Housing Roulette was an absolute trash idea.

[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.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Reading your inputs on it, I had a feeling the technical debt of the engine would have some reason for why they shy away from the instanced housing idea. I still sucks though at the end of the day since other older MMOs are capable of it but FFXIV's engine really is such a technical marvel of a mess.

People have suggested the next best thing would be to allow us to expand our apartment space to at least allow the basic housing functions such as gardening available for the rest of the playerbase. That still can be possible?

[CidHeiral]

The funny thing is, Island Sanctuary actually proved why instanced housing would be a terrible idea for this game on a technical level.

-snip-

This an excellent and accurate post that will unfortunately go in one ear and out the other for most. I am so tired of seeing "JuSt Do InStAnCeD HoUsInG" posts from people who have absolutely no perspective on what that would entail.

.....I think the MULTI-BILLION company can swing instanced housing if they actually tried.

Le gasp! How dare you expect multi dollar company who can barely keep the lights on to implement instanced housing! /s

Unfortunately "durrrr throw money at it" isn't an actual solution to technical problems.

[rainichan]

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.

If the servers weren't made for that, it'd take a lot more work to rework everything and would need an entire overhaul of the system, it wouldn't be something they could do in a week on top of everything else for patches + xpac + graphical update. Finite dev time + finite devs makes this incredibly difficult for something that they didn't intend in the first place to code.

Unfortunately "durrrr throw money at it" isn't an actual solution to technical problems.

Considering they wanted to add more DCs during ShB and they even said "we tried throwing money at new servers and they just didn't have them," money is indeed not the answer to this. Their main focus is making sure people can actually play first, as that will always be Priority 1, and as I recall they've said they want to expand housing servers once they're done expanding DCs and additional servers. It'll take time and I know no one wants to hear that it's going to take time, but the need to actually secure things needs to happen first before they can do anything more. At the very least I would love for them to rewrite enough code to compartmentalize housing items filesizes to open a couple more wards each patch, but I don't know how feasible that is.

[Packetdancer]

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).

Rather belatedly... my own take is actually that I suspect the dungeon servers have no provision for persisting zone state, while housing servers do.

Combat instance servers, after all, do not care what state you leave a dungeon in. Did you skip those chests over there? Did you open those treasure rooms in Qarn? Well, none of it matters; when you leave that instance, it just gets thrown out, and when you come back in the next time roulette dumps you there, it's a fresh instance with default state.

Conversely, housing servers must persist state. You added decorations to the house, and then left? You changed the playlist on the FC house orchestrion? When that housing instance is torn down, all changes to the zone state (e.g. new decorations, new orchestrion playlist, different fish in the fish tank, whatever) must be persisted into long-term storage, so that when you come back to the house later, those changes are still reflected.

Island Sanctuary, obviously, needs to persist state. And while some of that state may very well be independent of the zone (e.g., what you have being made in your workshop) as they're only accessible to you personally, other bits -- what crops are growing, what minions are out, what you've built where, what pathway style you chose, etc. -- are functionally similar to housing; they're zone state that needs to be shared with any visitor to the zone (e.g., any friend who shows up on your Island Sanctuary while you're there).

Now, that's all guesswork. But if I'm right about all that, it would almost certainly be easier to stuff Island Sanctuary onto housing instance servers (which can persist zone state) than to try to modify combat instance servers to have that same capability.