Unable to log in to prevent house demolition due to real world issues

[Stormpeaks]

It's absolutely to force people to stay subbed. If you don't pay your rent IRL you get evicted as well. Apartments (and now islands for outdoor furnishings), are the better choice for someone who does not plan to stay subbed perpetually.

Also remember that FC houses only require at least one member to walk in every 45 days; if they get demolished it means that every member of that FC has stopped playing.

Regarding the "manual labor" comment for new housing wards: It's not that. It that it takes up server resources.

Because of their blasted neighborhood ward design, all neighborhoods must exist in the live RAM of the world server so that people can hop into it in real time and see everyone else's houses in real time. Even the interior of your houses are technically one giant zone within the perpetual neighborhood space (as we found out with the log out workaround where people would initiate crafting inside their houses to avoid getting kicked out during 5.0 launch, and thus block anyone else from entering the interior of the housing zone because the zone was full!)

This means that every new ward added increases the live world server overhead. They've managed some pretty neat optimization tricks over the years to pack as many people onto each server as possible, but there is still a finite amount of storage space in RAM on a server, with most lower end standard configurations topping out at 128 GB of live RAM and the highest end of corporate servers reaching 12TB. I do not think that SE is using the latter kind of server, but I would suspect their world server data still isn't going much beyond 1TB per world, with another 1 TB per instance server. Maybe it's 128GB on the lobby server since that server doesn't have any persistent live data to deal with, just the lobby queues.

Apartments and FC rooms, on the other hand, are purely on demand instances, like duties are. They are stored as data and recreated in real time whenever someone chooses to enter them. Its the same with the Island Sanctuaries. It's a much better system since the location is only added to the instance (and thus the server RAM) when someone chooses to initiate it.

tldr

"poor square enix they are such a small indie company they cant afford proper servers"

also lol @ comparing this to IRL rent, like really ? Lmao

[Catwho]

tldr

"poor square enix they are such a small indie company they cant afford proper servers"

Wasn't a matter of just money, it was a matter of actual availability in 2022. They ordered new servers for Endwalker launch and didn't get them delivered until two years later.

also lol @ comparing this to IRL rent, like really ? Lmao

Yeah, actually. They're allowed to use whatever dirty tricks they can to get you to stay subbed, and housing demolition being set at 45 days for a personal house is a pretty smart one from a corporate stand point. Server resources cost money.

It's better than FFXI 20 years ago, where the resources were so tight that they might actually archive your character after a year. Some people had to put in support tickets to retrieve their old characters.

[Voltyblast]

It's better than FFXI 20 years ago, where the resources were so tight that they might actually archive your character after a year. Some people had to put in support tickets to retrieve their old characters.

20 years ago the online scenario wasn't as developed as today either.

In this regard, FFXI was one of the most developed and kind of "new" in the sense it delivered a story (nowadays a lot of mmorpgs have a "main quest", even Wow does now) and tried to implement the job system in ways that maybe only few games ever did by the time (I think Runescape comes to mind as the closest? But I never played it so do correct me if I'm wrong). What I'm trying to say is that FFXI was allowed to be flawed, most other mmorpgs were either simple experiences or just smaller games, the bar was still pretty low by the time and games still experimented.

FFXIV on the other hand is from 2013, and we're now in the year 2023, we have certain standards by now and the game shouldn't be struggling online this much, especially when literally everything is online now, even single player games (can't even play some games without signing up some online BS). So no, they shouldn't be allowed to demolish and remove items from the player just because "the servers aren't powerful enough". I can go back to WoW or SWTOR and any other online game I own and the items I have purchased there are still there. Heck when Wildstar was still up, my house was still there after months of breaks!

It kinda reminds me of the whole "Epic vs Steam" debacle, where people would to defend Epic saying "Well even Steam started out poorly, so why can't Epic have a chance to improve" and the answer is obvious: there is a standard now, the bar is already set, and going below that won't do you any favors. You can go higher though but it's clearly not the case here.