Alternative solving the housing crysis: Sanctuary AND wards

[Solilunaris]

Looks like we won’t see the system fixed for a long time so might as well search for new solutions. The easiest one (baffling that they didn’t do it already) is to keep housing as it is and give a instances player house in island sanctuary. Everyone wins: all players have a private house and those who want to play with the ward system and have neighborhoods can have it and stay with the 45 days autodemo and stuff. I can’t see why we can’t have both as putting a player house in island sanctuary seems the easiest thing.

[Shistar]

We've rehashed this idea a few times already, but the point is that you're putting ward people at a disadvantage because their house would be demolished if they don't enter it every 45 days while yours wouldn't (unless you want autodemolition in your island...) so it'd be unfair. No one would want to live in the wards because you risk losing your investment.


So far, some of us can somewhat agree on a hybrid system that places your house in your private island when first obtained/not in use and you can choose to keep it in that private spot as its own instance or move it to the wards at any time. If 45 days pass in which you don't use your ward house, it gets placed back in the island.


But there's still things to debate about it, like people who do not want to live in a tropical area, the lack of customization of the island, the issues that could crop up from this system...

[Kytrin]

My understanding is that the way they designed Island Sanctuary they genuinely CAN'T change it to allow housing without a complete overhaul, so the chances of that are unlikely. There's nothing to say they can't implement a NEW system, however.

I would propose instanced housing within the city-states themselves. Maybe somewhere near the various market districts for convenience to market boards. To get to one, you would talk to an NPC or a door similar to how you do apartments now. Your own would give you the option to go to your house, and to visit a friend or do a little sightseeing I'm sure we could arrange some kind of system to search for specific houses/names rather than flipping through endless tabs.

The instanced area would, by default, be themed on the city-state you purchased from, but there could be all manner of customization available. Perhaps you can change themes to other city-states (or even custom themes similar to housing skins) if you wanted to imagine an easter oasis in the desert for example. Or maybe you could specify if you wanted an urban style house where you have the equivalent of a penthouse suite with a rooftop garden rather than a traditional house and yard. The space itself would be roomy enough to hold the equivalent of up to a large house depending on how much you want to invest into it, and it would be easy enough to arrange it with a gorgeous view of whichever city-state you selected that shows NPC residents walking around doing their thing (I vaguely recall them mentioning once that it would be very hard to set up real-time views for instanced houses because of players, but I doubt anyone would complain too much about a view with NPCs moving around...).

You could even set the thing up with various amenities like purchasing a pool to swim in or a seasonal theme (snow, autumn leaves, etc.) or have various styles of floor-plans. There would be space for gardening and outdoor furnishings. Basically whatever we can imagine could be done. It would have all the same perks as a house without the wards or neighborhoods.

As for auto-demolition... I would propose instead that they expand ALL auto-demo timers to six months or even a year and apply them equally to everything, including apartments. Six months or a year would give a lot more flexibility for those times when life happens without completely removing the timer and thus making CPU-kun cry brokenly in a corner over all the information it needed to process. I would even suggest a way to, in-game, arrange for a hiatus if you know you're going to be gone for an extended period of time for any reason. It could put your data in a separate list that doesn't get loaded until either your hiatus period runs out and the house is demolished or you log back in and enter your house.

That's my two cents...

[Shistar]

Interesting ideas, Kytrin, I like many of these!

It would have all the same perks as a house without the wards or neighborhoods.

What worries me is that there is a clear "hierarchy" in the housing system, as in smalls are better than apartments, (offers a higher number of amenities/amenities that apartments can't provide), mediums better than smalls, larges better than mediums. If you popped your idea right in, where would it sit? What place does it have in the game, besides our dream version of housing? What do we do with the remaining housing, and everyone living there?
Because right now it sounds better than a large but without the amount of effort needed to win one, considering they're limited. The hierarchy will soon be weakened to apartment >>>>>> ANY plot with some limitations (garden, location, placement) due TARDIS housing, but it doesn't remove it entirely.
Either we're considering your idea costs exhorbitants amounts of gil, prevents you from having a ward plot, or something has to give. So here are my extra two cents!

I would propose instanced housing within the city-states themselves. Maybe somewhere near the various market districts for convenience to market boards. To get to one, you would talk to an NPC or a door similar to how you do apartments now. Your own would give you the option to go to your house, and to visit a friend or do a little sightseeing I'm sure we could arrange some kind of system to search for specific houses/names rather than flipping through endless tabs.

Brilliant. Maybe an unused area a small walk away would be even better, with the intent of encouraging players to walk around town and see/get seen by others, thus encouraging this sense of community in a way? After all, isn't why many players sit in Limsa, watching people go by?

