Devs Please Revisit Apartments

[Deveryn]

Based on trial and error I still think we can at least safely say we're past the part where continuing the course is viable. Whether they decide to do the right thing going forward or ignore the feedback is up to them; I just think they should be honest about their intentions, because they definitely can fix it whether they say it's easy or not.

They've alleviated some of the desire with IS, but the fixes people want are not something they can provide.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

I believe the apartments are due for a revisit from the dev team. Although housing is incredible, I believe apartments can be very comparable to housing. Currently, apartments are only missing a few things that could be remedied very quick with a few adjustments.

Here are my suggestions, please add more below!

1. Add an "outdoor" porch:
This to me is possibly the biggest feature that could help players feel they're not missing out on not owning a home, but also not taking away from those that do. A small porch / outdoor area where people can decorate with outdoor furnishing would add more value to the seasonal events and foster good will with players. It wouldn't be as big as the small house yard, but it would at least give players an option.

4. Provide an option to upgrade apartments to multiple floors in the future:
This is a shot in the dark, but maybe the apartments could be provided with upgrade feature to increase the floors to a small/med/large (penthouse!). Although the outdoor space would stay the same or increase only slightly (still keeping value to the houses), this would provide so many players with the fun of having a home without the disappointment of the very limited current housing system!

Apartments are such an incredible feature in this game. They provide a lot more to the general health of FFXIV than I think many people may know. Apartments are a great way to keep the economy healthy, since they further player investment even with those that have houses. Apartments also allow players to enjoy all of the housing districts without taking houses away from other players. Apartments also provide a horizontal progression for players outside of the gear chase, and increases the lifespan of many players' subscription. All of these points are great for SE's business! Please consider these suggestions and revisiting apartments dev team!

1)
I support this, it would make Apartments at least a LITTLE more Attractive, so you can have your own garden. It wouldnt be big, but its something.

4)
Hmm, while Id love this as well, considering the Apartments building is a Tower, it kinda wouldnt make sense....then again neither would an outdoor porch....But I feel like this is shooting to high at the moon.

Apartments could really use and upgrade. Its near impossible to get housing, so apartments are a Great Compromise...but at the same time limiting. Lift some limits, and I feel everyone would be happier.

[Renathras]

I believe the apartments are due for a revisit from the dev team. Although housing is incredible, I believe apartments can be very comparable to housing. Currently, apartments are only missing a few things that could be remedied very quick with a few adjustments.

I disagree with your suggestions...but I agree with your premise. Apartments COULD be the solution to housing (that was their entire point originally), they just need some nudges.

Personally, we need indoor hydroponic planters. Say it's Sharlyan tech and give it a Sharl theme and bam! Done and it fits in-universe. If Sharlyan basically has doctors with laser scalpels due to the confluence of magic, aetherology, and churgeony, then it's likely they've figured out indoor planters. Especially since Labyrintos is basically one giant indoor planter!

1: Even existing houses don't have "outdoor" space since that requires a larger instance, skybox, etc. Note when you're in a house you can never see the outside. The closest to that we've come is our Crystarium inn room/apartment. (Also, Crystarium housing when? I'd love that! I'd love even just an apartment there that I could customize with that open window view.)

2: This creates problems with the database. They'd have to introduce them as new Apartments, and that might cause problems migrating people over. They could take all existing apartments and dump their inventory/set out stuff into storage, but then people would have to redecorate it all, even people that don't mind the size, and there would probably be some issues porting it all.

3: This is probably also a server limitation, but if they stopped adding new wards, they could potentially use that space this way. Though it may be a different limiting system. I remember them saying they put the Dwarven Tribal quests in Lakeland because Kholusia was reaching the limit of items and NPCs that could be placed in a single zone, only to run up close to that limit when they put the Dwarves in Lakeland. So there may be something like that that's a more strict limit than we realize. So this would largely depend on that.

4: Runs a similar problem to 2 in the transition stuff and possibly with 3 in the server stuff. You might also have the issue that a larger room would look empty if they couldn't increase the item allowance.

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I do agree Apartments are a great idea and honestly one of the better ones they had to the housing crisis, they just need to leverage them a bit more.

My bigger thing is not being able to log/zone out and in Apartments or Houses. I'm sure there's a technical thing with that, but I can with my Inn room. /shrug

[Deveryn]

I do agree Apartments are a great idea and honestly one of the better ones they had to the housing crisis, they just need to leverage them a bit more.

Leverage them more than having them also exist in FC houses? I think folks overlook that extra capacity that exists in every one of those houses.

My bigger thing is not being able to log/zone out and in Apartments or Houses. I'm sure there's a technical thing with that, but I can with my Inn room. /shrug

It's easier to load up the simpler more static area than one so heavily customized with personal storage.

[Packetdancer]

1. Add an "outdoor" porch:
This to me is possibly the biggest feature that could help players feel they're not missing out on not owning a home, but also not taking away from those that do. A small porch / outdoor area where people can decorate with outdoor furnishing would add more value to the seasonal events and foster good will with players. It wouldn't be as big as the small house yard, but it would at least give players an option.

What I've hypothesized before is a rooftop garden; each apartment could have a private rooftop garden, with space for one crop plot (for crossbreeding seeds) and to put down some outdoor decorations. You don't need to worry about trying to add a 'porch' to the apartment instance itself (and thus an inside/outside duality that the housing system as it stands is not designed for), but rather when you clicked the 'exit' door of an apartment, it would give you the option to leave the apartment (returning to the lobby) or go to the rooftop garden for that apartment.

It does run the risk that you increase housing server load slightly; hypothetically, someone could be in the apartment and a friend of theirs could be in the garden at the same time, costing two little 'small housing' instances rather than one. But it feels like a very small risk overall, resource/load-wise.

