Housing Roulette was an absolute trash idea.

[Rokke]

Pre placard clicking, the OG way was you ran up to a plot and bought it when servers went live. I liked that one most- No clicking spam, no walk of shame collecting your funds. If I had a high queue # at login I just went back to bed lol

[Corvus_V]

What if we took this fervor and came to the conclusion that wards aren't the god damn answer, never were, and wont help anyone in the long run?
Why cant you guys just complain about this shit with the same determination you whined about male Viera?

Instanced housing is 100% the only solution. They proved they were capable of doing it with Island Sanctuary, and they were always capable of it because they had to have accounted for it when they made it so you could get a house, an apartment, an fc house, and an fc apartment all on one character. It was literally never an issue for them from the absolute start, they are just being lazy. Christ.

Lotteries werent the solution, it was the path of least resistance for them to avoid people complaining about placard spamming, which was totally mundane UNTIL you owned a small, then it was ideal because you didnt have to compete with everyone and their mother for a larger sized house, or you could even coordinate with your friends to take homes from them. Or house trade, which sucked, but still left you with "If I try hard enough, I can eventually own a large." But you know what? None of that actually matters! Know why? Because there aren't enough of them to meet demand, and there never will be until everyone can own one if they have the basic gil amount to own it. They could add 20 more wards, dead empty, and it STILL wouldn't be enough. Why dont you guys get that? Just do the math! Average the bids on each one, count the houses per ward, and multiply; maybe even subtract the goblet plots for good measure. No one wants the smalls, so wards are stupid! So please, please just make threads about that instead of demanding more wards, FFS.

[rainichan]

Square's solution to the bot problem being "lets just make it randomm!!xD" has to be the absolute laziest solution to a problem I've ever seen in a game.

Housing lottery was a player idea, it got a lot of backing because people were tired of clicking placards or waking up at 3am after maint and hoping they beat hundreds of others getting online and to a housing plot they wanted. It's the same as the auto-demos taht we have: player suggestion. There's a reason that after something like FFXI's Pandaemonium Warden making people physically ill from a straight 18 hour fight the devs decided "hmm, maybe not having our random housing timers to cut down on resellers and people loopholing is a good idea since people are doing what they did for PW... and we should do something else." It's not healthy for people.

Housing needs to be instanced, or unlimited wards. People can go back to an mmo they haven't played in 2 years and their house and guildhall will still be there. The housing in this game is ridiculous.

As much as they want to see people running around wards and stuff, it won't happen. People zone to their house, do what they need to do and zone somewhere else.

Instances or unlimited wards takes care of the problem.

I've talked about this before elsewhere, but the downsides to instanced/unlimited wards is the fact that they'd likely cut down what you can actually do with a house from what we can do now. I talked about LOTRO's unlimited wards here, though tbf to LOTRO their servers are from like, 2008, but the extreme limitation on what you can have in your house can be frustrating at times. I feel that XIV would have a similar limitation with that if they had an unlimited ward system. Instanced I think other people have covered on how they'd have to change it and issues arising from it, but XI has it and has had it since 2002 or so. It has its own limitations (unchangeable walls, shape of the house is set, no partitions only furniture, no true yard but you can buy a patio add-on for gardening, if you have the Adoulin xpac you can have access to the Mog Island which is a much smaller version of our own Island Sanctuary) so we'd likely have the same problems. Each side has a pro and a con and I don't think most think of the cons to either of these suggestions, just the pros that everyone will have access to a house, which is great! But would that be worth it for most if their ability to decorate and have access to what housing does now is diminished from a slight diminish or a severe diminish?

[Vandrak]

Housing lottery was a player idea, it got a lot of backing because people were tired of clicking placards or waking up at 3am after maint and hoping they beat hundreds of others getting online and to a housing plot they wanted. It's the same as the auto-demos taht we have: player suggestion. There's a reason that after something like FFXI's Pandaemonium Warden making people physically ill from a straight 18 hour fight the devs decided "hmm, maybe not having our random housing timers to cut down on resellers and people loopholing is a good idea since people are doing what they did for PW... and we should do something else." It's not healthy for people.



I've talked about this before elsewhere, but the downsides to instanced/unlimited wards is the fact that they'd likely cut down what you can actually do with a house from what we can do now. I talked about LOTRO's unlimited wards here, though tbf to LOTRO their servers are from like, 2008, but the extreme limitation on what you can have in your house can be frustrating at times. I feel that XIV would have a similar limitation with that if they had an unlimited ward system. Instanced I think other people have covered on how they'd have to change it and issues arising from it, but XI has it and has had it since 2002 or so. It has its own limitations (unchangeable walls, shape of the house is set, no partitions only furniture, no true yard but you can buy a patio add-on for gardening, if you have the Adoulin xpac you can have access to the Mog Island which is a much smaller version of our own Island Sanctuary) so we'd likely have the same problems. Each side has a pro and a con and I don't think most think of the cons to either of these suggestions, just the pros that everyone will have access to a house, which is great! But would that be worth it for most if their ability to decorate and have access to what housing does now is diminished from a slight diminish or a severe diminish?

EQ2 has always had instances and came out the same time as wow. You can have unlimited items basically in your housing instance. My wife built a castle from the ground up. You didn't get a plot/instance with a house. You could get an instance based on a certain zone and build every wall, floor, roof, etc of your house, and fill it with whatever you could place down. Not to mention you could right click and preview paintings and furniture right from the broker. As old as EQ2 is, and with no limitations on instanced housing, it would work here too.

[Brightamethyst]

So legit question, no snark as I am not a game developer and don't know how things work. People have argued that instanced housing for everyone isn't possible due to things like server space, but then they give everyone an island sanctuary.

