Housing: Square Enix is failing to accomplish what Lord of The Rings Online did in 07

[FireMage]

See.

No point interacting with you.

Because, no. Steam stats don't show a heavy drop-off point.

Highest Steam player count was in May 2022. This hit 1,320 average active players on Steam. This was up on March 2022 count of 767.

Average players now is 1,139, a drop of 180.

The game gained more average players than it lost.

Source. Steam:

https://steamcharts.com/app/212500

It has less than half what it did for that event. Also again ALL OF THIS IS IRRELEVANT. Older game, less house customization, order of magnitude less demand; all things you have ignored because as per usual you have no ground to stand on. Dismiss yourself, troll

[PirateRyanG]

It has less than half what it did for that event. Also again ALL OF THIS IS IRRELEVANT. Older game, less house customization, order of magnitude less demand; all things you have ignored because as per usual you have no ground to stand on. Dismiss yourself, troll

What are you even talking about? Do you just pull stuff out of your rear end and hope it sticks? It doesn't have less than half the players it had for that event. It has 180 fewer. Are you awful at maths?
Older game. Older servers. Worse code.

Able to accomplish what a newer game, with newer servers, and better code cannot accomplish.

Simple.

LOTRO doesn't benefit from scaleable cloud tech. It wasn't built with that in mind as it literally didn't exist. FF14 was.

[Shibi]

There's a limit to how much custom data can be rendered before the user starts to have issues.

Yeah, probably the polygon and texture-ram problems, although likely also a little bit of network in the mix. It's well known people get rather unhappy when their frame rates tank to 4 or 5 fps. So, they always have to code conservatively for the lowest common denominator when it comes to this, be that old playstations, or people on 10 year old windows machines with integrated Intel graphics. As the limits haven't really changed for more than a decade, I think it's likely still written for the video memory of the PS3. Just guesses though, none of us know the game's limits or internal designs, although those of us with industry experience in gaming can guess a few.

Partially solvable with distance culling out in the open world and cities, but inside a FFXIV house it's done with object limits rather than interest, it's all there and loaded into your card. Object limits also help with bandwidth when you load a house - too many people doing that at once could trash the network one guesses - even though the amount of data isn't really that great (locally stored assets). There are other techniques like decent LODs and interest management that can help outside. that are not seemingly used inside at all.

I also get the feeling of user scale is messing up their instance servers, too many people entering at once does something mean to the spawning of them.

All games have the same issues, all have solved it in one way or another. But this game is hampered by it's base design of always-on wards and the overload of players right now. As you rightly say, hampered by the original use of housing, which was for FCs, not people's personal use.

To address Ryan...

In terms of demo, it's been off almost a year, and right now there is an absolute glut of open available housing which won't be going anywhere for quite a few months, and sometime before or during 2024 (that's stated on how far ahead they said have approved budget for hardware purchases) yoshi did say there will be more wards added. So, demo really doesn't need to be on until each physical datacentre drops down to a few hundred plots over all servers.

Was it done "to make more loot" as Pirate Ryan suggests? I don't think that was the intention, just the path they are forced down. The history of the system as being FC only, then demo free later, disproves it. The last year without demo and moving forwards all these thousands empty plots remaining empty for likely a long time just adds more weight to that just being conspiracy theory.

[Striker44]

No, I am not.

The comparison was that "if an older game can accomplish this, why can't a newer game?".

Sure, the player counts are different, but server tech is much, much improved from when LOTRO was in its prime.

But, as always, you are being combative. People only need to look at your post history to see that you are a little putrid worm.

I see little informed honesty from the OP. First, just because one game came after another doesn't mean it should automatically be able to do every single thing the first game does the same or better. Different games focus on different things, and that will naturally result in different capabilities for each game. I'm perfectly fine with FFXIV not magically managing to do exactly what every single other MMO ever created can do; it does the specific things that make me really enjoy a game very well, and that's all that matters. (For me, that's a good story, engaging characters, lots of side content, and a fun community.)

This part takes the cake, though:

But, even if you took that fake data, the figures I gave still weren't far off (I said 85,000). As far as I can remember, the last announced stats was around the 80,000+ monthly active mark.

"The absolutely baseless figures I gave must be good, because that data I just called completely useless says so."

December 2020 is very recent considering this is an old MMO where player churn wouldn't be anywhere near what it would be at the start.

