[Suggestion] Solving the "Housing Problem"

[Endeleon]

I'm a little at a loss as to why infinite wards is infeasible? It doesn't seem like it would be THAT much of a size/hardware constraint but I definitely know nothing about making games so perhaps it is? It's not like the houses stay while you log out anyway, they are like dungeons where you get kicked out if you log out in them...

I mean, I'm on a world that has tons of open housing anyway but it seems this is a huge problem for most players...

[Rymm]

It's not like the houses stay while you log out anyway, they are like dungeons where you get kicked out if you log out in them...

It's not the house interiors that cause the problem, its the housing wards. They are also individual instances for every. single. ward. Someone a while back did the math that translated into thousands of zones across all the servers that are always up and running. I will have to look for that post again, but as they basically said, the wards on their own don't seem like much but when you add them all up, every world has far more housing wards than all the rest of the regular zones in the game, put together.

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

With the server upgrades and PS3 going the way of the dodo, we already know Stormblood's main city is twice the size of our current ones (because its not split in two). Maybe this improvements would also allow this idea to work. While its not "infinite" wards, it would quadruple the number of houses available on every server.

What if the map for a single ward looked something like this?:



It quadruples the number of houses without actually adding new wards, assuming the Stormblood improvements could make it feasible. Couple this change with a restriction of owning one house per account per server, and it would probably do a lot to make housing available to people while also preventing those drowning in gil from monopolizing all the land.

[Dustytome]

With the server upgrades and PS3 going the way of the dodo, we already know Stormblood's main city is twice the size of our current ones (because its not split in two). Maybe this improvements would also allow this idea to work. While its not "infinite" wards, it would quadruple the number of houses available on every server.

What if the map for a single ward looked something like this?:

That would be nice, but they've already stated they're struggling to allow more outdoor furniture slots to the existing wards even with ps3 being removed from the picture. I don't imagine they'd be able to just multiply that by 2-4 (not sure if subdivisions are part of the same "zone" since you can shout between subdivisions and the main ward).

[Naunet]

Honestly there's so much wrong with housing beyond just the limited supply that they need to just admit they were wrong and start over with instanced plots. Everyone gets one, and we all win with FAR greater item limits and customization abilities possible.

[worldofneil]

I'm a little at a loss as to why infinite wards is infeasible?

It's because the housing wards are zones (insides houses are instances, but the wards themselves are equivalent to zones). Each server has 3 areas, each with 24 wards (12 + 12), so 72 different zones which totals considerably more than every other zone combined.

But then if you multiply it by 64 servers, that's 4,608 zones, just for the current housing, each of which has to run all the time.

Unfortunately this design does appear to have made it hard for SE to scale up/add more housing (it took just over 2 years to add wards 9-12, they know we want more housing so if they could have added sooner I feel fairly sure they would have).