[Suggestion] Solving the "Housing Problem"

[Penthea]

Nope, not immersed at all!

Not sure if sarcasm but for some players a small instanced outdoors area will not feel immersive to them at all. Which is understandable. My Garrison in WoW sure as hell didn't make me feel immersed for that very reason. It really felt like an outdoors indoors.

[Berret_Snowbear]

Not sure if sarcasm but for some players a small instanced outdoors area will not feel immersive to them at all. Which is understandable. My Garrison in WoW sure as hell didn't make me feel immersed for that very reason. It really felt like an outdoors indoors.

I find half of the Ward being taken by the same two people who just have their houses and yards empty while they wait to flip the houses for 3x their original price to be more unimmersive. I'll gladly take instance housing over that any day. :P

[Naunet]

Not sure if sarcasm but for some players a small instanced outdoors area will not feel immersive to them at all. Which is understandable. My Garrison in WoW sure as hell didn't make me feel immersed for that very reason. It really felt like an outdoors indoors.

It's not particularly small. It's impossible to capture the sheer massive size of the housing plots in WildStar, to be honest, especially after the masters of visual manipulation have worked their magic.

The point to take away from those screenshots is that they started from a completely bare, flat, huge plain and were able to build up through their own artistic expression incredible environment designs. You can build a house custom using your own ingenuity. You can use one of the premade houses and decorate simply. You can design your own little world if you so choose. You can even populate it with NPCs or creatures or turn it into a large community hub that players visit regularly for rp. And honestly those screenshots were just the first few examples I saw poking through the "wildstar housing" tag on tumblr. To me, the benefits of instanced housing are clear beyond question.

[Penthea]

I find half of the Ward being taken by the same two people who just have their houses and yards empty while they wait to flip the houses for 3x their original price to be more unimmersive. I'll gladly take instance housing over that any day. :P

You're missing the point. The thing with garrisons in WoW was no one could visit your one unless you were in the same party. Unless you did that you only ever saw npcs so the area quickly felt like anything but alive. In FFXIV you can see other players in the residential district without needing to even know them at all. I know players who made friends with their neighbours and even joined their fc. That being said you don't usually see many players because most of the time they're elsewhere in the game doing dungeons, etc.

As for wards being half empty because of house flippers, my impression is that most realms aren't quite as bad as this. Moogle certainly is not. There is a housing problem across all servers but it can manifest differently due to things like population, how old the server is, server economy and what region it is intended for.

The point to take away from those screenshots is that they started from a completely bare, flat, huge plain and were able to build up through their own artistic expression incredible environment designs. You can build a house custom using your own ingenuity. You can use one of the premade houses and decorate simply. You can design your own little world if you so choose. You can even populate it with NPCs or creatures or turn it into a large community hub that players visit regularly for rp. And honestly those screenshots were just the first few examples I saw poking through the "wildstar housing" tag on tumblr. To me, the benefits of instanced housing are clear beyond question.

Yea all that is seriously cool but my experience in WoW has very much coloured my view on instanced housing. I don't mean like apartments, I mean when the outside and inside are both instanced. I can most certainly see the great deal of advantages it can provide, but there are some downsides as well.

Garrisons in WoW greatly isolated people from the game to the point that major hubs looked more noticeably empty than before. Part of this was due to the role they played in the game itself but another big part was the fact that they were instanced (actually phased, which is similar to instancing). It was ironic that a huge amount of players were all in the same location in the game but never saw each other because they were in different instances. It was such a huge disaster that garrisons got a massive amount of hate and an enormous amount of players are entirely against any sort of housing to be brought into the game again.

I'm not saying I don't want to see any instanced housing similar to Wildstar or WoW, but I have seen it go horribly wrong so I would be very concerned if SE considered doing similar.

[Solarra]

I see what you are saying Nettle, but Garrisons were nothing like housing. I hated mine, too. No customisation of buildings, no choice regarding npcs, no actual house or even a bed for your character to sleep on, and so much busy-work connected to it, you could easily fill a play session there on your own, just doing 'chores'. Player choice was limited pretty much to,
'You can put your barn here or you can put it over there. And no, you can't change the look of the buidings.'
Horde were stuck with spikes and no roofs in the snow while Alliance had their pretty Disney-style fort in the forest. The farm in Pandaria was closer to instanced housing and the response to that was very positive IIRC.

In FFXIV wards were originally designed for FCs and that makes sense. I go to my personal house every day, but I rarely see anyone whereas our FC house usually has a few people inside using the crafting room and a bunch of people in the garden waiting for instances, training chocos etc. It's a nice social place to hang out and we often see members of other FCs at the market boards or bells.

