Please Stop Punting on Housing Issues

[Raikki]

Shortly after housing came out people noticed that the furniture limit makes it virtually impossible to adequately decorate a large house. Relative to the square footage, the capacity for furniture is pitiful compared to smaller houses, and particularly pitiful compared to the generous capacity on private chambers.

This was addressed in the Live Letter back in April and we were given this response:

Q: Will you be increasing the number of indoor and outdoor furnishings that can be placed on estate grounds?

A: This relates to what I said earlier about personal housing, but if we were to increase the cap on the number of furnishings you can place on estate grounds, it would put more stress on the servers, and as a result, it would be difficult to confirm if the performance of housing areas is sufficient for unlocking personal housing. After patch 2.2 is implemented, we'd like to monitor how much time is spent inside and outside of estates, then calculate to what extent the limits on furnishings can be increased based on our findings. Although it's not difficult to actually increase the limit, we'd like to do this after properly confirming everything.

We're now coming up on the 1-year anniversary of Free Company housing being added to the game, and with the recent land expansions there are now a lot more people who have shelled out extremely large sums of gil to get a large personal or FC house. It's been a long time since April when we were told "it's not difficult to actually increase the limit" and after all this time we're finally given this update:

Q26: Large size houses feel kind of empty. Can you increase the limit on the amount of furnishings that can be placed in houses?

A26: We had been prioritizing the addition of land and since we do not know exactly how much of a demand there is we have not been able to do anything with this. This is not to say that we will stop adding land in the future; however, I feel we’ve filled the demand with the expansion areas, so I’m thinking it’s about time to enhance the utilities for each house. The team in charge of this, however, is currently working on the Gold Saucer and Free Company crafting, so implementation would take place after this.

So after waiting patch after patch after patch we're told that this issue has been kicked down the road until after Gold Saucer and Free Company crafting. If it's "not difficult to actually increase the limit", and if the load issues that had to be checked prior to introducing personal housing have been satisfactorily addressed (as evidenced by the release of personal housing) then why can't we get some action on this? Why do we have to wait for the people developing Gold Saucer and Free Company crafting to be done with new things before someone can go back and fix this? We've been more than patient enough on this already.

[Terrini]

It may not be DIFFICULT, it may instead be LONG AND TEDIOUS. They are dedicating their time and money in new content instead of adding a lot of customized code in order to add all of the new space into the houses. Time and Difficulty are not necessarily exclusive when talking about programming. I understand this and I've only dabbled in coding and such in things like writing out Python, Ruby and HTML and simple codes, now going into a full game code there are even more additional lines of code that need to be cross referenced and typed out to make sure that you don't have the same item slot read or contain two different items or cross with a different house...

I mean they probably have to add the code on EVERY HOUSE in EVERY ZONE and edit it to be uniquely categorized. So it's not hard to do it as it's something they've already done, they just add more lines of code, BUT ensuring it's all uniquely recognized is what makes it a time sink.

[Raikki]

LONG AND TEDIOUS

Their explanation is that the issue is due to resulting server load issues that need to be addressed, not that it's difficult to change the limit.

But this is also far from the only housing issue that's been delayed. In June, we were told that they'd address being unable to match partitions to anything but the original 3 walls:

... the development team will be addressing this.

We were also told:

We’re currently looking into making it so you can adjust the brightness of your entire house. The team is working to address this sometime after patch 2.4.

We got an update on that last issue, informing us that it's officially been delayed:

The development team is continuing to look into a feature that will allow you to set the brightness of the lighting in your houses, but as a result of adjusting the development schedule the team has been prioritizing other tasks.

It should not be the case that developing new content has to come at the expense of being unable to address minor technical issues in existing content. With the amount of hype that housing got, letting small issues detract from the enjoyability of it is a disappointing decision.