any decorations in your friend's yard.
• Your friend, standing in their yard, along with anything they're doing (like running around gardening or whatever).

Let's leave aside the weirdness factor that I and my friends will see your half of your conversation with your friend (as you're standing on the sidewalk outside of the instanced houses) and you and your friend will see my half of my conversation with the FC folks.

The fact that two of us are there interacting with the individual plots means the "ward" server here has to have two houses loaded in that plot, because it needs both my FC house and your friend's house active (and to be receiving/sending movement and chat data for the people in those yards) for that to work.

Doing things this way -- having a single open-world "megaward" but instanced houses within it in this manner -- actually makes the resources needed for that ward server a great deal larger. And I'm not really sure you gain anything; hypothetically you could repurpose the servers used for all the other housing wards to now handle housing interior instances... but there would be a practical limit on how many house exteriors could be instanced before the "megaward" server itself fell over, which I suspect would be far lower than the number of houses you get across all ward servers right now, thus functionally reducing available housing.

Moreover, if you have only a single ward with all the housing in it, you'd have many more players in it at once (picking many more houses to interact with) and we already know that, anything else aside, the game's not super great with hundreds of players in a single zone to begin with. (Witness zone congestion when a special FATE is up. Though admittedly, the zone servers do have other requirements, given they need to be tracking various mobs and where they spawn/how they move, etc., so that they're in the same place for everyone.) So you've got that resource issue now as well.

You can alleviate that somewhat if you make the yards always "empty" -- e.g., you can see the decor but not any people in the yard -- and force someone to actually click on a gate to go into the yard (and load into a 'yard instance' where all the people are). Of course, then the housing teleport should probably take you to the yard rather than just outside the gate, though that means no one then goes into the ward itself.

You could also try to fragment the megaward up by splitting the megaward itself into multiple instances (like how the /instance command can tell you "You are in Old Sharlayan {3}" when a zone is crowded enough to need multiple instance shards). But at that point, we've got enough caveats going on that there's really no connection between housing yard and the ward; either you might end up in a different 'instance' of the housing yard (if the yards are part of the megaward) and be like "buh? I said I'd meet you at the FC house yard, I don't see you?" because you were in separate instances of the "megaward" (and thus the yard)... or if you had the yards instanced separately then if you exit the gate and I exit the gate after you, we might end up in different "megaward" instances outside of the house if the megaward itself were crowded.

Dumping wards and reusing the ward server hardware almost certainly still isn't enough to go full "anyone can have an instanced house available at any time", but it would be enough to at least offer more potential concurrent housing interior instances.

We'd still run into the hard resource limit, of course; we already do on anything else, and the potential number of instanced houses in use if everyone has one on-demand would be astronomical compared to how many housing interiors we might need active at once right now. (Or, honestly, how many of anything instanced we need active at once right now. Raids, dungeons, house interiors, etc.)

But that hard resource limit would at least be higher than it presently is, because the ward servers are not a super efficient approach to begin with, as several folks have pointed out.

That still wouldn't solve the overall problem, of course; it would just procrastinate on it, making it something to deal with "later". Because as soon as you have more player growth, you have more housing demand, and with more housing demand you eventually do still run up against the hard resource limit of "how many houses can you have instanced" again.