I'm not paying $15 a month just to lose the lottery every time

[Striker44]

It's honestly a bit crazy how MMOs that are still going strong for 10-15 years have more extensive features than FF does. LOTRO is a really good example of this with their premium housing set up (buy as many houses as you want), standard housing with upkeep for f2p players and extensive events that make FF's look like they were thrown together in under an hour.

PSO2 is another example with one of the best glamour/fashion systems out there and their emote system is probably the best with hundreds to pick from and you can even sync your movements with another player without having to try 10 times to get the timing right like FF. They also have upgradable instanced housing.

SWTOR isn't in the best spot right now but their housing system should also be used as a reference for how to do it properly since you can own multiple strongholds.

There isn't an excuse anymore. Devs needs to just admit that the way they're doing housing isn't going to work and rework it to be instanced (even if it means ripping housing apart and rebuilding it), along with the handful of other things that are genuinely confusing as to why we dont have them.

If other games have been doing it for a literal decade, there's no reason why they can't provide the same.

Underlying game engines and coding vary immensely from game-to-game. And I'm not quite sure using LOTRO or SWTOR as examples of games "still going strong" is a good idea (I'm not familiar enough with PSO2 to know its real status). SWTOR is down to just a few servers, and LOTRO just announced closing another of their original world servers a few weeks ago.

[Jojoya]

Underlying game engines and coding vary immensely from game-to-game. And I'm not quite sure using LOTRO or SWTOR as examples of games "still going strong" is a good idea (I'm not familiar enough with PSO2 to know its real status). SWTOR is down to just a few servers, and LOTRO just announced closing another of their original world servers a few weeks ago.

But their downfall generally has nothing to do with their housing. It's other problems with the game, frequently monetization systems since most are F2P, that are usually to blame. If players feel like their progress are too heavily gated by paywalls, they quit so only the whales are left. The whales start feeling lonely for lack of other players and abused since they're footing a disproportionately high percentage of the game costs and they start quitting.

You can look at something like RIFT that's probably surviving in good part because of its housing system, which is one of the best to be found in a MMO.

Also, Josh Strife Hayes just did an interview with one of the Path of Exiles developers (it's sort of a combination ARPG/MMO if you're not familiar with the game but they've got smaller limits on how many players can be in a zone at a time than most other MMOs). Having a small player base doesn't necessarily kill a game. The goal of PoE was to have 10,000 players when they were first developing it. They've got significantly more than that but the developer said that even if their player base dropped back down to that 10,000, they'd keep the game running.

It's not the total number of players or servers that determine if a game is good for you. It's whether you have enough to play with when you're ready to play and if there is content you enjoy. That's why all those old MMOs keep going - they still have the content and enough players to keep those who really enjoy those games happy.

[SnowVix]

Underlying game engines and coding vary immensely from game-to-game. And I'm not quite sure using LOTRO or SWTOR as examples of games "still going strong" is a good idea (I'm not familiar enough with PSO2 to know its real status). SWTOR is down to just a few servers, and LOTRO just announced closing another of their original world servers a few weeks ago.

SWTOR is going to coast for quite a while at the 5 existing servers (2 US, 1 EU-EN, 1 EU-FR, 1 EU-DE), though. I've watched other games go through the same Freemium model and they get an easy decade+, and SWTOR is not only Star Wars, it's the last bastion of Legends (formerly Expanded Universe) content.