Please fix or remove housing!

[Evol]

I feel your pain. I was on Excal and housing was something I really wanted. I also wanted airships and gardening! But, as those things are tied back to revenue streams for an FC, they're pretty well guarded and left to the upper echelons.

Before the new wards were added even getting a small plot on Excal was rough. Rather, it was impossible without many extra millions and a willingness to violate the EULA by buying it from another player. I also didn't have the patience to stalk the neighborhoods for a mere opportunity to find a house to buy. So, about a year ago I started looking around at other servers and noticed Mateus and Goblin had tons of plots just sitting there. Before the pricing adjustments a small, lower quality (4 / 5) plot, would run you just over 900k. So, I packed everything up, gave away a lot of gil to friends, and server transferred with my 1.2 mil (2 retainers) then bought myself a house in the Mist. It was a pretty awesome day! Once transferred I worked my way up to a large and also nabbed one for my FC.

All of that to say, it might be a strategy for SE's to keep player housing on populated servers limited in an effort to encourage migration to lesser populated server. That's pure speculation, of course. I imagine if every server had housing capped and players were willing to cancel their sub because of it we might see them heading down a different path. Mateus still has many, many (wouldn't surprise me if it were 100+) housing plots available! There are still a lot of players that just don't care about owning a house and prefer the apartments.

I'd guess that from a business perspective they'd need to invest in more resources (either development or hardware) to increase ward size and accommodate a very select group of subs. If the amount of subs they're losing (over not getting personal housing) isn't a large enough dent in net revenue to justify the expense of expanding the housing system why would SE do it? However, from a high level I can't imagine they see it the same way the player base on highly populated servers does. Just know, it frustrated the crap out of me too.

I agree with you, the OP, that housing should be available for everyone. It's a huge reason I log in as often as I do. Just know if you really want it, it's there. Sadly it'll mean a hefty sacrifice to get it right now. Should you have to? No, probably not. But there are good people on every server! Convince, coax, or otherwise coerce a core group of friends to transfer with you and take over a neighborhood while you still can!

p.s. Just think of how much easier getting to a hunt on time is when it's low pop... just don't expect to kill Odin at 1 AM on weeknight, about 6 people will show up now matter how much you shout

Thank you!

I definitely know what you mean - and can see it too - regarding SE and their willingness to re-implement housing in a more constructive fashion.

However! The beautiful scenes we see client-side are only client-side. Their server isn't rendering a picture and sending it to you, our client application is doing all that work.
All the graphical data is already on our machines. All those fancy websites with item databases; they hacked FFXIV's client data-files and extracted all that info. There's even an app you can download online to do the same yourself.

Server-Side this data is just a list, a compressed list, sorted and designed to take as little space as possible. It's handled by a service where its sole job is to read/write that data. The list simply notes who has access, and what it is they have access to, the client engine then does any rendering based off of - albeit much more than just - this information received from the servers. The Server is updated with positional data, user interaction (such as clicks/input); no different than the normal game itself. If one player is doing these things in a housing ward, they aren't doing these things outside of the housing ward. If you don't grasp my point: It takes no further processing from their server to handle interactions for a player in a housing ward or the same player not in one. The server is still handling the same number of players interactions. The ONLY limitation they could have here is storage. And who is going to believe SE can't afford to build a few more raid-arrays/NAS boxes?

I know additional instancing does consume server resources, as data for an instance has to be loaded into memory - consumes a server thread or process - etc., until the instance is over -> but this is also SE we're talking about here, and the number of plots is severely limited on servers where the player population is high. Plots are also in excess, however, on servers with low population. Not quite sure why there is any issue with limited resources at this time. Especially when you consider that each ward is actually an instance. Simply increase the number of plots in each one to something reasonable: There should be 20 tabs per ward, instead of 2. Especially if you want to allow individual players to own a private cottage. Especially when you consider the extra resources being spent on instancing apartments, and I see nothing but empty apartments on Sarg....all available resources.

I think if anything, on servers where plots run out, new tabs should be auto added with more plots. There's no reason to add 20 tabs per ward to worlds where there's nothing but open plots. In fact, remove the not needed wards/tabs from low-pop servers and give that resource to highly-populated ones. And if the low-pop servers become populated, then expand their housing wards in much the same fashion as that which I've just mentioned. (Just an example of an idea, however poorly constructed).

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With regard to the way you had resolved the issue for yourself; If I could pay for all my FC members to transfer, and they all wanted to - that would possibly be viable for us. I chose Saronia as my home at the early-access of 1.0, and I was put into Sargatanas in 2.0. This is my home and I shouldn't have to pay to switch servers. Similarly, the case is the same with the friends and FC members I've gained over time. I am very sorry that you had to leave your server to enjoy a specific set of features. I really wish you would have never had to. In your case, I hope SE reads this and gives you back your 20 bucks!

And LOL @ 6 ppl showing up for Odin! That made me laugh pretty good, as we get that issue on Sarg - right times of the rare day/night when that FATE pops. Typically, however, its so packed everyone gets 5 mantles, if they don't DC that is. There's something, that the cross-world party finder should be able to fix - though I'm pretty sure FATES are one of the things you can't do with it.