Tell me again why we can't have instanced housing?

[Jojoya]

The problem is that we have instanced housing but a lot of players don't want to use it.

It's hard to tell if SE understands that the reason why most of those players don't want it is because of size and missing features, or if they think it's because players just don't want instanced housing.

Or if SE is just too attached to their wards to accept that many players are looking for something different.

There has been plenty of feedback over the years on what players like and dislike, and how wards and instanced housing could be merged together for players to get the best of both. All we can do is keep giving our feedback (as repetitive as it's getting) and wait to see what SE chooses to do.

[Eraden]

The problem is that we have instanced housing but a lot of players don't want to use it.

It's hard to tell if SE understands that the reason why most of those players don't want it is because of size and missing features, or if they think it's because players just don't want instanced housing.

Or if SE is just too attached to their wards to accept that many players are looking for something different.

There has been plenty of feedback over the years on what players like and dislike, and how wards and instanced housing could be merged together for players to get the best of both. All we can do is keep giving our feedback (as repetitive as it's getting) and wait to see what SE chooses to do.

I already have an apartment. I now own a small house as well. The house is both larger (twice as large) and has features that I dearly wanted (first and foremost was tenants). I have mentioned time and time again that these were my wants and I have no problems continuing to beat the drum. I honestly don't care how SE does it, but they need to offer larger residences with more features than what is available with stock apartments. This could be done with instanced houses or by upgrading the apartment system or by adding more wards or some combination of the three. Bottom line: current apartments feel too small and don't offer the features I am looking for.

[Siniztor]

The problem is that we have instanced housing but a lot of players don't want to use it.

It's hard to tell if SE understands that the reason why most of those players don't want it is because of size and missing features, or if they think it's because players just don't want instanced housing.

Or if SE is just too attached to their wards to accept that many players are looking for something different.

There has been plenty of feedback over the years on what players like and dislike, and how wards and instanced housing could be merged together for players to get the best of both. All we can do is keep giving our feedback (as repetitive as it's getting) and wait to see what SE chooses to do.

Wrong we have a instanced room..
A House can have tenants and comes in 3 different sizes small 2 rooms medium 3 mid size rooms and finally large that comes in 3 large floors..

I will call apartments a house if you give me 3 things
1- The option to have the same size as a house 2 floors 3 floors mid 3 floors large..
2- A planter for inside that can grow at lest 4 plants at once to crossbreed.. again by house size small can have 2 (8 total garden spots = to one garden) medium can have 4(16 garden spots =2 full gardens) large can have 6 (24 garden spots = to 3 gardens)
3- Tenants...exp let me live with my spose (not married not again nope)

I'll gladly give up a front yard and call it a house.. but until then you should probly call a sheep what a sheep is
Apartments are a room,, Not a House

Funny part is once you zone in a house your in a private instance.. you get in by clicking a door..
I enter my apartment by clicking a door to take me to a instance room.....
Seems like it be easy to tie the inside of housing server to the apartment door

[Avenger]

Wrong we have a instanced room..
A House can have tenants and comes in 3 different sizes small 2 rooms medium 3 mid size rooms and finally large that comes in 3 large floors..

I will call apartments a house if you give me 3 things
1- The option to have the same size as a house 2 floors 3 floors mid 3 floors large..
2- A planter for inside that can grow at lest 4 plants at once to crossbreed.. again by house size small can have 2 (8 total garden spots = to one garden) medium can have 4(16 garden spots =2 full gardens) large can have 6 (24 garden spots = to 3 gardens)
3- Tenants...exp let me live with my spose (not married not again nope)

I'll gladly give up a front yard and call it a house.. but until then you should probly call a sheep what a sheep is
Apartments are a room,, Not a House

Funny part is once you zone in a house your in a private instance.. you get in by clicking a door..
I enter my apartment by clicking a door to take me to a instance room.....
Seems like it be easy to tie the inside of housing server to the apartment door

You seem to be confusing "houses" with "housing." The original plan by the dev team was for player housing to be apartments (and FC house rooms) and FC housing to be houses in wards, but they eventually (in response to player demands) allowed individual players to buy houses in wards, leading to the situation we have today of scarcity and high demand (and perceived associated player social status?) for houses. (I also think small houses used to be smaller inside maybe, but that doesn't affect the overall situation.)

It appears that the way FFXIV is currently designed, areas that multiple players can enter (including housing) are limited by server capacity and bandwidth, which are in turn limited by cost, infrastructure, operational and supply chain issues. Though it isn't clear to me whether island sanctuaries will be open to multiple players or not.

I would expect any instanced housing expansion to be small and incremental, such as adding small moggarden terraces to apartments.