Not at all. Data that's 2 years old is ancient history. Look at where WoW was in December 2020 compared to now...

[FireMage]

maths

Oof. Also the average is not worth dignifying, the peak is. It shows LOTRO is on semi maint mode

LOTRO doesn't benefit from scaleable cloud tech. It wasn't built with that in mind as it literally didn't exist. FF14 was.

Wrong, as per usual, troll

[PirateRyanG]

Oof. Also the average is not worth dignifying, the peak is. It shows LOTRO is on semi maint mode



Wrong, as per usual, troll

What is wrong with 'maths'?

Semi-maintenance mode, with a console version announced, a graphical overhaul announced, and an expansion pack around the corner? (in a week)

[PirateRyanG]

I see little informed honesty from the OP. First, just because one game came after another doesn't mean it should automatically be able to do every single thing the first game does the same or better. Different games focus on different things, and that will naturally result in different capabilities for each game. I'm perfectly fine with FFXIV not magically managing to do exactly what every single other MMO ever created can do; it does the specific things that make me really enjoy a game very well, and that's all that matters. (For me, that's a good story, engaging characters, lots of side content, and a fun community.)

This part takes the cake, though:



"The absolutely baseless figures I gave must be good, because that data I just called completely useless says so."



Not at all. Data that's 2 years old is ancient history. Look at where WoW was in December 2020 compared to now...

The figures weren't baseless.

We know that LOTRO had 100,000 MAU in December 2020.

We know that LOTRO hit its peak player count (for 10 years) in April/May 2022 (on Steam).

Therefore, it stands to reason that there is zero chance there was a 50% player drop-off between December 2020 and now, especially since the current Steam count is roughly the same as it was during the 10-year peak.

[FireMage]

Man all this shilling for LOTRO is actually gross. Ignoring that it has an order of magnitude less players? Check. Improperly using statistics to try and show otherwise? Check. Ignoring the sheer difference in age and housing customization? Check. Flat out lying about server infrastructure of XIV? Check. And TC says they aren't a troll

[Momo_Kozuki]

Oh, it is rare to see LOTRO coming to the table.


Back when I still play like 7-8 years go, I also own a house in LOTRO. Housing is plentiful on smaller server (I play on Riddermark before it got merged into Brandywine), and I can say that while LOTRO can provide you plentiful housing thanks to its much-smaller playerbase, compared to FF14, it comes with many limits:


-Houses are plentiful, but most big houses and good locations are already taken, just like FF14. That was on a medium-size server before merging into one of largest server.



-Decorating houses are very limited. LOTRO uses hooks with fixed locations for you to place items on, and you cannot even choose what kind of items on it. If the hook is for furniture but you want to put something like a painting in its place, tough luck. There are not that many hooks per house either. It gets old after a while, and I only use my house for extra chest space to store up stuffs. Housing feels like an afterthought than a meaningful content.



-FF14, meanwhile, embrace freestyle placement and is the reason why there is a lot of creative decorations, including both normal and glitching methods. This, however, makes FF14 have it very difficult to handle all housing decoration data at once cuz outdated infrastructure, so the housing supply is always limited. If FF14 opts for hook-based decoration, it might help a lot in adding more houses, but it would also kill the creativity. So it is a question between quality vs quantity.


I'm not a fan of how FF14 handles housing (how they make housing a subscription hostage), but the two games clearly have different conditions (player population and demands) and how to handle it (hook-based vs freestyle), which benefits players in different ways. A comparison between them is kinda unfair when they are pretty much not the same.



Unless SE just destroy everything and make them up from scratch, or the game is so declining that more plots are opened because people leaving in roves, I doubt there will be any improvement.

[Themarvin]

I dont think its just solely because of the auto demolish retaining subbed players. If you havent noticed, they've turned that off for almost a year now (and still is I think? Could somebody fact check me this please?)
Its simply because I think the dev team finds the player created neighborhood system on a server where anyone can visit far more appealing.

However no amount of band-aid fixes can truly help the situation because of the limited server space for each one trying to accommodate every single player. Its a very unfair system and of course we all know that by now.

I just think they really either need to introduce personal housing while still retaining the limited ward space as a "premium" thing or even just allowing players to expand their apartments to accommodate more rooms and allow gardening.

There is a world crisis going on and the only that think everything is well is some guy sitting in Moscow.