The instanced area would, by default, be themed on the city-state you purchased from, but there could be all manner of customization available. Perhaps you can change themes to other city-states (or even custom themes similar to housing skins) if you wanted to imagine an easter oasis in the desert for example. Or maybe you could specify if you wanted an urban style house where you have the equivalent of a penthouse suite with a rooftop garden rather than a traditional house and yard.

You could even set the thing up with various amenities like purchasing a pool to swim in or a seasonal theme (snow, autumn leaves, etc.) or have various styles of floor-plans. There would be space for gardening and outdoor furnishings. Basically whatever we can imagine could be done.

You almost had me there, but you lost me at the yard. I don't think you should have a yard unless you live in a plot, since you already have your Island Sanctuary to do outdoor decoration in. Although gardening may not be as lucrative as it used to be, by allowing a yard you either have to block them out from plot gardening or think of something else to not leave ward plots in the dust.

As for everything else, yes, 100%! Provided plots can get their own version of this, apartments too. Especially apartments, that currently can't even change their interior style like plots can't. I find it only fair, honestly.

The space itself would be roomy enough to hold the equivalent of up to a large house depending on how much you want to invest into it, [...]

So, we're assuming this prevents you from buying a ward plot? What if I want to move to a ward after buying your idea? Do I have to demolish, does my interior get transferred...? Can we go back to the original after being in a ward, or did I lose my spot now and would have to re-invest in the original idea if I wanna move out of the ward? Or can I then hog a house in a ward and also have another large in my pocket dimension by the markets? In what position does this leave the original apartments? Don't get me wrong, I like the idea, but something isn't adding up.

[...] and it would be easy enough to arrange it with a gorgeous view of whichever city-state you selected that shows NPC residents walking around doing their thing (I vaguely recall them mentioning once that it would be very hard to set up real-time views for instanced houses because of players, but I doubt anyone would complain too much about a view with NPCs moving around...).

I would love this. Even better if, affected by the day and night cycle, there's different kinds of NPCs going about their lives. This would be an insane draw for apartments specifically.

As for auto-demolition... I would propose instead that they expand ALL auto-demo timers to six months or even a year and apply them equally to everything, including apartments. Six months or a year would give a lot more flexibility for those times when life happens without completely removing the timer and thus making CPU-kun cry brokenly in a corner over all the information it needed to process. I would even suggest a way to, in-game, arrange for a hiatus if you know you're going to be gone for an extended period of time for any reason. [...]

I have to disagree on the autodemolition, mainly for one reason: 6 months to a year is an extremely long time. While it would benefit those who already have a home, what of those waiting for a plot to be vacant? How long do you expect them to wait? Even if they can get our idea of housing in the meantime, do you really expect them to wait for at least 6 months to have the opportunity to move to a ward if they wished? People would start tweaking.

However, I really like the hiatus idea, but there should be a draw-back of some sort, like having you on a shorter leash for a time to prove you're not just arranging hiatus after hiatus to keep your house forever. Because we all know people would do that and unsub for extended periods of time while blocking active players from engaging with the content. We already know how this went, just look at old threads before autodemolition was a thing.
Here's my ideas:

• After a hiatus period, the feature goes on cooldown for either a fixed amount of time or however long your hiatus was when it was requested. If you came back early, the CD will apply for the original amount of time to prevent abuse.
• A hiatus should have a maximum amount of time equal to a patch cycle at most. I believe this is plenty of time for most situations and prevents houses being frozen in time for extended periods of time, and most people would typically return every patch, so it is not as bad as it sounds like at first.

[...] It could put your data in a separate list that doesn't get loaded until either your hiatus period runs out and the house is demolished or you log back in and enter your house.

Would this prevent people from visiting you? If you went on hiatus but your house was open for visiting originally, I assume you mean it would be taken off the list of houses available to visit by others, including your tenants? I am assuming here that none of this applies to FC housing, because otherwise it would lead to abuse like placing the house in stasis and preventing members from leaving because they can't empty out their rooms.
I understand the space of this list is not infinite and gets regularly cleaned out as people's hiatuses run out, but game devs have to consider extreme possibilites like, say, the majority of players going on hiatus at once. This is not necessarily our business to worry about, I know, but I like to consider these things when talking about ideas to see if they would even be possible to begin with. If CPU-kun is already getting bloodshot eyes as it was said, how would it be able to handle an infinite amount of houses, suddenly all going on hiatus or worse, coming back from one all at once?

