"Housing is Pain", or "Why We Can't Have Nice (Instanced) Things"

[Packetdancer]

We have a lot of housing threads right now. So many. And I'm deeply tired of trying to post the same things in every one of them, in different forms.

So of course, I'm going to solve the problem by adding another thread; this cannot possibly go wrong! (Obligatory XKCD reference.)

More seriously, I kind of want just a place I can post this stuff to link to it in other threads without having to repost this sort of commentary in its entirety, especially as it's likely to hit 'massive wall of text' status. Perhaps it will provide a useful thread other people can also link to/point to in these discussions. Perhaps it will promptly fall to the fifth page of the forums and no one will notice it.

Either way... let's talk about housing! At absurd length, in the usual Packetdancer fashion! ("Pax, are you capable of being concise?" "Not unless I'm making a pithy comment or pun. Now, let me spend two pages telling you why that is." "Never mind.")

Prepare yourself for a trip into... the OUTER LIMI- er, I mean, the limitations of MMO server architectures! *spooky music*

(And bear with me for a few; I've decided to take pity on people and break the sections of this up into individual posts, but the server makes me wait 30 seconds between posts. So it'll take a bit to get these all posted. When I get to something with a tl;dr summary, I'm probably done!)

[Packetdancer]

This game may be built on a graveyard. (Or, *spooky noises* The Ghooooooosts of Gaaaaames Paaaaaast.)

We've been told that the client contains no pieces of 1.x code, and -- as it runs on an entirely different game engine -- that seems likely to be true. So far as I know, we've never been told that the server doesn't still contain pieces of 1.x code. In fact, given the extremely tight development cycle for ARR, I wouldn't be surprised if they did reuse pieces of the 1.x-era server tech. I would also not be surprised if the original 1.x server tech used bits of FFXI's server tech; code reuse is kind of a Thing That Happens in software development in general, including game development.

In essence, there's a definite chance the server for this game has some architectural choices made as far back as 2001-2002 when FFXI came out. And if that's the case, the server codebase would be a dizzying mess of interconnected systems, some of which were written by people no longer at the company and which you're afraid might break if you sneeze on them, much less modify them. The infamous "spaghetti code" comment would be a polite way to describe that sort of scenario.

(Honestly, the spaghetti code comment itself is what makes me think that this likely is the case, but that's beside the point.)

I'll pause to allow a moment to recover for every software developer reading this who is now suffering mild PTSD as they recall some past project that met those criteria. It's alright; we've all had them.

Even if it's not, it's very clear that the game's server architecture is designed along more traditional lines than the "hot new cloud MMO" stuff is, which means it has a concrete limit on its available resources. And complex, interconnected online systems cannot simply be shoved "in the cloud" onto virtualized hardware and expect them to work; you run into all sorts of issues, and it still won't take advantage of scalability because you have to write your system from the start to work with the idea that your list of resources can be constantly in flux.

(It's worth noting that putting an MMO "in the cloud" doesn't solve all problems anyway; it can address some aspects of scalability, potentially, but it also can create entirely new and different problems. One need only look at New World to see that in practice.)

[Packetdancer]

So, what does that mean for housing?

With open-world housing, we know exactly how many houses there are; the formula is easy. <X> housing districts, each with <Y> wards, each ward having <Z> houses of a given type. (Plus <W> potential apartments in the apartment complex and <V> potential personal rooms in an FC house.) I will spare you embedding the resulting math, but overall you can easily figure out the maximum number of small personal rooms (apartments or FC house personal quarters) per ward, and the maximum number of houses of each type per ward, and so on.

This gives you a known, concrete quantity of "what is the maximum amount of data that needs to be stored" and "how many houses could be in use at once". You generally make the assumption that not every single house and room will be in active use (i.e., have someone inside it) at a time, so you pick a percentage (or whatever) and based on all of that, you can figure out how much computing power (and storage) you need for housing.

We can see that there is, in fact, this concrete limit; when a ward is particularly crowded and active, we can run into the scenarios where it simply cannot instanciate a new house. You try to walk into your home and get "Due to system load, you are unable to leave the area." or whatever it is. We saw it during Endwalker launch, and I won't be surprised if we see it again once the lottery gets sorted out. The limit isn't unique to housing, of course; we've seen other things run up against their limits. A given zone not allowing any players to teleport in when a special FATE is up, etc. Even the infamous "Raubahn (Extreme)" scenario.

Conversely, instanced housing -- by its very nature -- has no concrete limits. The number of houses you might need is anywhere from "0" (people decide they're tired of housing) to "every player who has ever played the game". Because with instanced housing, players would expect that if they unsubscribed and came back later, their house would still be there, so even if they only walked in once and changed the color of the wallpaper, then logged off, you need to keep that house around for eternity.