[Siniztor]

It appears that the way FFXIV is currently designed, areas that multiple players can enter (including housing) may be limited by server capacity, which is in turn limited by cost and supply chain issues. However, it isn't clear to me whether island sanctuaries will be open to multiple players or not.

I would expect that any instanced housing expansion to be small and incremental, such as adding small moggarden terraces to apartments.

My guess is the apartments arent hooked to the instanced housing server.. but hooked to the fc room instanced server... Only diffence in apartments n FC rooms is Apartments have a 3rd option on the door exit building..... Which I believe they should add to Fc rooms stop making me zone twice to leave my fc room (im lazy i pay the 25gil to teleport lol)

[Shibi]

...areas that multiple players can enter (including housing) are limited by server capacity and bandwidth, which are in turn limited by cost, infrastructure, operational and supply chain issues. Though it isn't clear to me whether island sanctuaries will be open to multiple players or not...

It's always been said by yoshi that we can visit other people's islands.

The "we can't have instanced houses because servers/covid/supply chain" argument needs to be put to bed now.

[DPZ2]

It's always been said by yoshi that we can visit other people's islands.

The "we can't have instanced houses because servers/covid/supply chain" argument needs to be put to bed now.

Except that we know that the current housing is built across multiple servers, and we know that Islands are not going to be 'housing'. From what we've learned (which is very little) you will not be able to put a single housing item on your Island. It isn't built for that purpose. I anticipate something very close to the Garrisons from Warlords of Draenor in World of Warcraft.

So, you can rant and rave all you want, but if you want something like the current housing, it is dependent on limited infrastructure.

A complete change in that architecture will be required to provide everyone with what you wish for as "instanced housing". And that is going to take time and future infrastructure purchases to assure the 5-15+ million players who want to be able to leave the game and come back 5 years later that their house is still available.

[PredatoryCatgirl]

At this point, the reason we don't have instanced housing is because...they don't want instanced housing. The wards are Yoshi-P's baby, and for all the good he's done this game, that is one decision that makes me wonder what the heck he was thinking.

[Shibi]

to assure the 5-15+ million players who want to be able to leave the game and come back 5 years later that their house is still available.

That's disk space, not server space.

Edit: and simplistically doing the calculation on space

128 bits for an instance UUID
128 bits for an object UUID
24 bits for position <X,Y,Z>
24 bits for rotation <I,J,K>
8 bits for dye

32 bytes. Lets triple that to be generous and add 3 more bytes to hold scale too to allow later expansion.

120 bytes per object. 200 objects = 24KB

Let say 3 houses per person as an average... 72KB per person

15,000,000 players is 1,080,000,000KB / 1,080GB or basically 1TB of data split between 3 data centres. Which is a tiny amount of data.

And that's everyone having 3 houses, each holding 3 times the data that would be needed.

500GB for NA, 500GB for EU, 500GB for JP, 500GB for OCE (My PC has more than this)

I've still underestimated? ok, lets triple it again and add 3 x 500GB SAN arrays in each region.

Teir-1 Enterprise solutions are there for this, complete with hot geo-redundant backup.

[UkcsAlias]

128 bits for an instance UUID
128 bits for an object UUID
24 bits for position <X,Y,Z>
24 bits for rotation <I,J,K>
8 bits for dye

128 bits is excessive for unique object ids, and instanced object ids. That would only be relevant if each object would be like an NFT. A number with over 30 zeroes is enough to not only give everyone unique ids, but basicly every single item they ever found in the game.
64 bits is on that already more realistic (and also natively handled by computers being at least 4x as efficient to use). But even this is a huge number of ids (still a digit with 19 zeroes).
Therefor i think that this game either uses 16, 24 or 32 bits for such ids.

Within an instance, it goes further, Since you know the restrictions per ward anyway. And there is no crossreferencing needed between wards. So you only need enough ids to store every potential object in the entire ward. lets for simplicity say 100 houses using all 500 slots (well above what we have now). Then thats 50000 unique object ids. Add in 500 appartments, and you are at 300000 ids. This can fit well inside a 32bit integer (it fits 10x).
128 bits would again be an excessive waste of resources.

The problem is most likely not space, but the constant requirement of network checking for dynamic content, and transferring house information. While 32bytes isnt a lot, network traffic has overhead which can easily make these packages more expensive.
If each second 10 people are joining a ward, and it has to send all the data of 60 houses (lets say 200 outdoor objects). Then this means almost 7MB in data for each person. With 10 people thats 70MB. This is most likely the real issue, since such traffic is just a lot of load. This cannot scale linearly like HDD space since this very quickly runs into physical limits of cables. Luckily this data is quite easy to compress (lots of very similar information), so it might in the end still be only 1MB.

But i guess this is what prevent them from expanding, as hardware needs to be capable of managing the traffic, and since its all free, it has to be done cheap.