[JohncarterIx]

do ehst wow did

[Kytrin]

Oh wow... you've given me a lot to think about! In my defense, I wrote up that idea at 2am this morning when my insomnia was being rude, so I definitely didn't think out all the details lol! I'll try to go through all of this point by point and see if we can flesh this out any better!

What worries me is that there is a clear "hierarchy" in the housing system, as in smalls are better than apartments, (offers a higher number of amenities/amenities that apartments can't provide), mediums better than smalls, larges better than mediums. If you popped your idea right in, where would it sit? What place does it have in the game, besides our dream version of housing? What do we do with the remaining housing, and everyone living there?

Because right now it sounds better than a large but without the amount of effort needed to win one, considering they're limited. The hierarchy will soon be weakened to apartment >>>>>> ANY plot with some limitations (garden, location, placement) due TARDIS housing, but it doesn't remove it entirely.

Either we're considering your idea costs exhorbitants amounts of gil, prevents you from having a ward plot, or something has to give.

I had not considered the housing hierarchy at all honestly. My general idea was that a player could build the plot from the ground up so like maybe you start out with something really basic like the equivalent of an apartment and invest more to upgrade it (assuming you don't just dive right in and buy all the things at once), but I never thought about it in that context.

I think how we equalize things between the townhomes and the wards (and where they fall in the hierarchy) would depend on exactly how the townhomes end up working. If they're houses that exist outside of wards, then yeah they should be subject to the demolition timer the same as ward houses, but also get at least most of the perks OF a house. If they're apartments, then they should be exempt from auto-demolition but also not as good as the ward houses and sit somewhere in the middle of that hierarchy.

Brilliant. Maybe an unused area a small walk away would be even better, with the intent of encouraging players to walk around town and see/get seen by others, thus encouraging this sense of community in a way? After all, isn't why many players sit in Limsa, watching people go by?

Thank you! I'm glad you liked that idea!

You almost had me there, but you lost me at the yard. I don't think you should have a yard unless you live in a plot, since you already have your Island Sanctuary to do outdoor decoration in. Although gardening may not be as lucrative as it used to be, by allowing a yard you either have to block them out from plot gardening or think of something else to not leave ward plots in the dust.

As for everything else, yes, 100%! Provided plots can get their own version of this, apartments too. Especially apartments, that currently can't even change their interior style like plots can't. I find it only fair, honestly.

I respectfully disagree. Townhomes, condos, and especially penthouse suites can and do have outdoor space in the form of balconies, terraces, patios (if you're on the ground floor), etc. The amount of space you have depends entirely on how much you're willing to shell out for it, but it's still there. Now, that said, the limitations on that space depends entirely on if you view townhomes as houses or apartments. If it's basically a house without the ward/ward view/etc. then yeah, they should have the ability to garden the same as any other house depending on their size. If they're apartments, then they should be subject to whatever limitations you have on apartments.

(The badly needed apartment overhaul is an entirely different subject lol)

Regardless, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a place to sit outside, plant a few trees and flowers to your taste, and enjoy that lovely view you admired so much above.

So, we're assuming this prevents you from buying a ward plot? What if I want to move to a ward after buying your idea? Do I have to demolish, does my interior get transferred...? Can we go back to the original after being in a ward, or did I lose my spot now and would have to re-invest in the original idea if I wanna move out of the ward? Or can I then hog a house in a ward and also have another large in my pocket dimension by the markets? In what position does this leave the original apartments? Don't get me wrong, I like the idea, but something isn't adding up.

Lol no assumptions here! I just hadn't thought of those logistics earlier. Again, I think this depends entirely on if a townhouse is considered a HOUSE or an apartment. If it's a house, then yeah, you can transfer between townhouses and wards, and back, the same as someone transferring from a small to a medium or large could and you absolutely cannot have both. If it's an apartment, then you still have to buy a ward house the normal way and you could have both the same way we can have a house and an apartment now. The difference is where we choose to have the apartment.

I would love this. Even better if, affected by the day and night cycle, there's different kinds of NPCs going about their lives. This would be an insane draw for apartments specifically.

It would! And I love the idea of the day/night cycle affecting what you see! That's great! We might could even go a little crazy and have seasonal versions for events like Starlight or All Saints.

I have to disagree on the autodemolition, mainly for one reason: 6 months to a year is an extremely long time. While it would benefit those who already have a home, what of those waiting for a plot to be vacant? How long do you expect them to wait? Even if they can get our idea of housing in the meantime, do you really expect them to wait for at least 6 months to have the opportunity to move to a ward if they wished? People would start tweaking.

