Using housing from SWTOR as base for the housing system.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

If you're going to propose XIV takes another games housing system, you should describe the system in full since not everyone will have played the game you're referencing.

To another players point. Fully instanced housing has it's perks. But I've found in other games that have it, it doesn't get the same engagement or value put into it that wards do. I'd like to see SE take steps to open up plots by taking gil farm via subs out back and shooting it. And honestly I think a lot of the housing woes would die with it for quite some time, as many people have an excess of FC houses for that purpose. Private housing across many servers has excess supply. I just bought another house on chaos DC with no other bids. Plenty went through the lotto with zero bids and are still sitting there today. Even medium houses had only a couple bids each for the most part. I don't think we would see a housing pinch across most servers till the games population ticks back up significantly and the new worlds have empty wards sitting there ready for it.

Adding some more life into wards would be my preference. Not shoving housing away further out of the game world in instances and behind players inviting you to their homes as in other games. We see how little engagement island sanctuary got in terms of visitors. You can decorate there and make some really lovely islands, but nobody is visiting other islands much at all. An instanced based ward could be interesting, where you go into the ward and each plot's placard can let you select whose home to visit. So the ward itself is still shared amongst people and you can still roam and visit other people's homes seemlessly without needing invites. That could be interesting, I'd still rather see the changes I'd mentioned first since I really don't see the latter happening.

[Aidorouge]

If they're going to copy anyone's homework for housing, it should be WildStar's, which was more or less instanced housing and Island Sanctuary by default.

https://wildstar.fandom.com/wiki/Housing

You start off with simple designs and can build them up into more desirable designs with different features, the inner outer, walls, roofs, doors, windows, wallpapers and furniture can all be changed or added onto your home. Items in your home such as furniture are not restricted by physics, you can make chairs, tables, flower pots, shelves and everything else float.

You can scale items inside the house to be five times bigger or smaller, and have up to a plethora of items in your house.

Around your home is an area of land which you are able to build facilities on, these are called sockets. The things you build on top of them are called plugs. You can build Mine sites and farms which you can harvest resources from. Additionally you are able to create craft stations on your land. Your plugs will give you daily quests which you can complete for rewards.

Others players are able to visit your Housing plot if the Visitor Rules (Private, Neighbors Only, Roommates Only or Public) permit this. In addition rules can be set allowing players to harvest your gardens and resource nodes. If they do this you can choose to either have the materials send to you by mail, to share with the person who gathered the resources or to let that player have all the resources they gathered.

Houses can have expeditions; a type of mini expedition that you enter on your own or with your friends, which will scale accordingly. Housing Expeditions also have their own unique decor rewards which cannot be obtained elsewhere.
+++

They even had their own ward-like system, albeit player-made and maintained.

https://wildstar.fandom.com/wiki/Communities

Communities are mega Housing plots in which five actual player housing plots can be placed. In addition Communities have a shared area between the five plot which can be decorated as well by Community members who have the relevant permission.

The Community skyplot is a massive plot of land in which five actual character plots can be placed. Each plot is marked by distinct borders on the skyplot. It is however possible to build over the edges of the borders to some extend to create smooth transitions.

The owner of each plot is able to edit their own plot within the Community. With the relevant permission it also possible to edit the shared space between the plots which makes it possible to merge the individual plots and the Community area together as one.

It is possible to invite alt characters to a Community allowing players to fill up an entire Community with their own characters. Invites sent to an alt on the same account will automatically be accepted as long as the alt meets the requirements for joining a Community.

The Community itself has its own crate with 5000 storage capacity, up to 4000 decor from the crate can be placed in the shared area between the character plots. The player plots present on a Community retain their own decor limits (upgradeable by Store purchases) and vary from 500 inside and another 500 outside up to 2500 inside and another 2500 outside. In total the exterior decor count for a Community can be as high as 16,500 decor. The Community itself has no interior and as a result the amount of decor which can be placed in the interiors depends on what the players involved have unlocked as their own decor limits. Collectively the interior decor counts can, theoretically, be up to 12,500 decor. This brings the absolute maximum of possibly placeable decor for a Community to 29,000 decor.

Admittedly, WildStar's housing had lower decor limits before you upgraded (and off-hand I can't remember if this was a purchase made with in-game currency or real money as WildStar did have a F2P phase) and Communities were small in scale (20 members but only 5 member plots can be showcased at a time), but Square-Enix could decide to go higher if they wished and one would certainly hope they would use an in-game method of upgrading decor limits, in fact they already sort of plan to do that with the upcoming interior update.

