Suggestion - Add Instanced Private Housing

[Nyalia]

First of all, allowing individuals to buy FC houses is perfectly understandable. People were doing it anyway by making solo FCs, this just makes it easier and codifies it into the system. Prices are high, but they should be for the privilege of showing off their house to the public in a public area.

The thing is, most people don't care about that privilege. What people want is a place they can decorate that allows them to access all the features that are gated behind housing, namely Gardening, Chocobo Raising, and Chocobo Dyeing. Personal rooms are nice, but they do not give people a yard to decorate, they're especially small, they don't allow you to stable your chocobo or garden, and they're reliant on you being in an FC and that FC having a house.


My suggestion is as follows. Keep the individual public housing that was added with 2.38 for people who want it, but introduce new, instanced personal housing that everyone can enjoy. You choose one of the three city-states in which to build your home, purchase a private land permit, and you gain access to a new zone that connects to the Housing District. Perhaps there's a gate there that you go to and click on, similar to the Personal Rooms door.

In this new zone, there's just the spot for your house and the outdoor area, with some geographical features that make it make sense that only your house is there. Perhaps it's surrounded by thick, impassable foliage, or it's surrounded by mountains, or whatever. Because the whole zone is instanced, the insides of the house don't have to be a separate instance than the outside, though I guess they could be.

You can build a house on this land just like any other purchased land. You can decorate the outside just like any other house. The size of the house could be fixed at small or smaller than small, so there's still an advantage to having a house in the FC wards. You can garden in this house (limited to one garden, and maybe only a small (4 plot) or medium (6 plot) one), you can build a chocobo stables. You can build an Aetheryte so you can teleport directly to it (or maybe right outside of it). You can give permissions on this house similar to the ones that will eventually be coming for personal rooms.

This would allow everyone to have a house. Those who want bigger houses or houses that are more conveniently located near Marketboards can buy the expensive ones we have now. Other people can spend the 1-2m price for the land deed and have their own cozy little instanced house.


Why can't this be implemented? Why is this not feasible with the current server limitations? My understanding is that it is feasible, as it wouldn't use up as much system resources. However, I'm not guessing on the system architecture that SE uses, so maybe there's a legitimate reason for why they did what they did. However, I think finding a way for us to all have private, instanced housing would make the playerbase as a whole happy. I don't think many people care about the neighborhood aspect of housing.

Please "like" this post if you agree, and explain why if you disagree.

[tocsin]

Respectfully, since I also wish this could be the case, I have to disagree.

The problem with this, is that you are thinking of instances as free land. From an IT perspective (I work in the field) instances mean an entire different server allocation. literally, each player with an instanced house, means millions of server allocations. now this is okay with inns, due to them not having anything special in them, but once you have to start saving configurations, the number bloats exponentially.

Honestly, it would be easier from a server resources perspective to add 100 wards per server, than to create instanced housing. its more efficient, and you gain network bandwidth by not transferring between file servers to enter your house.

My opinion, though.

[Nicobo]

Every month there are posts about "what's the point of FC houses?"

By design, FC houses had some exclusive advantages, they were gardening and chocobo stables,
however, players expected personal houses have the same functions, then everyone received this result.

IMO each ward is an instance, I just think OP suggestion is reducing the size of a ward to one plot of land.. ^^;

[Nyalia]

Respectfully, since I also wish this could be the case, I have to disagree.

The problem with this, is that you are thinking of instances as free land. From an IT perspective (I work in the field) instances mean an entire different server allocation. literally, each player with an instanced house, means millions of server allocations. now this is okay with inns, due to them not having anything special in them, but once you have to start saving configurations, the number bloats exponentially.

Honestly, it would be easier from a server resources perspective to add 100 wards per server, than to create instanced housing. its more efficient, and you gain network bandwidth by not transferring between file servers to enter your house.

My opinion, though.

Then why is this not true for personal rooms?