That's a pretty broad range. Moreover, you have no good way of guessing how many houses need to be in use at once; you can sure try to set up an appropriate number of housing instance servers, but the actual resource demand would be in flux. It would be very easy to run up against a limit where you have so many people in their house on a given active world that no one else can enter their house. I mean, we have that scenario now, but you could run into it a lot more easily when every single player has a house they can access on a whim.

This is why I'm fond of suggesting instanced airships for FCs. You still likely run into the same issues, but they're mitigated since there's a much smaller number of active FCs above a certain rank than there are players overall. (Whether they're mitigated enough to be solvable? That's something no one except SQEX has the info to know.) If that is viable, though, by removing all the FCs from housing wards, you'd at least free up a bunch of houses for personal housing... and you'd ensure every FC that ranks up enough to get an instanced airship could have a company workshop, gardens, etc.

(Because, anything else about the housing system aside, the fact that we're at a place where owning a house gates participation in entire other systems -- like gardening and FC submersibles -- is a design flaw that could've been avoided. That's got nothing to do with server architecture, and really ought to be addressed.)

[Shibi]

...This is why I'm fond of suggesting instanced airships for FCs. You still likely run into the same issues, but they're mitigated since there's a much smaller number of active FCs above a certain rank than there are players overall. (Whether they're mitigated enough to be solvable? That's something no one except SQEX has the info to know.) If that is viable, though, by removing all the FCs from housing wards, you'd at least free up a bunch of houses for personal housing... and you'd ensure every FC that ranks up enough to get an instanced airship could have a company workshop, gardens, etc...

Instanced airships, phüh! I want overland airships, I'd love to park over limsa and drop water balloons on the all the horny hyur. /s

Otherwise, agree, as always. EQ2 like housing would be nice, Qho optional.

[Packetdancer]

So, for those of you whose eyes glazed over and you stopped reading and skipped to the bottom, I present the tl;dr summary.

In essence, this game's architecture is demonstrably built on set resource limits; we see this whenever you can't walk into your house (because too many houses are in use), can't get into the server (because too many people are on), or when things go unexpectedly wrong (like the infamous "Raubahn (Extreme)" scenario). That is not a scenario which is well-suited to anything where the amount of resources which could be requested is open-ended; i.e., where you do not have a good guess at "how many do we need".

Unfortunately, "how many do we need" is both the question this game needs answered for things to work, and also the very question that instanced housing tries to avoid answering at all. Which means it's not likely that the two things -- how the FFXIV servers work, and how instanced housing work -- are likely to play together well.

In short: SQEX almost certainly knows this system is broken. The reason they keep bandaging it rather than replacing it is probably not that they think it's a good system, but that the alternative -- instanced housing -- is not viable without gutting the server architecture and rewriting it.

And yeah, that was a lot of text... but I mean, are any of my posts here ever that short? :P

[Midareyukki]

Okay, so... if the alternative isn't viable, but they don't think it's a good system... why not try to go for an "option C"? Like, Instanced Housing won't really happen because, well, read above. And housing is borked. So why not make a new version instead?

I know it's probably an ignoramous-level question, but I am one and I am also legitimately curious.

[Packetdancer]

Okay, so... if the alternative isn't viable, but they don't think it's a good system... why not try to go for an "option C"? Like, Instanced Housing won't really happen because, well, read above. And housing is borked. So why not make a new version instead?

I know it's probably an ignoramous-level question, but I am one and I am also legitimately curious.

Unfortunately, I'm guessing the reason is simply that no one has figured out what a viable option C is.

If you have an infinite amount of houses... you've got instanced housing, in one form or another.

If you have a limited number of houses... you functionally have the same issue we have now, where it's a finite resource, and it's possible there are no houses left to have.

The only possible quantity of houses other than "a finite number" and "an infinite number" is "none at all". And if option C were "just nuke the housing system from orbit, salt the earth, and walk away" I suspect that there's a lot of people who wouldn't really like that option, either.

[kpxmanifesto]

The comma should go inside the quotation marks, immediately following the word "pain."

There should be a period to end your sentence given you're already using punctuation in the header. That, too, goes inside the quotation marks you set.

Lol bro...

[Iscah]

The comma should go inside the quotation marks, immediately following the word "pain."

There should be a period to end your sentence given you're already using punctuation in the header. That, too, goes inside the quotation marks you set.

Those are American punctuation rules. In other parts of the world, punctuation stays outside of the quote marks unless it is actually part of the quote, which in this case it is not.

(I am from one of those parts of the world, but in any case I think it is the more logical approach. If you're quoting a word or phrase, quote marks around that only. If you're quoting a whole sentence, the quoted sentence's punctuation goes inside the quotes.)

And no, you don't have to end a title with a full stop just because you put a comma in the middle of it.