Housing Roulette was an absolute trash idea.

[Ivtrix]

There have been people who have been playing years who just finally got a house and will say the system is horrid.

*shrug* there are myriads of people who complained the old system was bad too. There isn’t a perfect solution and there will be always those left unhappy with how things are done.

The lottery system is a very Japanese solution, they do this sort of thing constantly for things that are in high demand but have limited supply. I remember when PS5 support was announced, Yoshi-P mentioned on the same Live Letter that he didn't have a PS5 yet. The ongoing supply issues the console had meant that every retailer was only selling their PS5 stock via lottery, and he hadn't gotten picked yet.

[Midareyukki]

*shrug* there are myriads of people who complained the old system was bad too. There isn’t a perfect solution and there will be always those left unhappy with how things are done.

My view is that the old system was toxic. People would spend hours on end in front of a placard hoping it'd miraculously pop. And constantly fight against easily ten other people botting and clicking on the placard to see if it worked. People would legit spend the night camping the place.

What we have now really isn't perfect. And it may seem unfair. But it's far fairer imo than whatever we had before. Because that was just masochism incarnate. This? This is a raffle. The unfortunate thing about it is the supply versus the demand.

I don't think it's simply a Japanese solution. I mean, sure, this practice may be a lot more welcome in Japan and all that, not saying it isn't o: I don't know enough to say otherwise anyway. But what I mean is that back then? When we had that really unhealthy system? THIS is what people asked for. A Lottery system. For better and for worse. And I mean it, people HERE, in THESE forums, the EN General Discussion chats, did ask for this. Myself among them.

I don't blame this system. Not in its entirety. Just that while it's better than what we had before, it still is stunted by one simple issue: supply.

And unfortunately, the way the game is designed and the way servers work mean supply isn't something that will grow overnight.

[Ivtrix]

My view is that the old system was toxic. People would spend hours on end in front of a placard hoping it'd miraculously pop. And constantly fight against easily ten other people botting and clicking on the placard to see if it worked. People would legit spend the night camping the place.

What we have now really isn't perfect. And it may seem unfair. But it's far fairer imo than whatever we had before. Because that was just masochism incarnate. This? This is a raffle. The unfortunate thing about it is the supply versus the demand.

I don't think it's simply a Japanese solution. I mean, sure, this practice may be a lot more welcome in Japan and all that, not saying it isn't o: I don't know enough to say otherwise anyway. But what I mean is that back then? When we had that really unhealthy system? THIS is what people asked for. A Lottery system. For better and for worse. And I mean it, people HERE, in THESE forums, the EN General Discussion chats, did ask for this. Myself among them.

I don't blame this system. Not in its entirety. Just that while it's better than what we had before, it still is stunted by one simple issue: supply.

And unfortunately, the way the game is designed and the way servers work mean supply isn't something that will grow overnight.

It’s not simply a JP solution, it’s just how they deal with a lot of their problems. The big difference is that the PS5 is hardware, and the housing wards technically aren’t (although they do exist on a server)

I think another issue that goes hand in hand with the current system is the developers thoughts on housing itself. They havnt outright said it, but it’s not hard to deduce that they really arnt fans of private housing at all. It seems clear to me that their interpretation is that housing in their eyes is to be used as social hubs for the free companies and they are really hesitant to allow people to go buck wild with private housing.

[CidHeiral]

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.

It wasn't Square's solution, it was the playerbase's. Players demanded a lottery system for years, and they got exactly what they asked for.

The lottery system was never going to solve a supply issue, it just makes it fair for everyone who wants to bid.

[Joven]

My view is that the old system was toxic. People would spend hours on end in front of a placard hoping it'd miraculously pop. And constantly fight against easily ten other people botting and clicking on the placard to see if it worked. People would legit spend the night camping the place.

What we have now really isn't perfect. And it may seem unfair. But it's far fairer imo than whatever we had before. Because that was just masochism incarnate. This? This is a raffle. The unfortunate thing about it is the supply versus the demand.

I don't think it's simply a Japanese solution. I mean, sure, this practice may be a lot more welcome in Japan and all that, not saying it isn't o: I don't know enough to say otherwise anyway. But what I mean is that back then? When we had that really unhealthy system? THIS is what people asked for. A Lottery system. For better and for worse. And I mean it, people HERE, in THESE forums, the EN General Discussion chats, did ask for this. Myself among them.

I don't blame this system. Not in its entirety. Just that while it's better than what we had before, it still is stunted by one simple issue: supply.

And unfortunately, the way the game is designed and the way servers work mean supply isn't something that will grow overnight.

It wasn't Square's solution, it was the playerbase's. Players demanded a lottery system for years, and they got exactly what they asked for.

The lottery system was never going to solve a supply issue, it just makes it fair for everyone who wants to bid.

I don't even think it's a supply issue. I think it's everyone wants a select few houses while others fall by the wayside. I went through Shirogane on (I think) Louisoix and the first 4 plots in the subdivision I was in were empty. No buildings, no owners, all of them smalls. You could counter with "well that's only certain servers", but then it comes down to the playerbase migrating to areas that accomodate what they want. My friends gave up raiding at the hours they play to move to a server where houses were more available because to them a house was more important. Choose your priorities.