[tocsin]

The space on the server that is required for personal rooms is calculated into the cost of the housing ward itself. that's why they cant afford server resources for more than 10 wards atm, and why they technically have a limit on the number of personal rooms per house.

Maybe if they eliminated personal rooms, they might be able to put those resources into new housing wards, but that doesn't really fix the problem, it just shifts the focus.

[Nyalia]

The space on the server that is required for personal rooms is calculated into the cost of the housing ward itself. that's why they cant afford server resources for more than 10 wards atm, and why they technically have a limit on the number of personal rooms per house.

But what I'm suggesting is basically the same thing - make personal housing just like personal rooms, only have outdoor areas. Maybe if you want a personal house, you couldn't have a personal room? Meh, whatever. We'll see what they do with 2.4, I guess.

[PROBOUND]

FFXIV Tokyo Game Show Fan Translation Source

F: Before 2.4 comes out, you released 2.38… “I canot buy a house!! Lend me some money Yoshida!!”

Y: Sorry about that… There’s a lot of people who think the pricing is too high. At first we made it so they cost roughly the same as free company housing. To people for whom this was a big problem, we are very sorry. People have been asking we we put the FC housing and private housing in the same place.

To explain, we didn’t want FC housing to be completely replaced with private housing. We thought if we introduced totally separate (uninstanced) private housing, we would end up with people totally abandoning the FC houses and never interacting with one another. In 2.4 we’ll be doubling the available wards. And moving forward we will continue to increase the number of wards.

One more point: A lot of people wanted instanced housing. Since there are limited amounts of instance servers it would be impossible for people to save their personal houses if they were all instanced. (???) If it’s instanced it ends up being something entirely unlike housing. Please wait a bit longer for more options.

Maybe this sheds some light on the instanced limitations?

[Nyalia]

Thanks, it does. I still don't get why they could do personal rooms the way they did if this was true, but whatever...

[Errors]

Thanks, it does. I still don't get why they could do personal rooms the way they did if this was true, but whatever...

It's so they can better estimate the number of people who can/will have access to personal rooms and properly allocate resources. They know that X amount of houses are in a ward. Limit 1. They know that on average that X amount of people are in a FC. Limit 2. The cost of plots. Limit 3. The cost of houses. Limit 4. The cost of personal rooms. Limit 5. Needing certain rank to buy house. Limit 6.

All that gives them a range on what sort of resource allocation is needed, bandwidth, instances, servers, software, development, databases, etc..

Things aren't ever simply solved by creating a new instance, nor are they finically free.

Sadly, it's rather difficult to explain to an average user. All they tend to see is them getting spited by a corporation for not getting what they want.

Does it suck for a player? Yes.
Does the average player care what it take to implement things? No.
Does this make SE a bad company? Not any more worse than another company.
Do I still want my own personal house? Yes.
Will I cry bloody murder that I can't get a house right this moment? No.

I can wait, and frankly housing isn't my number one priority in playing FFXIV. If I wanted a housing SIM I'd play a different game for that. The housing in this game isn't all that great to begin with in the ways of features/functionality (in an FC with a large house). It's very basic at the moment and treat it very much as a social gathering point to see/hangout with friends. I do think that SE could have communicated a bit better on what their idea was but that moment already passed. Nothing more can be done at that front. I've heard cries about they should have vetted it through the community first, all I can say is that is a horrible idea. Any person who has worked with any sort of large user base knows how this can go horribly wrong really quickly (that's a whole different discussion).

I've got no problem with people voicing their displeasure with a feature. But to make assumptions that it's just a simple button flip to fix things is simply ignorant. If personal housing was a person's number one reason for playing FFXIV. I really have no understanding why they play FFXIV in the first place. Housing is such a small feature of the game.

I do believe that if they added potted plants or something to allow a person to grow perhaps a small collection of plants on their own in their current personal room it probably been a lot less of an issue. Hell, current gardening through FC plots is a pain. haha