However, I really like the hiatus idea, but there should be a draw-back of some sort, like having you on a shorter leash for a time to prove you're not just arranging hiatus after hiatus to keep your house forever. Because we all know people would do that and unsub for extended periods of time while blocking active players from engaging with the content. We already know how this went, just look at old threads before autodemolition was a thing.
Here's my ideas:

• After a hiatus period, the feature goes on cooldown for either a fixed amount of time or however long your hiatus was when it was requested. If you came back early, the CD will apply for the original amount of time to prevent abuse.
• A hiatus should have a maximum amount of time equal to a patch cycle at most. I believe this is plenty of time for most situations and prevents houses being frozen in time for extended periods of time, and most people would typically return every patch, so it is not as bad as it sounds like at first.

I put auto-demo at that long because I've seen one too many horror stories about people getting the short end because life events are a thing that happen and 45 days is REALLY short. I'll gladly compromise on a patch cycle though. That's reasonable for both normal demolition and hiatus. And you're right, most people are coming back for patches so they'll be logging in and can reset the timer.

You've also got a point about people going on hiatus indefinitely, so what about you can go on hiatus for the equivalent of one patch cycle (thus giving you both the normal demo cycle and a second cycle to take a break or whatever) every four cycles? So basically, you can take 8 months off (normal and hiatus) but you can't go on hiatus AGAIN for another 8 months.

Would this prevent people from visiting you? If you went on hiatus but your house was open for visiting originally, I assume you mean it would be taken off the list of houses available to visit by others, including your tenants? I am assuming here that none of this applies to FC housing, because otherwise it would lead to abuse like placing the house in stasis and preventing members from leaving because they can't empty out their rooms.
I understand the space of this list is not infinite and gets regularly cleaned out as people's hiatuses run out, but game devs have to consider extreme possibilites like, say, the majority of players going on hiatus at once. This is not necessarily our business to worry about, I know, but I like to consider these things when talking about ideas to see if they would even be possible to begin with. If CPU-kun is already getting bloodshot eyes as it was said, how would it be able to handle an infinite amount of houses, suddenly all going on hiatus or worse, coming back from one all at once?

Hm... I hadn't thought about people visiting you. The idea of a separate list was a thought to help reduce server load, but that's a good point. I'm not sure how best to work that. That's a problem someone with FAR more network architecture knowledge than I have would need to poke at.

That's definitely a NO on FCs abusing the system to force people to stay though. Whatever the answer, we don't want that.

[Shistar]

Oh wow... you've given me a lot to think about! In my defense, I wrote up that idea at 2am this morning when my insomnia was being rude, so I definitely didn't think out all the details lol! I'll try to go through all of this point by point and see if we can flesh this out any better!

Haha, no worries! I'm looking forward to fleshing out your idea, it's a cool one and I'm sure we can get a lot of juice out of it.

[Kytrin]

Haha, no worries! I'm looking forward to fleshing out your idea, it's a cool one and I'm sure we can get a lot of juice out of it.

Thank you!

Maybe if we can flesh out a workable enough system, Square will adopt it!

[Anvaire]

Personally, i think they should just leave the current housing as is. But give a new system for instanced housing one with much more customisation options. A realm in a teapot if you were. Tie some rewards to it and you have instanced housing as a brand new content type.

[Shistar]

I think how we equalize things between the townhomes and the wards (and where they fall in the hierarchy) would depend on exactly how the townhomes end up working. If they're houses that exist outside of wards, then yeah they should be subject to the demolition timer the same as ward houses, but also get at least most of the perks OF a house. If they're apartments, then they should be exempt from auto-demolition but also not as good as the ward houses and sit somewhere in the middle of that hierarchy.

Lol no assumptions here! I just hadn't thought of those logistics earlier. Again, I think this depends entirely on if a townhouse is considered a HOUSE or an apartment. If it's a house, then yeah, you can transfer between townhouses and wards, and back, the same as someone transferring from a small to a medium or large could and you absolutely cannot have both. If it's an apartment, then you still have to buy a ward house the normal way and you could have both the same way we can have a house and an apartment now. The difference is where we choose to have the apartment.

I think it makes sense to make it be a housing interior that can be moved around, which is more or less what I mentioned in one of the first messages of this thread as something that's been discussed before. In that sense, I love the idea!! This basically fixes the main conundrum we were having in previous conversations about not everyone wanting to live in a tropical island in the middle of nowhere. In that sense, I believe having it occupy the same "slot" as a plot house would be best, especially considering townhouses sound like a premium version of an apartment in the town, but not as fancy as say, a mansion with its garden. Which leads me into...