[Zebraoracle]

I don't even think it's a supply issue. I think it's everyone wants a select few houses while others fall by the wayside. I went through Shirogane on (I think) Louisoix and the first 4 plots in the subdivision I was in were empty. No buildings, no owners, all of them smalls. You could counter with "well that's only certain servers", but then it comes down to the playerbase migrating to areas that accomodate what they want. My friends gave up raiding at the hours they play to move to a server where houses were more available because to them a house was more important. Choose your priorities.

But it literally does depend on data center. As has been said, on Aether the demand far outweighs the supply. It just comes with a high population DC. Like yeah certain plots are more popular for sure, but on a high density server most of them are going to be bid on regardless of location.

[Joven]

But it literally does depend on data center. As has been said, on Aether the demand far outweighs the supply. It just comes with a high population DC.

Then, again, transfer to another data center. I, an NA user originally from Aether Cactuar, transfered over to the EU data centers because houses were more prevalent and got a medium in Lavender Beds almost immediately. If they really want one concessions can be made.

[Mr_Gyactus]

I think another issue that goes hand in hand with the current system is the developers thoughts on housing itself. They havnt outright said it, but it’s not hard to deduce that they really arnt fans of private housing at all. It seems clear to me that their interpretation is that housing in their eyes is to be used as social hubs for the free companies and they are really hesitant to allow people to go buck wild with private housing.

..And I think you are right.
I have a private house, but it's -almost- useless.
- I cannot share the house with alts
- I don't have a workshop thus I cannot do submarines or different walls for the house,
- I don't have "chambers" for my subtenants,
- I lose the house if I don't enter for 35 days (no matter if subtenants enter, only the owner resets the demolition),
- I can't decide who enter (or everyone or max 4 characters).


It's a status symbol, nothing more.

[Ivtrix]

It wasn't Square's solution, it was the playerbase's. Players demanded a lottery system for years, and they got exactly what they asked for.

The lottery system was never going to solve a supply issue, it just makes it fair for everyone who wants to bid.

Exactly, it’s made people acutely aware of how much demand there is vs supply.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

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?

The funny thing is, Island Sanctuary actually proved why instanced housing would be a terrible idea for this game on a technical level without major overhauls in the backend.

When IS was launched, everyone having an instance of it open as people made a mad rush at it completely shut down the instance servers for housing on practically every popular server for days during peak hours since there were linked, preventing the vast majority on those servers from going into their homes. (IS was likely hooked up to the housing server cluster to prevent this issue from taking out the combat duty instance server cluster instead, which would be 10000x worse for Square). The exact same thing happened when EW was released - everyone afking in their apartments with their anti-afk tools to prevent kicks caused housing to become nigh impossible to enter, to the point that between that & difficulties logging into the game, they had to emergency freeze the auto-demo to prevent people's houses from being demo'd when they literally couldn't enter them to cancel the auto-demo.

The game literally cannot support instanced housing in its current setup. if everyone was given their own housing instance, the above issues would become an almost daily occurrence. The wards work in 99% of situations because they're by definition, more limited, and thus on the average, way less housing instances are open at any given time contrasted to if everyone had one. If they released instance housing tomorrow, it'd be in the top 3 biggest disasters in the game's history, and the devs know it. Until they can fix the bigger backend issues such a system will present, instanced housing will never be a valid option.

And speaking as someone with game dev experiences, updating/changing backend stuff that's had years worth of systems built onto it is not a small feat, and an extremely tricky undertaking. With how tight their patch cycle dev times are of only 4 months, it's definitely not something they're going to do when they can't afford any major setbacks at all if something goes bad. If they ever do instanced housing, it'll be made during the X.5 -> expansion development frame since they have way more dev time to afford things going wrong.

As to why they can give everyone their own Island Sanctuary? Simple, because with the way its setup, you're there for maybe 10mins a day at best, and if you try to afk there, it kicks you out. Outside of launch days where there's new content for it, there isn't any risk of IS instances clogging up the cluster drains, since players either close them manually by leaving, or the game purges them regularly with afk kicks. A vastly different story for housing where people love to afk, craft in their homes, etc, keeping open instances not doing anything/barely doing anything clogging the drains way more a potential issue. I have zero doubts if they ever added instanced housing to the current game state, they'd have to put an insanely hard afk timer on it, like 10mins, and implement systems that can bypass anti-afk tools and kick you out anyway. Or even worse, make a queueing system for it then only give you a small amount of time to hang out inside your house before it auto-kicks you out, either of which would no doubt illicit 'BuT wHy Is It LiKe ThIs' complaints.

Then there's also other issues to talk about, like the fact that with the way they have things coded, you literally cannot teleport to a location unless its a persistently loaded location (the exact reason you cannot warp to IS, because a player's instance is only loaded when they enter it) which would mean instanced housing would require you to do similar to IS and require you to go talk to some NPC/object to access it which would no doubt draw ire from people complaining about things they have no technical knowledge on.

As a former game programmer, I don't envy Yoshi-P's team. A bad decision made when they expected the game would only get maybe one expansion before shutting down is biting them immensely hard a near decade later, and trying to give a technical explanation on why it would take a long time / why they want to stick to the ward system would just go in one ear and out the other for 99% of their players who have zero server environment experience, or make 'but this MMO did it' false equivalence fallacies without understanding the technical aspects of FF14's server architecture & code foundation.