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

[Jojoya]

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.

True. If gil generation was a concern of SE, they could nerf the sell to vendor value of the accessories. They've done that in the past with other items like the workshop schematic materials and materia.

[Thorio]

I would be happy if they just copied bdo's housing system.

[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.

[RealityCheck]

Copy Rifts housing 100% and finally have the best housing in any game.

Ability to BUILD and create beyond placing items and glitching lol

This housing design is a disgrace...not to mention not enough for everyone lol ffs how ridiculous

[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.

[Wanzzo]

When this game came out they didn't expect so many players (even at the beginning with long queues and a very limited space for only 5000 players or something in each world).

So if they created the wards with only FCs in mind, I think they should just go for that. All plots for FCs only. One for each FC and nothing else. No more personal houses...

Besides, we all have access to the Inn's room, right? Is it possible to somehow make it customizable? (instanced, but allowing only 1 char - you, in this case). If that were the case, we would not need apartments and we would only have the FC house to receive our friends making the place even more interesting... (in this way, instead of an inn room, we receive a small "apartment" at the inn, see?). oh, and we could get rid of rooms inside the FC's house as well, in order to make way for more wards (for more FCs to come).

Am I making any sense or is this all junk in my mind and I have to shut up about it 'cause this wont solve nothing? '-'

[SenorPatty]

When this game came out they didn't expect so many players (even at the beginning with long queues and a very limited space for only 5000 players or something in each world).

So if they created the wards with only FCs in mind, I think they should just go for that. All plots for FCs only. One for each FC and nothing else. No more personal houses...

Besides, we all have access to the Inn's room, right? Is it possible to somehow make it customizable? (instanced, but allowing only 1 char - you, in this case). If that were the case, we would not need apartments and we would only have the FC house to receive our friends making the place even more interesting... (in this way, instead of an inn room, we receive a small "apartment" at the inn, see?). oh, and we could get rid of rooms inside the FC's house as well, in order to make way for more wards (for more FCs to come).

Am I making any sense or is this all junk in my mind and I have to shut up about it 'cause this wont solve nothing? '-'

This just feels like settling and when it comes to video game housing, people loathe settling. Whatever the original intent was when it came to housing, it's irrelevant now. People want a place they can call their own, of their choosing, of the size and location they want, where they have absolute control, this last part being something that FCs can't provide. There are those out there who feel FC housing or apartments should be enough but those people typically have their own personal housing of their taste or they don't have any stake in housing and are just looking to shut the issue up.

I know there are also those who are trying to explain why certain things can't happen for housing like instanced hosuing or near infinite wards but I'm gonna put my money on the thought that most people at this particular point in this game's life don't care or have stopped caring about the why's and are more interested in a proper, genuine fix.

[Packetdancer]

I know there are also those who are trying to explain why certain things can't happen for housing like instanced hosuing or near infinite wards but I'm gonna put my money on the thought that most people at this particular point in this game's life don't care or have stopped caring about the why's and are more interested in a proper, genuine fix.

I agree, honestly. I strongly suspect Square-Enix agrees.

But unfortunately, people being tired of it and wanting a fix doesn't change the fact that the only real fix -- instanced housing that supports all the features available to housing now -- almost certainly isn't possible with the game we have (or specifically, what we can reasonably infer about the server architecture, based on everything else in the game).

And any fix other than that one is still just going to be a bandage at best. Adding more wards...? Even if you added enough for every current active player to have a house, somehow, that's still only a temporary fix; we'd be right back here the next time the playerbase grew and there weren't enough houses for the new players to get one. Etc.

I think the closest you could come to a real fix would probably also not be popular. Namely, do away with personal housing entirely.

You can have personal quarters with your FC, and an apartment in one of the main cities (if you aren't in an FC). Demonstrably, it's feasible to have a large (albeit still finite) number of apartments or FC personal quarters, possibly because they are small and somewhat limited compared to the actual plots.

You can expand the apartments slightly, having a patio or 'rooftop garden' with a single gardening plot to allow gardening.

Then do away with the wards entirely. FCs with more than X members and who have achieved at least Y rank can get an instanced airship. The airship has a big open deck (for outside housing items), a greenhouse (for gardening), and a company workshop (for company workshop stuff). They can have personal quarters, just like an FC house can now.

It doesn't actually solve the issues this system faces in regards to instanced housing, but it places a limit on how many instanced houses (or, well, airships) can exist; the number of FCs that would meet the criteria of, say, "at least 5 different players" (not characters, players -- joining more than one alt to the FC would be fine but wouldn't count as more than one player) and "have hit at least rank 8" or something... that'd be a much smaller number than the number of total active players in this game. And it would also mean that Free Companies aren't locked out of having a company workshop if they happen to be unlucky when it comes to housing.