I respectfully disagree. Townhomes, condos, and especially penthouse suites can and do have outdoor space in the form of balconies, terraces, patios (if you're on the ground floor), etc. The amount of space you have depends entirely on how much you're willing to shell out for it, but it's still there. Now, that said, the limitations on that space depends entirely on if you view townhomes as houses or apartments. If it's basically a house without the ward/ward view/etc. then yeah, they should have the ability to garden the same as any other house depending on their size. If they're apartments, then they should be subject to whatever limitations you have on apartments.

(The badly needed apartment overhaul is an entirely different subject lol)

Regardless, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a place to sit outside, plant a few trees and flowers to your taste, and enjoy that lovely view you admired so much above.

No, you're absolutely right, I was so into talking about this hierarchy stuff that I failed to mention I fully agree that it's not an unreasonable ask and that it sounds great! Buuuut here's my next batch of questions: When you transfer to a ward plot, does this mean you keep this interior garden portion despite also obtaining an outdoor garden, or does it poof out of existence? If it isn't gone, would ward houses be able to upgrade their interiors with yard space, or would they be forced to invest in a townhouse first, then move it over to a ward plot?

My solution is quite simple: Give these interior yards, or maybe more accurately for my idea, Balconies to apartments instead! This will make them more desirable, with unique layouts that townhouses/plot houses can't have because they already got their outdoors + gardening. I would say, to keep things fair, to not allow gardening in your balcony (due to having downstairs neighbors and such...) but the amount of flowerpots you can place scales up with how fancy your place gets. You can place outdoor furnishings in this balcony normally, but now we're reaching our next problem: How in the world would the game understand apartment vs. balcony space? As we know, indoor and outdoor furnishings are clearly labeled and stored separately... maybe we need a third category for balconies? I would imagine they wouldn't let us plant a whole tree in your balcony, so some things might not make the cut (but I imagine most things should)

If we're seriously insistent about having it for townhouses/ward plots, I think a terrace would be the most appropriate. But considering you'd be able to move this place between the city and the housing district, maybe the view would change based on we're you're currently settled? Tons of work for sure, but I can't resist a beautiful view... and I already imagine our floated items glitching into our terrace floors if it's directly above our top floor lol

It would! And I love the idea of the day/night cycle affecting what you see! That's great! We might could even go a little crazy and have seasonal versions for events like Starlight or All Saints.

ABSOLUTELY. If we can go insane, we can even consider weather changes! NPCs with umbrellas! (our compass always marks sunny weather while inside a house regardless of the outside weather, so they'd need to apply the same weather table for housing for this to work, I assume? This would likely also affect light levels inside the house, making for some seriously cozy rainy evenings...)

I put auto-demo at that long because I've seen one too many horror stories about people getting the short end because life events are a thing that happen and 45 days is REALLY short. I'll gladly compromise on a patch cycle though. That's reasonable for both normal demolition and hiatus. And you're right, most people are coming back for patches so they'll be logging in and can reset the timer.

You've also got a point about people going on hiatus indefinitely, so what about you can go on hiatus for the equivalent of one patch cycle (thus giving you both the normal demo cycle and a second cycle to take a break or whatever) every four cycles? So basically, you can take 8 months off (normal and hiatus) but you can't go on hiatus AGAIN for another 8 months.

That's understandable. There's a very difficult balance in making a feature useful for those who need this accesibility yet hard to abuse for those who don't...
My idea intended to stop people from going on such long breaks as 8 months. It would be 1 patch hiatus, 1 patch you have to be there and it alternates. I think longer hiatuses could potentially be arranged, but to prevent abuse they'd have to appoint a GM to it and of course, to keep track of it since it's a special exception.

Unless it is my turn to be sleepy and I am misunderstanding?

Hm... I hadn't thought about people visiting you. The idea of a separate list was a thought to help reduce server load, but that's a good point. I'm not sure how best to work that. That's a problem someone with FAR more network architecture knowledge than I have would need to poke at.

That's definitely a NO on FCs abusing the system to force people to stay though. Whatever the answer, we don't want that.

I think they could have this system only affect personal housing to begin with. FCs have a much easier time maintaining their house because every single member contributes to resetting the timer, but this is not the case for tenants, and if we pair it with the idea of separating the workshop from the housing ward competition should be more even between people moving in and out of wards and FCs who actually want a house for the house itself and not the workshop occupying spots. This would also be more in line with YoshiP's idea of wards being this communal space for multiple active FCs to mingle + some personal owners who have also proven they use/care about their housing enough to maintain a ward plot.