WoW's player housing will have no FOMO and private housing wards

[Shougun]

I remember the Garrisons promised at Blizzcon. I cry over the Garrisons provided in Warlords of Draenor.

I have little confidence that the housing system will end up as good as players are expecting. I wasn't the only one to add a comment on the blog post expressing skepticism.

But at least WoW players should be able to say they have a house once the system is implemented and they won't have to change what server they're playing on to do it.


Except the ward system is the underlying problem and it was SE's decision to create it as it works. The things that players suggested were to address the built-in flaws the ward system has and that SE ignored.

No paying customer should be told they will need to wait 2-3 years for additional hardware to be added so they can get access to a game feature that other players already have.

So yes, in this case it's absolutely SE's fault. If they had planned ward design and expansion of hardware to hold the wards effectively in the first place there never would have been a need for demolition, timers, placard clicking, lotteries, etc.

I saw the notes on the garrison system that was never to be...... Damn lol. It had big dreams.

It is a little concerning given the garrison had similar grand visions that they are suggesting they have for houses. Hopefully they can deliver, would love to see FFXIV wake up and go "o shi--" and try to addres their own system.

Given WoW is making it so similar to ours (but potentially better), if they achieve it SE will have a lot of egg on their face. Which also means failing would be bad for both games ... Lol.

[Reimmi]

I can already taste the hysteria two or three years later when FF14 players all quit and become FF14 refugees in WoW LMAO

I just play both, myself
Tribalism is for losers

[Kahnha]

just make 120 extra wards and sub divs and it would clear the housing issue I don't understand why they have such a hard time doing this 140 people bidding on the only mansion available on the server in the worst area (Empyreum).

if you got a lotto system make the times shorter entry periods (3 days) / results (2 days) it can't be that hard... you're a multi million dollar company.....

[VoidsentStatus]

I sure wonder what game(s) they're referring

Every marketing point that sounds good is actually trash and has already failed in FFXIV beforehand.

"We’d much rather do a great job with a small number of zones than do a passable job on a large number (or come up with solutions that take the player out of the world into their own personal instance of a zone)"

1) contradiction: "one for Alliance and one for Horde, with more possible places to live in the future" and "Having many housing zones conflicts with the second pillar of designing a feature that is “Deeply Social.”" Taken together, this means, 'we might add something later, but not much. don't expect a lot of variety because of problems it creates'.

2) this is them directly saying they are against personal/private instances of housing.

"Deeply Social: its systems are designed to encourage interacting, playing, and progressing with friends, neighbors, guilds, and the wider community"

" If they’re only interested in coming and going once or twice a month, that’s great, too!"

Someone going to their house once a month makes a deeply social game? That wouldn't end up in mostly dead wards like what FFXIV already has? If you didn't want to be blatantly contradicting your own goals, maybe..you'd create a system to get rid of houses that weren't being used at all/for social purposes?? Like auto-demo?? You don't get the freedom to say you want to encourage social environments but give people the freedom to leave the game for however long they feel like it and still keep housing meant fundamentally by their own definition to promote the opposite. You can't have an army of houses abandoned for 6 months and say you're encouraging a social environment with housing.

"No exorbitant requirements or high purchase costs" Housing supply low, effective demand super high, and let bots run crazy on it. Not like people don't have armies of housing taken up by level 4 characters on FFXIV that people complained about for years.

"no lotteries"
Oh cool, we're back to FCFS where RMT house selling and house-reselling was rampant. There's no auto-demo to naturally free up available plots. With no auto-demo, there's no guaranteed time to check for available housing too right? Because we can't have an invisible timer on someone who self-demo's or we'd have 100 people sitting outside to insta-buy the house like the placard wars that tanked people's irl health.

" If you want a house, you can have a house."
You're throwing every single player with the smallest amount of resources into a small pool of regular, public houses. They're going to get bought in Balmung level congestion from everyone with the fastest PC's and movement abilities, and everyone else won't have anything else to purchase. Eligible to purchase a house, but functionally irrelevant because there's nothing available to buy.

