Personal Housing Server Limitations and the Future of FFXIV Development

[Vaer]

Or the 1,467 FC airships (assuming all of them are active and have FC housing to build their airships) in Masamune flying around in one zone. The whole server WILL CRASH.

It's okay, they'll just charge us 150 mil to buy the landing strip and the hangar. Better start saving.

[Lazearus]

It's okay, they'll just charge us 150 mil to buy the landing strip and the hangar. Better start saving.

When Yoshi's avatar pops up again in next year's anniversary event, I'll crash my airship into him, reverse, and crash into him again.

[Magis]

Or the 1,467 FC airships (assuming all of them are active and have FC housing to build their airships) in Masamune flying around in one zone. The whole server WILL CRASH.

That will most likely be a cutscene like our current airships (I miss chillin on ferries/airships ). A nice big honking menu that says "Where would you like to go?".

[Magis]

This has nothing to do with "server expandability" (as in you can't just throw more servers at it) and is most likely an architecture problem. To be honest, it's an easy fix that was already done in 2003 with FFXI.... a game designed to run on much slower computers. Instances.


I posted in another thread, but it's better here:

I don't understand why instancing is such a difficult concept to understand. Unlike static zones (ie: Eastern Thanalan), an instance doesn't exist all the time. An instance only exists as long as there are players to occupy that zone. When a player enters, a copy of the zone template is created... when everyone leaves, it is destroyed. This already happens with various story line zones (and is how SE makes the game seem to progress like when all the dead bodies were in the Waking Sands), the inn, and FC houses (not wards). The server limitations at the moment are most likely a ward problem not a house problem. If creating instances was a limitation, then NO instance would be possible because at launch, huge populations of people were generating more instances doing the main storyline quest (Waking Sands) or going into the inn (back when sanctuary was not applied in the cities, only in the inn). The issue is most likely a hard cap on the maximum zone ids available for SE to use. If you look at a certain open source FFXI server (not linking), you'd see the game had a max cap of 256 zone ids available (due to the size of the parameter in the packet). This means the game could not reference more zones unless a rework of the underlining network code was changed. This is most likely the case with FFXIV... adding more wards lowers the amount of zones available, restricting how many SE can use later on for expansions and stuff. I'd hope that they used a large data type (say a short or long instead of a byte) so they are not restricted, but they may have to save bandwidth.

Course, I don't know anything about how FFXIV ARR's network code is setup and it could be totally different, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the ideas got lifted from previous MMOs SE made.

The dungeons are slightly different. The concept is the same, however they run on a separate server.

PS: I think this is why the server kicks you out of the house when you log off. The instance may not exist when you log back in, so it puts you in the ward which WILL exist. Also, since there will be 1440 zones for housing, if the above is true, it's obviously not capped at 256 (1 byte, 8bits). Depending on how large their data type is... it could be anywhere from 65536 (2 bytes, 16bit) to 1.8446744e+19 (8bytes, 64-bit). Edit: Sorry, there will be 48 wards (1440 houses), so this may still be the case... a limit of 256.

[Jorge6029]

Housing is something I really think they shouldn't be to focus on, I want adventures not houses, I'm not playing this game to go to my virtual house c'mon people, lets focus on important things! Quests, fights, new classes and jobs, more items, gears...

[Linka]

Housing is something I really think they shouldn't be to focus on, I want adventures not houses, I'm not playing this game to go to my virtual house c'mon people, lets focus on important things! Quests, fights, new classes and jobs, more items, gears...

Whelp there are tons of ppl who care about housing so it is a pretty important feature. Only beceause its not important to you doesnt mean everyone else feels the same. And honestly how would you feel if they would promise you some new awesome raid contend and you would get a hard mode version of an allready existing dungeon instead? Cuz that is kinda basically what they did with housing right now. And hell who knows they might do it with other features too

[Titor]

Housing is something I really think they shouldn't be to focus on, I want adventures not houses, I'm not playing this game to go to my virtual house c'mon people, lets focus on important things! Quests, fights, new classes and jobs, more items, gears...

Important to you may not be important to someone else.
As a RPer, and on a server full of RPers, it seems to be very important to me and many other people on the Balmung. Gilgamesh is probably the same since they are a RP server but I cannot speak for them. Some people also enjoy gardening or modeling their furniture, hanging out with friends, or whatnot. For me personally I could care less about new quests or new gear. I do care about RP, though. But I am not saying new quests or gear are unimportant, since there is a part of the playerbase such as yourself that want them.

From the outcry on the forums, it does seem like quite a lot of people do want housing.

[Lazearus]

Housing is something I really think they shouldn't be to focus on, I want adventures not houses, I'm not playing this game to go to my virtual house c'mon people, lets focus on important things! Quests, fights, new classes and jobs, more items, gears...

But my adventure involves building a nice home with a great garden to grow stuff needed for adventuring. And anyway this housing debacle just revealed that our future adventures will be affected by their infrastructure limitations.

[Toxsik]

OP is spot on, quick messing around SE and FIX your problems NOW!!!

[Pscylo]

Welcome to the reason I walked away. It's 2014 and Eorzea is simply....Linear as hell. No player interaction with the environment, depth of systems like crafting and gathering is severely lacking, and then there is this personal housing that is nothing more than a rename of FC housing with additional wards....way....to.....go