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

[NanaWiloh]

Well housing is already 1 private house and one fc house per account. SE can't do anything about those that owned more than one house before the changes. Also, ones could have more than one account with homes and FC's. Don't have to be a FC for 90 days before can own a house? Maybe they should just make FC housing instant housing then make all wards private housing.

Have to be a member of a FC for 30 days before you buy and own a FC house.

[kevin_satron]

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

[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.

[Pablomaldito]

People get around it, though. It's already 1 personal 1 FC per world: I have a personal, I inherited a FC house which means I can't get another house on any of my characters on Balmung.

Was that FC house actually purchased by one of your characters, and is that character still in the FC? If yes to both, then your characters indeed cannot purchase another house (except the one who bought the FC house, who can make a purchase for the purpose of relocation). However, if the answer to either of those questions is no, then you are free to create a FC on another character and have them buy another FC house on Balmung.

[rainichan]

Was that FC house actually purchased by one of your characters, and is that character still in the FC? If yes to both, then your characters indeed cannot purchase another house (except the one who bought the FC house, who can make a purchase for the purpose of relocation). However, if the answer to either of those questions is no, then you are free to create a FC on another character and have them buy another FC house on Balmung.

It was not mine, but the character who did buy it way back at housing release is still in the FC, just hasn't logged in (they moved other characters to a different server after the flustercluck that was SB and being on Balmung with our unmoving 10k+ queues after 1pm) so it went to me. Most of the FC moved, but I stayed on Balmung since it was my server from open beta and that's where my 1.0 character was shuffled. Already had my personal at that point.

Still wouldn't make an extra FC for the purpose of having a third house even if I can, I'm not an arsehole and I see no need for it. (Apologies if this comes off as saying you are, you are not for pointing it out, sorry. I just realized that could be taken poorly which was not my intention. You're gucci. <3)

[aloneatsea]

snip

This is by far the most salient take on housing I've yet seen.


I mentioned this on another thread, but there's another massive bugbear SE would need to reckon with to swap to instanced housing too -- transitioning. From my viewpoint, there is absolutely no way to transition to instance housing without pissing off a large part of the playerbase either immediately or over time.

This is almost entirely down to the fact that not all plots are made equal. Large plots have more decorating space, and can have more garden plots. Medium plots can have fewer, and Smalls fewer still.

Say we suddenly overcome the immense technical problems instanced housing proposes -- do they exist alongside the neighbourhood system, or replace it entirely? If it replaces it -- naturally, the uproar from those who had houses already is going to be immense. People hate change, and they especially hate change when it comes to points of prestige they hold over others. What about players who deliberately purchased houses side-by-side with their friends or family members? What about players who formed friendships with their neighbours and now don't get to enjoy that common space? It's a mess.

So maybe the two systems should exist side-by-side - but that's not going to work so smoothly either. How large are instanced houses going to be? Smalls? Mediums? Larges? Will you have the option to pick a size? No matter how you shake it, the inherent inequality in the system is going to mean either instanced housing or neighbourhood housing is superior. If you can get Large houses with ease via the instanced system, those who "worked hard" for their neighbourhood Larges will riot. If you can only get Small houses via the instanced system, people will riot because it's not as good as the neighbourhood houses.


TLDR; no matter what SE does or how they play it, they can't change the system they have without massively pissing off one portion of their playerbase -- those who currently own houses, or those who currently do not. The safest play is to gradually add more wards to meet demand without creating ghost wards, which requires only a limited amount of dev time, and yields the greatest benefit to Square Enix.

It's a miserable place to be in, game design-wise, and frankly I don't envy the devs for it.

[Renathras]

Remind me again why people don’t want instanced housing, but come up with ideas like OP? I wish people would stop trying to punish players because of the housing systems poor design. The absolute only thing that is going to solve the FFXIV housing crisis is instanced housing. No matter how many ways people try to limit, demolish, punish people who already own a home, there will never be enough plots for everyone. The answer is simple, allow people who want instanced housing to have it and the people who refuse can live in the neighborhoods that already exist.

Do you know what "instanced housing" actually is? Can you describe "instanced housing" and how it will let people have houses they can customize the external and internal spaces of that are shared with the world?

Because if you think that, you don't understand what "instanced housing" actually is.

Not to mention it probably wouldn't work with the back-end they have in FFXIV. If it did, they'd have done it by now.

