[Housing] 1 House Per Service Account. 1 FC Per Service Account.

[Packetdancer]

Remind me again why people don’t want instanced housing, but come up with ideas like OP?

I mean, it's worth pointing out that the housing we have now actually is instanced, from a technical standpoint... just not in the way people generally mean it.

It's not like there's a server out there at all times representing a specific house interior, after all. The housing interiors are stored in persistent storage, and when you try to enter a house, it has to go and check "is this house currently instanced?" If it is, yay, you just get shunted over to that (and see whoever is inside). If it is not, it needs to spin up a housing interior instance, load the housing interior data into that instance, and then load you into it.

And when we run out of available space for new housing interior instances to be created, we get those moments -- like back during the Endwalker launch -- where the server just goes "nope" and tells you that you can't enter a house, leaving you spam-clicking your doorway hoping to get inside.

(In contrast, dungeon instances are throwaway; it doesn't need to save or load any instance-specific data, because no dungeon needs to remember if you opened a given chest or moved a chair or turned on a light or whatever. And inn rooms or Grand Company barracks seem to exist only on your client, which is why no one else can ever enter your inn room or GC squadron barracks; they simply do not exist on a server to be shared.)

So it's not that (most) people object to instanced housing, more that some folks think the amount of work that is likely involved in ripping this housing system out and trying to architect fully instanced housing -- especially given some of the potential limitations we can guess at regarding the FFXIV server architecture -- seems like it would involve more compromises than people would be happy with.

I dislike the ward system, even if I do understand what they were trying for. I agree that instanced housing would be better. But I suspect that the wards serve, in part, to keep the resource usage within a predictable limit... and I suspect that any change which involves "we might need to abruptly add huge amounts of server capacity to handle housing if people start using lots of houses at once" is going to be a reaaaaally tough sell to the publisher's finance team (e.g. SQEX's accountants). No matter how much the dev team themselves over at CBU3 might want to do that.

It isn't that people don't want Instanced Housing but that we know the dev team simply won't implement. Whether due to coding constraints, their stubborn refusal to admit the ward system is awful or a combination of both, this has been a problem for years now and every single mention has only led to band-aid fixes and apologies from Yoshida.

I am absolutely convinced it has to be technological issues. Aside from the fact that I can see how those technical issues would come up, I feel like if they genuinely believed the ward system was a good idea they'd be trying to talk it up as to why it's a good idea.

I mean, everyone knows that this system is a trash fire in a number of ways. Honestly, inanimate objects, possibly on other planets, have probably heard enough about the housing system in the gaming press to know that it is a disaster.

The fact that we get apologies for said trash fire and band-aid fixes trying to maybe make the fire a little less "roaring inferno" and something a little more like "uncomfortably hot bonfire" suggests to me not that anyone thinks "this trash fire is beneficial to the community" but rather that no one has a viable plan to put out said fire at present.

Which, to me, screams "server architectural limitations".

I can tell you right now that requiring people to clear a savage fight on-content to access housing ownership would be one of the most negatively viewed things SE could possibly do to this game.

That idea shafts casual players with no interesting in raiding so unbelievably hard it's difficult to put into words how bad it would be.

It's bad enough that players are gated from participating in the gardening system (e.g. crossbreeding seeds) by the requirement to have a house (to have a yard to put down a housing plot) and that FCs are gated from using the Company Workshop by the requirement to have an FC house.

If you gated having a house on doing the current savage tier -- and thus gated FCs having access to the workshop on their officers being raiders, or functionally limited access to gardening to just raiders -- I feel like we'd reach a point where the playerbase would be in open revolt, and we'd see the forums trying to re-enact the French Revolution.

can we have housing like new world? 1 plot can be owned by multiple people, and each house will have their own instance

Not without huge changes to how housing works even from an interaction standpoint.

Right now, at my FC house, we'll have folks standing in the yard and practicing on the training dummies while someone else is at the marketboard across the street, someone else is sitting under the tree by the marketboard and crafting, and everyone might be chatting in /say.

If the plot my FC house is at were shared among multiple folks, how would that work? If you had Group A standing in our FC house yard using the training dummies, Group B standing in their yard (same plot) and RP'ing a picnic... do the folks in my FC house yard see /say commentary and emotes from the other plot's yard, and vice versa? If I am with the group in my FC yard and I walk out to the sidewalk to go to the marketboard, do I now see the other group's yard and see their stuff? Can people in my group's yard see me outside the house? If people in the other plot are holding a party in their yard, do we in my FC's house yard just see people gathering outside on the sidewalk, walking in the gate to our yard... and vanishing?

It's a huge number of headaches just to figure out how those situations should work, even before you get into any of the technical obstacles involved in solving those edge cases. (Which is a key reason why things like BDO or New World that do shared plots with individual instances like that almost never have any sort of 'front yard' visible outside of the housing walls, as you might guess!)

But alas, I feel like that that ship has already well and truly sailed for FFXIV.