[Hycinthus]

If they're going to copy anyone's homework for housing, it should be WildStar's, which was more or less instanced housing and Island Sanctuary by default.

Why not just use WoW as a base?

WoW's housing now already can do almost everything what Wildstar and SWTOR does, and it's also a good balance between community and private instance.

Including every item not limited to physics and scale.

[MayuAmakura]

Why not just use WoW as a base?

WoW's housing now already can do almost everything what Wildstar and SWTOR does, and it's also a good balance between community and private instance.

Including every item not limited to physics and scale.

"Please understand that our servers cannot take this as we struggle to display more large houses in districts so we had to make sure that they are on small number. Also understand that by following these changes, we would have to remove sub-mandatory thing from the housing. We cannot do that."

Yeah exactly the answer you'd get I'm pretty sure. They hardly even went with this housing update of increasing slots because "our servers just crash when we do". My bet is that they'll just try to increase slots by a bit, give ability to get large / medium inside but not outside ('cause servers crash lmao) and call it a day. Never again will housing updates come. I wouldn't be surprised if 7.5 comes and we see yet another: "sorry, we delayed housing again. It will be in 7.8 for sure!".

[Aidorouge]

Why not just use WoW as a base?

WoW's housing now already can do almost everything what Wildstar and SWTOR does, and it's also a good balance between community and private instance.

Including every item not limited to physics and scale.

I'm not too familiar with how WoW's housing works because I haven't gone looking it up, I'm only acquainted with WildStar/SWTOR/LOTRO and of the three I liked WildStar's the most.

If WoW's housing is already shaping up to be "WildStar+" then they're already on the right track and they're going to absolutely body FF14 when it pulls it off. The only concern I have is Blizzard's bad habit of abandoning content introduced in an expansion once the expansion is over. There was a time, for example, where they really hyped up Garrisons for Warlords (not housing, but "close enough" for some people), but the expansion wasn't even wrapped up when they announced they weren't going to do anything else with them and they were basically left behind on AU Draenor. (Or maybe they were torn down and removed? I can't remember exactly.)

[Arrius]

The only concern I have is Blizzard's bad habit of abandoning content introduced in an expansion once the expansion is over. There was a time, for example, where they really hyped up Garrisons for Warlords (not housing, but "close enough" for some people), but the expansion wasn't even wrapped up when they announced they weren't going to do anything else with them and they were basically left behind on AU Draenor. (Or maybe they were torn down and removed? I can't remember exactly.)

So far they are adding a new premium currency specifically for housing items and putting up Endeavors, which are themed seasonal 'tracks' that reward items specifically made for the theme, but you have to be active as a neighborhood community to unlock the items on the vendor.

They definitely see the value of housing as a good revenue angle, and play hard to drum up interest which seems to pay off for them.

[Aidorouge]

So far they are adding a new premium currency specifically for housing items and putting up Endeavors, which are themed seasonal 'tracks' that reward items specifically made for the theme, but you have to be active as a neighborhood community to unlock the items on the vendor.

They definitely see the value of housing as a good revenue angle, and play hard to drum up interest which seems to pay off for them.

Okay, I think I'm convinced they're in this for the long haul, lol.

FF14 about to get beat up and have its lunch money stolen.

[Jeeqbit]

Okay, I think I'm convinced they're in this for the long haul, lol.

FF14 about to get beat up and have its lunch money stolen.

It already has. Where do you think many of those 400,000 lost subscribers went? What do you think happened to a lot of those WoW refugees that didn't stick with the game long-term?

Not all of them chose WoW, but needless to say, things like the housing have won people over to it. They even took a shot at FFXIV on their blog, but it didn't reach the FFXIV team because Yoshi-P wasn't aware of WoW's housing until an interviewer brought it up.

Regarding your concern about them abandoning things once an expansion is over, they acknowledged that issue and moved away from the principle of always abandoning last expansion stuff, I believe. I don't play WoW but I watch their director talk sometimes just because they discuss having issues that I know FFXIV has also had.

Speaking of that, I watched the recent ESO stream (never played ESO) and they talked about having many issues that we also have in FFXIV. It's interesting the sheer crossover in problems that they've all had, such as item limits, inventory issues, homogenization, formulaic patches, etc. These MMOs have all been through these things at some point, or are going through them still, the complaints in these other MMOs are so familiar.

[Jojoya]

Why not just use WoW as a base?

WoW's housing now already can do almost everything what Wildstar and SWTOR does, and it's also a good balance between community and private instance.

Including every item not limited to physics and scale.