The OP change is at least working within the existing system while trying to fix some of the supply issues by breaking hoarder gaming of the system issues.

EDIT:

-Clear 1 savage fight of current patch (so you can't unsync Shb for example)

Some of your other ideas are bad (if there's a small friend/family group that's pretty casual and a lot of members don't play often, you're saying they should be excluded from owning a house?), but this one takes the cake. What does clearing a Savage fight have to do with hosing? o.O

EDIT2:

I mentioned this on another thread, but there's another massive bugbear SE would need to reckon with to swap to instanced housing too -- transitioning. From my viewpoint, there is absolutely no way to transition to instance housing without pissing off a large part of the playerbase either immediately or over time.

I think a lot of the people proposing "solutions" forget this. There are people pissed off now, but if you take all the people who have ever done housing, the ones who have done it for years, the people for whom housing actually IS a selling point of the game (so we're all clear: Housing is not a "main selling point" of FFXIV...some small number of people, sure, but that's probably eclipsed by the number of people that only get to level 15 to play Mahjong and that's their entire reason for playing FFXIV), then things would go nuclear. Not to mention all the coding that would have to be put in JUST for the transition. Even if it was a simple "everything is destroyed (housing and aparements) and people are given a special storage that gets ALL of the items AND they get a full refund for all the prices, that would already go over extremely poorly.

The technical problems are most likely the real issue, but many of the proposed solutions would make things far, far worse than what we have now.

They could do a side-by-side thing...but that probably wouldn't work that well. That's basically what Apartments and Island Sanctuary are, and neither has managed to scratch the housing itch.

[rainichan]

This is by far the most salient take on housing I've yet seen.


I mentioned this on another thread, but there's another massive bugbear SE would need to reckon with to swap to instanced housing too -- transitioning. From my viewpoint, there is absolutely no way to transition to instance housing without pissing off a large part of the playerbase either immediately or over time.

This is almost entirely down to the fact that not all plots are made equal. Large plots have more decorating space, and can have more garden plots. Medium plots can have fewer, and Smalls fewer still.

Say we suddenly overcome the immense technical problems instanced housing proposes -- do they exist alongside the neighbourhood system, or replace it entirely? If it replaces it -- naturally, the uproar from those who had houses already is going to be immense. People hate change, and they especially hate change when it comes to points of prestige they hold over others. What about players who deliberately purchased houses side-by-side with their friends or family members? What about players who formed friendships with their neighbours and now don't get to enjoy that common space? It's a mess.

So maybe the two systems should exist side-by-side - but that's not going to work so smoothly either. How large are instanced houses going to be? Smalls? Mediums? Larges? Will you have the option to pick a size? No matter how you shake it, the inherent inequality in the system is going to mean either instanced housing or neighbourhood housing is superior. If you can get Large houses with ease via the instanced system, those who "worked hard" for their neighbourhood Larges will riot. If you can only get Small houses via the instanced system, people will riot because it's not as good as the neighbourhood houses.


TLDR; no matter what SE does or how they play it, they can't change the system they have without massively pissing off one portion of their playerbase -- those who currently own houses, or those who currently do not. The safest play is to gradually add more wards to meet demand without creating ghost wards, which requires only a limited amount of dev time, and yields the greatest benefit to Square Enix.

It's a miserable place to be in, game design-wise, and frankly I don't envy the devs for it.

tbf, no matter what the devs do and how they do it, there's always a portion of the playerbase that is never happy.

"Give us this!"

They do.

"But not like THAT I hate it like this!!!"

So they change it.

"Well I don't like that either because it's not exactly how I envisioned it!!!"

It's always a mess for them, and I'm like you and just... don't envy the devs at all.

...as an aside, how you doin on donations for your shrine?

[ThaCa]

They really should consider more things bound per account.

Like also having only 1 spot avaiable in PvP leaderboards for an account to curb the alts.

[LaylaTsarra]

They really should consider more things bound per account.

Like also having only 1 spot avaiable in PvP leaderboards for an account to curb the alts.

I think most of us who play alts would love a common bank for many things. Not being able to share your own house is ridiculous. Relative to one house per account they chose not to do it with this update of the rules which I personally thought was a possibility.

The issue of retroactively enforcing the rules is a mute issue in my view. They won't penalize those of us who followed the rules but will apply any new rules moving forward. Purchasing houses on other servers and data centers has been a part of FFXIV housing for years.