Crystarrium and Sharlayan House Wards?

[Hasrat]

There were 360 personal houses available at the launch of Empyreum. In Balmung, I looked through every house and ward towards the end of the entry period.

Balmung

Balmung is not the standard any such system should be measured against.

[Jojoya]

Balmung is not the standard any such system should be measured against.

To be honest, there should be no standard at all. Each world is unique in population and what content the players tend to gravitate toward.

SE should be considering how to create a system that best serves the variety, not a standard.

[Hasrat]

To be honest, there should be no standard at all. Each world is unique in population and what content the players tend to gravitate toward.

SE should be considering how to create a system that best serves the variety, not a standard.

Ehhhh, I'm not so sure about that. Seems like it would quickly lead to cries of favoritism, on top of the snowball effect that large servers already experience. Large server gets more resources, draws more players, needs more resources... I've been around long enough to hear Balmung calling for Mateus to be stripped of housing because "well they're low pop and not using it anyway."

Much of dev efforts are intended to achieve some semblance of balance, because that's what the hardware is designed for.

Plus, harkening back to a previous point of mine, their intention is not to serve everyone. Treating every server like Balmung would be a massive waste of resources. Treating everything like whatever the low-pop server is these days would obviously see massive outcry. So, they aim middle of the road, a balance between satisfying as many as they can, without blowing the budget. Or, alternatively, spending as little as possible while keeping the vocal outrage to a minimum.

[Jojoya]

Ehhhh, I'm not so sure about that. Seems like it would quickly lead to cries of favoritism, on top of the snowball effect that large servers already experience. Large server gets more resources, draws more players, needs more resources... I've been around long enough to hear Balmung calling for Mateus to be stripped of housing because "well they're low pop and not using it anyway."

Much of dev efforts are intended to achieve some semblance of balance, because that's what the hardware is designed for.

Plus, harkening back to a previous point of mine, their intention is not to serve everyone. Treating every server like Balmung would be a massive waste of resources. Treating everything like whatever the low-pop server is these days would obviously see massive outcry. So, they aim middle of the road, a balance between satisfying as many as they can, without blowing the budget. Or, alternatively, spending as little as possible while keeping the vocal outrage to a minimum.

I'm not proposing that every server get treated like Balmung. I'm proposing a better use of resources.

Part of the issue with the current housing design is that the housing instance servers are per world instead of a shared resource across a data center like instanced duties are. How can we tell there's a difference? In our HUD settings, we have the ability to select "Display current world name" as part of the server information (the clock) on our HUD.

Go into an instanced housing area (house interior, private chamber, apartment) and the server name continues to appear. Go into an instanced duty and the server name disappears because you're no longer on an instance server supporting a specific world. It's a shared resource across the data center.

So do the same with housing instance servers. Leave the wards tied to a world but have the instanced portion shared across the data center. Most of the Crystal worlds other than Balmung and Mateus still have a large number of vacant apartments. Being tied to a specific world's servers, they aren't much help to players who would happily make use of them if they were available on their home world's servers. Making the housing instance servers data center wide becomes more efficient management of equipment while doing a better job of meeting player needs on all worlds.

I doubt the Balmung/Mateus overflow would fill them all and become a problem for players on the other Crystal worlds, partly because as soon as the new NA worlds become available in (hopefully) November, SE is going to slam most of the existing NA worlds with the Congested status to force new characters to be made on the new worlds. If SE is smart, they'll add additional incentives for players to transfer from Congested worlds to New worlds just as there is a difference when transferring to a Preferred world from a Congested or Standard world (right now there is no difference in bonus going to a New world when origination world is Congested/Standard/Preferred).

One thing it would mean is no more functional Summoning Bells inside of a house. Players would have to use the Summoning Bells in the wards, which isn't a bad thing if players want to see more foot traffic in the wards.

It's not a change that could be implemented that quickly if SE is inclined to do it. I wouldn't expect to see it happen until the 7.x series. But it would help, especially if SE isn't going to give up on their pet wards.

You're right that treating every server the same as one specific server doesn't work. That's why some resources are better shared across a data center than limited to a single world.