Depends on which aspects of WoW housing you want them to emulate. If you're only referring to acquiring a house and the controls for item placement/scaling, I'm on board. The rest of WoW's housing system is at best not an improvement compared to FFXIV and in some aspects is considerably worse. Far too many decor items are gated behind quests, achievements, and rep grinds from old expansions. Sure, you'll have a house but is it worth it when you're limited to decorating with a limited selection of vendor basics and the gold cost of those basics adds up quickly?

I disagree that WoW housing does anything for community. WoW Neighborhoods feel just as empty as FFXIV wards if not emptier because of the spacing between plots (I've got a house next to a friend and we usually can't see each other when we're both on the outside of our respective plots). You can't get into a Neighborhood unless you're in a party and the party leader has their house there, or you have a Battle.net friend that owns a house there. Endeavors do nothing to promote player interaction within housing since most are completed solo outside of the Neighborhoods, not in them.

Speaking of that, I watched the recent ESO stream (never played ESO) and they talked about having many issues that we also have in FFXIV. It's interesting the sheer crossover in problems that they've all had, such as item limits, inventory issues, homogenization, formulaic patches, etc. These MMOs have all been through these things at some point, or are going through them still, the complaints in these other MMOs are so familiar.

WoW housing also has those issues.

Here's an example - for exterior placement you're allowed a budget of 200 points. Each decor item has a value that's between 1 and 5 points (for now, they've hinted at items with higher point values being added later in Midnight). Trees are always 5 points, bushes can be 3 or 5, flowers are 1 or 3, benches are 3, tables are 3 or 5, fountains are 5, etc. The first day of early access, players were already complaining in Neighborhood chat that 200 is too low of a cap because they had barely placed anything before hitting it. Do the math and you see why. If you're using larger items that have a 5 point value to fill up the yard, that's only 40 items you can place. I did mess around in beta using mostly 1 point items with about a dozen 3 point items and got the yard filled up but it left the house looking like it was in an abandoned grassy lot in one design and a junkyard in another.

For interiors, you've got budgets for rooms that can be added in addition to item placement. Different sized rooms have different point values as well. The interior limits can be upgraded by ranking up the house through acquiring uncommon quality or better decor items for the first time and doing Endeavors but that's a slow grind. That same ranking system also adds in new room shapes and sizes as you go.

Want to use multiple of a decor item unlocked through a rep grind and purchased with a currency other than gold? Be prepared to spend a massive amount of time grinding through old expansion content to get the currency even if you already have the rep. Want multiple of a crafted item? Be prepared to spend several hours out farming wood that is Warbound unless you want to pay thousands of gold on the AH to have the crafter farm that wood instead.

Long time WoW players may appreciate having the housing now but it's will be a hard sell to those that don't already have several years invested in WoW, or that aren't prepared to invest most of their time into WoW going forward. As usual, Blizzard took something that could have been fun and turned it into full time job.

[Aidorouge]

WoW housing also has those issues.

Here's an example - for exterior placement you're allowed a budget of 200 points. Each decor item has a value that's between 1 and 5 points (for now, they've hinted at items with higher point values being added later in Midnight). Trees are always 5 points, bushes can be 3 or 5, flowers are 1 or 3, benches are 3, tables are 3 or 5, fountains are 5, etc. The first day of early access, players were already complaining in Neighborhood chat that 200 is too low of a cap because they had barely placed anything before hitting it. Do the math and you see why. If you're using larger items that have a 5 point value to fill up the yard, that's only 40 items you can place. I did mess around in beta using mostly 1 point items with about a dozen 3 point items and got the yard filled up but it left the house looking like it was in an abandoned grassy lot in one design and a junkyard in another.

For interiors, you've got budgets for rooms that can be added in addition to item placement. Different sized rooms have different point values as well. The interior limits can be upgraded by ranking up the house through acquiring uncommon quality or better decor items for the first time and doing Endeavors but that's a slow grind. That same ranking system also adds in new room shapes and sizes as you go.

Want to use multiple of a decor item unlocked through a rep grind and purchased with a currency other than gold? Be prepared to spend a massive amount of time grinding through old expansion content to get the currency even if you already have the rep. Want multiple of a crafted item? Be prepared to spend several hours out farming wood that is Warbound unless you want to pay thousands of gold on the AH to have the crafter farm that wood instead.

Long time WoW players may appreciate having the housing now but it's will be a hard sell to those that don't already have several years invested in WoW, or that aren't prepared to invest most of their time into WoW going forward. As usual, Blizzard took something that could have been fun and turned it into full time job.

That does sound pretty unfriendly to new players, which would make it a wasted chance to pull in anyone fleeing from FF14 if they're dropping in to get a house and are met with hurdles beyond the initial acquisition.