My brain can't parse this just due to my own ignorance on the subject, someone mind explaining?

Wards vs instanced housing was an intentional design choice. It's not that they couldn't make instanced housing -apartments and FC rooms prove that- but that they wanted the open world neighborhood feel.

You have to understand that nine years ago when housing first came about the population was MUCH smaller, gil was much more scarce, and housing was FC only (they didn't open houses to individuals until later.) The ward system was fantastic for that game at that time. The system clearly hasn't aged well but at this point it's too late to change it.

[Corvus_V]

Wards vs instanced housing was an intentional design choice. It's not that they couldn't make instanced housing -apartments and FC rooms prove that- but that they wanted the open world neighborhood feel.
. The system clearly hasn't aged well but at this point it's too late to change it.

It isn't too late to change it because owning a plot of land isn't meant to hold any economic value outside of its use as a potential company workshop, so that's incorrect. Trading houses is against ToS, so houses are valueless to other players financially and their scarcity is completely arbitrary.

In terms of neighborhood feel, it's also basically completely dead; so this was all nonsense from the start. Allowing players to teleport to their homes removes any sense of "passing through and seeing people who live by you," as you'd have to deliberately walk past another players house while they're there knowing that in order to have any kind of interaction with them. Essentially, every ward is a glorified gallery, not a neighborhood. Even if you run an RP venue, people just head directly towards it without doing anything else. Depending on the type of venue, that may even be a good thing.

Please try not to give Square Enix too much credit for thinking of everything. They haven't, and none of this was necessary.

[kevin_satron]

So legit question, no snark as I am not a game developer and don't know how things work. People have argued that instanced housing for everyone isn't possible due to things like server space, but then they give everyone an island sanctuary.

My brain can't parse this just due to my own ignorance on the subject, someone mind explaining?

island is 100000000000000000000000x more limited compare to housing.

[Corvus_V]

island is 100000000000000000000000x more limited compare to housing.

Nope.

So legit question, no snark as I am not a game developer and don't know how things work. People have argued that instanced housing for everyone isn't possible due to things like server space, but then they give everyone an island sanctuary.

My brain can't parse this just due to my own ignorance on the subject, someone mind explaining?

There's no substance to this claim. That's the problem. Sorry they lied to you. People like to make excuses for their favorite developers for mental exercise. If you look closely enough, though, you can see they have an image problem and they like to cut-corners. If you're even vaguely familiar with what people are doing on twitter, you'll know their ps3 excuse has run its course, so people need to come up with other totally invalid bullshit to make up to explain away the reason the game just has to suck and can't be improved no matter how hard they try; despite it's obtuse subscriber count. Consider the fact that they don't want people wearing cross-class items. It isn't because this is a Playstation issue, because [REDACTED] and it's fine. It's more than likely because if you've been around a bit, you'll notice they re-hash assets, and color swap them/make them dyable, and its how they artificially make it so they have to model less shit for players to wear, and release it as "new" when it was probably just an item another class used to wear. They hope you don't notice, but once you start to expand out to the other roles and get them to cap, you will, inevitably. Obviously this doesnt stop you from wanting to wear stuff other classes can because it looks nice, but hey, maybe next expac, right? By the way, if it seems like im digressing, I'm not. I'm just on topic to how mundane dozens of things are in FFXIV that they just absolutely refuse to fix; and it's relevant because more than half the time when people tell you they can't do it it just isn't true.

You're correct in your assessment that it's stupid that they can give everyone an island, but can't give us instanced housing. You occasionally had to attempt 2 or 3 times to enter your island during peak hours when the patch dropped because of how busy it was (hilariously, this also affected people trying to enter their homes. Just another clue that it's a lie.), just like they we're woefully unprepared when they released Endwalker and there were 2000 player queues. They're fine with making a ton of money, just not with putting it back into the game to make it more fun. They're content to let the community piss for territory, because community is what drives this game more than anything else at this point.

Infact, maybe thats why they wont take the plunge and just let people decorate a house of the size of their choosing. Maybe if they actually did log in and participate, or genuinely take feedback every now and then, they'd realize that its an absolute dumpster-fire that needs an extra feature to make it less of a maelstrom of player grief. Maybe they're scared because they're under the impression people actually see each other in the wards; and they think it'll be cringe and lose subscriber if you don't visit your neighbor's empty house once every 2 years wondering if they even actually exist.

[RyuDragnier]

So legit question, no snark as I am not a game developer and don't know how things work. People have argued that instanced housing for everyone isn't possible due to things like server space, but then they give everyone an island sanctuary.

My brain can't parse this just due to my own ignorance on the subject, someone mind explaining?

Because the IS is locked behind completion of 6.0's storyline, it by itself limits the server space because free accounts can't get it. There's also a number of players who will not complete 6.0 despite having EW, meaning they won't unlock IS. And for every player who doesn't have IS unlocked, that's less server space used.

[Corvus_V]

Because the IS is locked behind completion of 6.0's storyline, it by itself limits the server space because free accounts can't get it. There's also a number of players who will not complete 6.0 despite having EW, meaning they won't unlock IS. And for every player who doesn't have IS unlocked, that's less server space used.

See? lol

If that wasn't absolutely not true, then why wouldn't they just make it so you can get an instanced house once you clear 6.0? Or restrict trial accounts, if that was even an actual concern in the first place? Do you genuinely believe that, or you're making a joke? It's hard to tell
Would this also not imply that the servers will just fucking collapse from people having too much fun on their private islands once 7.0-8.0 comes out? Or when people catch up? What's your endgame with this idea? What do you stand to gain from making stuff up?