How To Frustrate Your Player Base 101

[Arzalis]

I don't think anyone is saying it's an easy fix.

I will point out they've had literally almost a decade to fix it and refuse to, though.

They added housing relatively quickly, but every decision after that has done nothing but entrench the current system instead of actually fixing anything. It's just a series of really poor decisions combined with SE's typical stubbornness on things imo.

[Deveryn]

I don't think anyone is saying it's an easy fix.

I will point out they've had literally almost a decade to fix it and refuse to, though.

They added housing relatively quickly, but every decision after that has done nothing but entrench the current system instead of actually fixing anything. It's just a series of really poor decisions on SE's part imo.

It was really just that initial decision of having wards. They've been stuck since then and trying to alleviate it as best they can. The way everything is separated with outdoor and indoor just looks like a mess to correct.

[Packetdancer]

I will point out they've had literally almost a decade to fix it and refuse to, though.

In my experience, it's rarely "refuse" and more "this is a massive change and we cannot get upper management / the publisher / whatever to actually sign off on taking the amount of time it will take to do this."

(And as I've pointed out elsewhere... we like to think that the dev and the publisher are the same, but they're not. CBU3 and SQEX itself are separate entities, like Bioware and EA or Naughty Dog and Sony. SQEX just has not had their individual development houses do separate branding until very recently -- witness Forspoken's "Luminous Productions" or how FFXVI has a CBU3 logo associated with the trailers -- so it's easy to forget that they aren't actually the same.)

The FFXIV servers were, by all accounts, written extremely hastily during the legendarily-rushed development for ARR; I suspect we are still paying off a lot of technical debt to this day as a result, and I certainly don't think there was a lot of future-proofing for "hey, maybe someday we'll want something other than static wards" or whatnot.

And in my experience technical debt that isn't directly causing a live service game to stop functioning is very hard to get approval to work on fixing. So, I'd love to see them fix this... but I suspect the dev team would also love to see improvements to the servers that could allow those sort of changes. I'm just not sure that they're in a spot that they get to make that choice, based on my own experiences.

In a perfect world, yeah, fully instanced housing would be the ideal. But the perfect is the enemy of the good, and while I'll continue to hope they can someday pull off the revamping of things necessary to support something like that properly, I admit I'll personally also keep hoping for interim solutions that make the current trash fire of a housing situation be -- as I've put it before -- 'uncomfortably hot bonfire' level trash-fire, as opposed to 'raging cinematic inferno' level.

Because even if they someday get approval to make the necessary changes -- heck, even if they have already gotten said approval and begun quietly making the changes -- those changes likely won't be fast (because if you get to rearchitect things you absolutely take the opportunity to do it right and try to future-proof things better). And I feel like there's probably room for improvement in the meantime.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