Because if you can't solve a resource-scarcity problem by making the resource infinite, the second-best option is to limit how much of the resource is consumed and hope the demand stays below the level where things break. (I suspect this is precisely why SQEX already currently requires you to reach a certain rank in your Grand Company before you can have an apartment.)

But I don't think folks would be super happy with that, either. Because it would be taking away a thing we have now -- personal houses where you can have yards and stuff -- and taking something away is never popular.

[Wanzzo]

This just feels like settling and when it comes to video game housing, people loathe settling. Whatever the original intent was when it came to housing, it's irrelevant now. People want a place they can call their own, of their choosing, of the size and location they want, where they have absolute control, this last part being something that FCs can't provide. There are those out there who feel FC housing or apartments should be enough but those people typically have their own personal housing of their taste or they don't have any stake in housing and are just looking to shut the issue up.

I know there are also those who are trying to explain why certain things can't happen for housing like instanced hosuing or near infinite wards but I'm gonna put my money on the thought that most people at this particular point in this game's life don't care or have stopped caring about the why's and are more interested in a proper, genuine fix.

Well, maybe this game just need a new and "modern" engine focusing on it's current size in gaming industry and not anymore on a limited by resources as it was created. A new housing system (without the conflicts with instanced stuff) and a lot of changes...
There, inside a new engine, they could solve all those problems we see now (I believe). And, maybe, put a little more effort on animations, graphics improvements (like the type they annouced, but even better). The 1.x version of the game had a slightly better animation on characters during cutscenes (at least, for my eyes. They felt more smooth and natural). Oh, and the problem with Viera's and the animation lock for high ping scores (like mine) could be adressed as well! Maybe, a new system and a new engine could get things on a better path?

Again, is my brain just going inside an insane trip, or this could fix anything? '-'

[Packetdancer]

Besides, we all have access to the Inn's room, right? Is it possible to somehow make it customizable? (instanced, but allowing only 1 char - you, in this case). If that were the case, we would not need apartments and we would only have the FC house to receive our friends making the place even more interesting... (in this way, instead of an inn room, we receive a small "apartment" at the inn, see?)

I'm going to go with a "maybe" on this one. You'd still need to store the inn "apartment" state on the server side -- if you kept it client-side and had to reinstall the game, or tried to play on a different computer, you'd be missing all the decor state. But as soon as it becomes a guaranteed-solo instance of something -- like the inn rooms -- and no one other than you can ever go in there, you do immediately get rid of the requirement for the instance itself to be handled on the server. That does functionally open up an infinite number of possible "inn apartment" instances, since no matter how many are in use, the client using each one is responsible for that instance.

(Side note: this is a factor in why the glamour dresser is only available in those solo instances, so far as I know.)

As soon as you add anything like a training dummy or whatnot, of course, you immediately need the place you are to exist on the server as well (for combat to work). And things like gardening are problematic, because you need the server to be authoritative on those; otherwise, people could just walk into their inn room and then hack the client to be like "the plants are ready" or "this plot now has Thavnairian onion seeds planted! Ignore the fact that I didn't actually have any!" or whatever.

(You can prevent that sort of stuff, but this game's architecture is also Not Great at that as it is even in shared instances where the client isn't the primary authority; witness gil-farming bots and people cheating in PvP or whatever. I can't imagine it would do better with instances where it has to trust even more that the client is telling it the truth about things.)

The biggest problem, though, is that by its very nature as a client-hosted solo instance, you cannot ever have anyone come and visit your hypothetical "inn apartment".

And that, more than anything, seems to be what appeals to many people about the housing system: the social aspect. Having friends over to see what you've done with decorating. Wandering around house-to-house to see what other people have done and get ideas. Being horrified that your friend has turned their FC personal quarters into a shrine to both moogles and Nanamo, and immediately leaving while resolving to never speak of this again. Randomly discovering your in-game spouse has turned the basement of their house into a small cult-room, with a horde of stuffed Alphas in a ritual circle clearly trying to summon a primal. Etc.

(And yes, those are both actual things that happened.)

As SenorPatty says, I don't think removing the social aspect of housing would be a popular choice.

Well, maybe this game just need a new and "modern" engine focusing in it's current size in gaming industry and not on a limited by resources that it was created anymore. A new housing system and a LOT of changes...

Sure, it could absolutely use a newer and more flexible architecture. But keep in mind, the changes -- at least insofar as housing is concerned -- would need to be on the server side (which is, I guarantee you, a great deal more code than the client side). And moreover, that making those sort of changes would be on at least the scale of shutting down 1.x and creating A Realm Reborn.

They would, in essence, need to shut down this MMO and create a new one.

Again.

Though, hey, we do still have one moon left...

(Also, aw. The forum says I've posted too much for today and it's cutting my posting privileges off until tomorrow. So, uh, I guess I'll be quiet for a bit.)