If instanced housing was offered to individuals and the wards went back to being for FCs, I think we'd get much more community feeling than we will by sticking to the system we have. But instanced housing has to be attractive; it has to have advantages over what we have now. Apartments are a step in the right direction, but since they are basically a more expensive FC room, with the same limitations and no opportunity to garden, they aren't terribly popular.
If instanced housing offered people say, interesting locations (town house in Ishgard, desert island near Mist etc.), the opportunity to upgrade to a bigger house, more outdoor furniture and wasn't subject to the timer, I think quite a few of us would be tempted to swap to it from our personal houses.

[Penthea]

I see what you are saying Nettle, but Garrisons were nothing like housing. I hated mine, too. No customisation of buildings, no choice regarding npcs, no actual house or even a bed for your character to sleep on, and so much busy-work connected to it, you could easily fill a play session there on your own, just doing 'chores'. Player choice was limited pretty much to, 'You can put your barn here or you can put it over there. And no, you can't change the look of the buidings.'

Even if garrisons had actual customisation half as good as FFXIV they still would have gotten a lot of hate because the main gripe seemed to be the isolation it caused. Of course the garrison had too much functionality which decreased the likelihood of players idling elsewhere, but there is no doubt that a huge part of the isolation happened because of the instancing itself. WoW's biggest mistake with garrisons was letting only individuals own it. I'm sure they would have been at least moderately successful if they belonged to guilds instead.

If instanced housing was offered to individuals and the wards went back to being for FCs, I think we'd get much more community feeling than we will by sticking to the system we have. But instanced housing has to be attractive; it has to have advantages over what we have now.

If instanced housing offered people say, interesting locations (town house in Ishgard, desert island near Mist etc.), the opportunity to upgrade to a bigger house, more outdoor furniture and wasn't subject to the timer, I think quite a few of us would be tempted to swap to it from our personal houses.

I would be okay with instanced housing if it was in addition to what we have now. To make this work wards would need to be more attractive to fcs than individuals, and instanced housing would have to be more attractive to individuals than fcs. Let players choose what they want but have one be the obvious better choice depending on their situation.

I would not be okay with instanced housing if everything else was scrapped and that's all we were left with. I'm totally against forcing players to isolate themselves or their fc from the rest of the game.

[Besame]

I don't like the idea of instanced housing. Kinda breaks the immersion. It's nice that a bunch of people can occupy the same space.

Make private housing 1 per account. Improve apartments. Maybe add a community garden area where apartment users can garden together?

In swtor and wildstar, you have instanced housing you can set as private OR public and allow anyone to come, visit, do activities with you. Not hard to do when you care about the game you make. Plenty of immersion if you wish, private if not.

[Dustytome]

Even if garrisons had actual customisation half as good as FFXIV they still would have gotten a lot of hate because the main gripe seemed to be the isolation it caused. .

I think part of the issue there was obligatory isolation. You had to be isolated for a lot of the features. The idea behind it could have been fun but the way they did it would likely have been better served as a guild keep with individual player options. For legion they added class halls and I'm not sure how that worked out, but it seemed odd that they focused on making sure mostly strangers saw each other instead of bringing guilds together again.

[Penthea]

I think part of the issue there was obligatory isolation. You had to be isolated for a lot of the features. The idea behind it could have been fun but the way they did it would likely have been better served as a guild keep with individual player options. For legion they added class halls and I'm not sure how that worked out, but it seemed odd that they focused on making sure mostly strangers saw each other instead of bringing guilds together again.

Yea I did mention the garrisons had too much functionality but if they were for guilds instead at least players would have been isolated from other groups while being together with their own. But no instead Blizzard somehow thought it was a good idea to give a small town to one player.

It's kind of funny because players have been asking for guild halls from the beginning and instead they isolate players or group up strangers based on their class. Apparently it's too complicated to understand what a guild hall is (?). Whatever there is to be said of SE, I haven't yet seen them make a habit of introducing massive features that don't align with what players want or need.

[Naunet]

Yea all that is seriously cool but my experience in WoW has very much coloured my view on instanced housing.

Garrisons are not at all housing - especially when compared to WildStar. The housing community in WildStar is incredibly open and interactive and you definitely don't feel like you're on your own in a little private world. Housing in WildStar also isn't meant to be a quest/mission hub, like Garrisons were designed. In WildStar, the community developed out of people sharing ideas, folk building interactive housing plots (obstacle courses, mazes, dueling arenas, freakin' mini golf, roleplay hubs of a zillion varieties, even a couple literal MALLS), and player-run events. It's intrinsically tied to the community and not NPCs. I can only imagine the wonders that Communities will do for WildStar housing (being able to link multiple plots together visually); it's going to be amazing.

That's something that FFXIV should strive for!

Whatever there is to be said of SE, I haven't yet seen them make a habit of introducing massive features that don't align with what players want or need.

That literally describes housing. XD