[Batbrat]

ACK!!!!!!!!!!! Well, I guess that's it for FFXIV housing. A lot of you should consider moving over to WoW (and freeing up more houses in XIV in the process, thank you)

[genuine_stranger]

ACK!!!!!!!!!!! Well, I guess that's it for FFXIV housing. A lot of you should consider moving over to WoW (and freeing up more houses in XIV in the process, thank you)

Unironically, since my 4-month break, there are even fewer houses available on Zodiark now than before… Has the demolition timer been paused again?

Or did everyone decide to try out housing all of a sudden?

[brinn12]

This feels like them having the last laugh. FFXIV had a golden opportunity in late SHB, but it kept the same formula of releasing content that FFXIV veterans were complaining about. Most of the issues the game had are still present, such as the housing system, which has always failed to satisfy the majority of the playerbase. Other games are doing a much better job at listening to player complaints.

[Jeeqbit]

2) this is them directly saying they are against personal/private instances of housing.

I didn't interpret it as them being agaisnt it but I didn't read it for long.

Someone going to their house once a month makes a deeply social game? That wouldn't end up in mostly dead wards like what FFXIV already has?

Freedom and flexibility is fine. Some houses are ignored by their owners, while others are used all the time by an FC, so just being chill and letting players do what they want is good.

If you didn't want to be blatantly contradicting your own goals, maybe..you'd create a system to get rid of houses that weren't being used at all/for social purposes?? Like auto-demo??

If you've seen people quitting in this game, you will see that sometimes it's because they lost their decorated house. For some people, a house is what ties them to an MMORPG through thick and thin. So when they lose their house in FFXIV, sometimes they quit for good. Auto-demo is only good due to the limited amount of houses overall; if there was no limit, it would be a bad thing. If Blizzard won't have limited houses, then there's no point in demo.

Oh cool, we're back to FCFS where RMT house selling and house-reselling was rampant.

Again, RMT only happened because of the limited house availability. If everyone can get a house is defeats the whole reason for the RMT.

[VoidsentStatus]

.

"I didn't interpret it as them being agaisnt it but I didn't read it for long."

This first section's bolded bit: "Having many housing zones conflicts with the second pillar of designing a feature that is “Deeply Social.” In a world where players can live in many different zones, they become increasingly spread out and even with aggressive sharding, the chance of seeing other players, much less interacting with them, drops quickly."

Combined with: "We’d much rather do a great job with a small number of zones than do a passable job on a large number (or come up with solutions that take the player out of the world into their own personal instance of a zone)"
^
This sentence format is "We'd rather do x, than y or z." z being personal instances.

They want people seeing and interacting with each other naturally, so it's open world housing and not instanced.

Because of that, it necessitates limited housing. FFXIV and WoW both decided to go for that neighborhood, naturally meet and talk to other people goal, that come with the exact same problems. People wanted infinite, instanced housing for FFXIV but Yoshi P said no because he valued neighborhoods. Those were directly at odds with one another. WoW is taking the halfway approach of allowing groups of ppl to create instanced wards, but it doesn't mention that for individual players by themselves, which means, they deal with a housing system similar to FFXIV. For them not to have the same problems, they're going to have to renig on some of these promises or goals.

"If you've seen people quitting in this game, you will see that sometimes it's because they lost their decorated house."
They lost their decorate house because they never went inside or quit the game temporarily already. If you only played the game for a house, that you didn't step inside of 45 days, there's something else majorly missing in that argument. You didn't want to play the game at all at that point in time, but tried to keep the house in case that ever changed in the future.

But WoW is essentially running a gamble that there's enough instanced wards of FC's/Linkshells ppl (imagine Island Sanctuary but a housing ward) to where the normal, public wards for individuals aren't swarmed out like FFXIV. If they do get swarmed out, it's over. It's gonna be a bigger mess than FFXIV housing is and they're gonna have to add the same features.

[IndraSyngiwyb]

Amazing. Imagine a housing system that doesn't literally hold its player's subs hostage. Couldn't be Square.