[Packetdancer]

My bigger thing is not being able to log/zone out and in Apartments or Houses. I'm sure there's a technical thing with that, but I can with my Inn room. /shrug

You are correct on "I'm sure there's a technical thing with that". Namely, the inn room (or Grand Company squadron barracks) seems so far as I can tell to only exist on your client, not on the server; this is why no one can come into your inn room with you, or visit your barracks. It's also why there can be an infinite number of inn rooms or barracks in use without any issue; they don't, strictly speaking, exist from the standpoint of the server.

Housing interiors are dynamically instanced, and the 'door' acts as a queuing system. If you're the only person in the house, when you teleport out (or enter a duty queue, or log out), the house—as an instanced zone—ceases to exist, thus there's nowhere to return you to when you go back.

Worse, if you teleported into your house interior on teleporting, but you actually wanted to get to the yard, it would require spinning up an interior instance, loading all the customization data, loading you into the zone... only to have you click on the door and exit immediately to get to your yard. Conversely, the exterior is shared by everyone; that instance is almost certainly already there to drop you into, and if you did need the interior of the house, you can walk up to the door to go in.

They did kind of do a workaround for this for Island Sanctuary; if you watch carefully, upon leaving a duty and being dropped back into your Island Sanctuary, it actually loads you into Moraby Bay first, then basically seems to functionally "use the NPC" to get you back to your island (and restore your location in doing so). But that works because so far as I know you can only be returned to your own island sanctuary, not a friend's; it doesn't need to think about "you were in this spot in the house at this plot on this ward" like it would with housing and then (functionally) teleport you to the door and use the door and then move you where you were. Instead, it can just be a "I was on my Island Sanctuary, [yes/no]" flag.

[Packetdancer]

Warframe actually has the coolest fucking stuff ever. I'm gonna be totally honest, I don't think FFXIV will ever compare to it when it comes to what you can make in it with the decorations.

I must reluctantly agree with this. It actually irritates me on some level how good Warframe's housing system is.

I am currently constructing an arboretum in my clan dojo. I used an Inspiration Hall, then built out a floor up higher, at a level even with the base of the windows (letting you look out and see the lovely space skybox). That 'upper floor' has been landscaped with grass and stone, and trees and so on. I've also built a cliff between two of the main windows, with a waterfall down into a pond. Some lovely little meditation areas, and one of the ceremonial bells (because, I mean, c'mon... bell). I then also built a steep cliff down towards the main entry door, and a winding stone pathway a lot like the one you ascend to talk to Teshin in the Conclave room of the relays.

And this is without getting into the fact that the dojo is a space station I literally am snapping together like Legos, putting down as many rooms as I want wherever I want, as long as they make (some) degree of spatial sense. (Somehow I get left to do the decorating/building in every game we play anyway, so, y'know... everyone else took a break to play Destiny 2, time for me to knock down things and renovate our dojo while they're gone!)

I have trouble thinking of many MMOs, period, that can equal that.

Hence why—as I said—I am sometimes annoyed that a looter shooter is one of the most impressive high-water marks for a well-designed housing system that I've seen, and an excellent example of how you can do really impressive instanced housing; when you no longer have to fit things in any sort of shared world—as with clan dojos—you can allow people to completely customize the floor plan.

But I really, really doubt that the FFXIV servers are architected in an appropriate manner to handle it. (Especially as, let's be honest, Warframe's dojos have their own problems, in terms of certain bits of server performance and the weird interactions they have with the party system.)

[Avoidy]

Doubled furniture caps across the board would make a lot of people really happy.

I agree. Would love more done with apartments.
The best thing about them is I don't need to be forced to sub to still have it.

A cynical part of me thinks this is why SE has gone out of their way to not address apartments in years. I've been watching their live letters for any sign of an apartment upgrade, but nothing. And recent event rewards have skewed towards outdoor furniture only, which apartments obviously cannot use. Case in point: the christmas event gave a holiday tree... that can only be used in a front yard, which apartments obviously lack. Bravo, brilliant job SE.

[ICountFrom0]

They did kind of do a workaround for this for Island Sanctuary; if you watch carefully, upon leaving a duty and being dropped back into your Island Sanctuary, it actually loads you into Moraby Bay first, then basically seems to functionally "use the NPC" to get you back to your island (and restore your location in doing so). But that works because so far as I know you can only be returned to your own island sanctuary, not a friend's; it doesn't need to think about "you were in this spot in the house at this plot on this ward" like it would with housing and then (functionally) teleport you to the door and use the door and then move you where you were. Instead, it can just be a "I was on my Island Sanctuary, [yes/no]" flag.

You can see the double zone by having something that gives you a message every time you zone up, like trying to enter a full channel.

[LittleArrow]

Thanks for all the suggestions! I really hope the SE dev team is reading this, bc there are some great ideas here (even the ones contradicting mine!).

I just wanted to clarify, when I said "outdoor porch," I meant a small instanced outdoor yard that you would have to zone into just like the houses. It would be like expanding the porch in shadowbringers with an instanced door you'd have to go out for. The outdoor area could be static scenery and the porch could be a wide rectangle area with grass (like half of the yard for the small house).

Also, I think someone posted it's not realistic for apartments to have multiple floors. This is absolutely a real life thing. There are MANY very expensive penthouses that are literally mansion like spaces at the top of high-rise apartment buildings in cities. It's crazy @.@;

I still believe just the porch alone would help alleviate the incredible disparity between those who have houses and don't with outdoor furnishing. There's a literal entire furnishing section that is completely useless for people. An instanced outdoor porch would completely fix that. Yes, there should be more housing wards, but there can be a great compromise that I think everyone would enjoy ^^