Housing in Materia - after changes to FC only plots

[Jojoya]

They have expanded them many many many times over the years. Unlike every other mmo ever ff14 has continued to grow its customer base as it got older. I truly doubt back when they said they could add apartments as needed they ever imagined that they would grow their customer base in the way that they have.

What they told us was that it would be fairly easy for them to add more wings to apartment buildings if demand got so great that a world no longer had available apartments left.

I think why it hasn't happened is because the demand for more houses has been so great, adding new wards for houses also adds more apartments. The only world to date that has seen all apartments fill up is Balmung though Mateus seems to be getting close.

If more worlds fill up or get close to filling up their apartment buildings and SE hits a roadblock when it comes to adding more wards to meet house demand, we might see the additional apartment wings added at that point.

[Hasrat]

What they told us was that it would be fairly easy for them to add more wings to apartment buildings if demand got so great that a world no longer had available apartments left.

I think why it hasn't happened is because the demand for more houses has been so great, adding new wards for houses also adds more apartments. The only world to date that has seen all apartments fill up is Balmung though Mateus seems to be getting close.

If more worlds fill up or get close to filling up their apartment buildings and SE hits a roadblock when it comes to adding more wards to meet house demand, we might see the additional apartment wings added at that point.

I'd suspect it may be due to that imbalance that they're not putting any rush on expansion. So many of the efforts to date have been towards balancing world populations. To their views, the solution to "one world has totally filled every apartment" is "more players should transfer to different worlds."

It's kinda the same problem Balmung has always had. I've been around long enough to see the calls from Balmung that SE should just close/merge Mateus (the low pop world at the time) to make more room for Balmung. From an outside perspective, it just feels kinda selfish to demand that one world get special treatment just because everyone keeps trying to get in when it's so crowded.

Balmung being out of apartments incentivizes players to filter off to other worlds. SE catering to Balmung to always make sure they have "more" of everything just means more players will continue to push in, eventually resulting in the near-permanent Congested lock, which, we've already seen the crying when that happens.

[Jojoya]

I'd suspect it may be due to that imbalance that they're not putting any rush on expansion. So many of the efforts to date have been towards balancing world populations. To their views, the solution to "one world has totally filled every apartment" is "more players should transfer to different worlds."

It's kinda the same problem Balmung has always had. I've been around long enough to see the calls from Balmung that SE should just close/merge Mateus (the low pop world at the time) to make more room for Balmung. From an outside perspective, it just feels kinda selfish to demand that one world get special treatment just because everyone keeps trying to get in when it's so crowded.

Balmung being out of apartments incentivizes players to filter off to other worlds. SE catering to Balmung to always make sure they have "more" of everything just means more players will continue to push in, eventually resulting in the near-permanent Congested lock, which, we've already seen the crying when that happens.

So then there's a near permanent Congested status due to the server have characters for more accounts than it can reliably hold. That's why the Congested status exists and where there's also the temporary hold on character creation/transfers - to help keep populations more balanced. It's not to balance housing demand versus supply.

Something that can be easy to overlook is that a character is not the same thing as a player (account). As an example, I have multiple characters on Coeurl. Because I have a single player account, I can only be logged onto one of them at a time. But each of those characters has an apartment while I can only have 1 personal house. If I create another character for Coeurl, it does not truly add to the server population but it does add to the demand for apartments if I want that character to get an apartment as well.

That's Balmung's problem. There are more players on Balmung with multiple characters than you'd see on other worlds. They want each of their characters to have housing, which means apartments in most cases since there's the house restriction.

Not allowing those characters to get an apartment is rarely to get those players to create their new characters on other worlds - they want them on Balmung for their RP purposes and a lot of times that means having them in a specific FC or local linkshell that's on Balmung. Creating the character off world means the character can't be in that FC or linkshell (cwls are still limited to 64 members compared to 128 for locals so they may not be a viable option depending on the RP group size).

Maybe their FC was lucky enough to get a house and they're able to create a FC room but if not, an apartment is their only option (or perhaps they have reasons for not wanting a room at the FC house). When it comes to server memory usage, a FC room and an apartment aren't going to be any different.

It wouldn't surprised me if apartment buildings were basically designed off how FC houses function. It would help to explain why SE was so confident in their statement that they could easily increase the number of wings in an apartment building if needed - the same thing already automatically happens with a FC house.