Will Housing ever be addressed in any meaningful manner by the XIV team?

[RayneLittlewinkle]

At this point, as much as I rail against SE for their housing... I'm starting to think they've just plugged their fingers in their ears and chosen to be stubborn about it.



Uhm. Or people who like having differently decorated houses for their different characters??

The one true solution is instanced housing. WildStar has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is the superior option and does not result in a weaker community.

Why would anyone need this though? I can SEE people having alts on different servers then yeah sure. my alt on Mateus could have a house and my main on Balmung could have one. but still something needs to be enforced. Perhaps one fc house/one personal house per server. On one account. That would be better I think.

As far as people who have alts on a same server SE just needs to allow us to make them tenants.

[Spiroglyph]

What content have we seen in turn that is taking up "precious" resources

1) Diadem: A twice-failed instanced F.A.T.E. zone that is pretty much abandoned.
2) Lord of Verminion: An April Fools joke that no one asked to be implemented in the game and that no one seriously does.
3) SB zones that cannot hold past 250 players without crashing the servers (Ixion)

This is so real I'm torn between laughing and sobbing disgustingly. Maybe both? Definitely both! :'D

On a more serious note, though, I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before but in my ideal ffxiv housing system, we'd keep the wards for FC housing, and see instanced personal housing.

How this would work for people who already have houses and would cry about wanting compensation, though? No clue. I personally would hand over my house for the possibility of instanced (ideally upgrade-able) housing, but I'm sure most house-owners would not agree with this measure :/

[Naunet]

Why would anyone need this though?

Because they enjoy decorating homes unique to each character... I'm not sure why that's difficult to understand.

For the exact same reason people in WildStar roll a bazillion alts to create a bazillion different builds on housing plots, why people in Rift own multiple dimensions, etc.

[Galaktica]

I posted this question in the live letter thread, but I would also like to ask it here: why is housing the only thing in this game that limits the number of players who can engage with it?

Just think about it for a sec. The game doesn't magically run out of gathering/crafting mats. Monsters don't go extinct. Dungeon drops don't dry up if too many people run the instance in given amount of time. NPC vendors don't run out of inventory. Even A and S ranks will always be back to see another day.

So why was housing, of all things, the one thing in this game they decided would be fine to limit? I'm aware this following statement may sound hyperbolic, but this limit seems to go directly against everything this game stands for. I just can't fathom the reasoning behind this decision. I mean, yes, I get that server space is a thing that one needs to take into consideration, but again...why just this one thing? You allow every player access to every facet of the game except for this one thing and I cannot comprehend how they signed off on this in the first place.

[Victoria_Silverdawn]

Because they enjoy decorating homes unique to each character... I'm not sure why that's difficult to understand.

For the exact same reason people in WildStar roll a bazillion alts to create a bazillion different builds on housing plots, why people in Rift own multiple dimensions, etc.

That's not always true... many houses on my server are empty plots with just a house on it... and they keep the ugly starter fence u get when u buy the plot... and they stay like that... for months, and years, until a new owner gets it...

And comparing this to any other MMO housing is like comparing an apple to a coconut... other games have unlimited instance houses... we have a limited neighbourhood system...

[Naunet]

And comparing this to any other MMO housing is like comparing an apple to a coconut... other games have unlimited instance houses... we have a limited neighbourhood system...

Thus the desire for SE to switch to instanced housing... (more like comparing a perfect, juicy, just-sweet-enough apple to a rotten coconut...)

Those eyesore empty homes? You wouldn't be bothered by them at all in instanced housing.

[Victoria_Silverdawn]

Thus the desire for SE to switch to instanced housing... (more like comparing a perfect, juicy, just-sweet-enough apple to a rotten coconut...)

Those eyesore empty homes? You wouldn't be bothered by them at all in instanced housing.

You were the one saying people can own 8 of them because they like to decorate... that's not always true...

Which would be lovely... if SE was going to do it... they won't... they just made a new housing zone...
they wanted a neighbourhood style housing... which is lovely on paper... not in reality... if they wanted to redo it it would have to be in one of the new expansions... but our servers barely hold us... instance housing isn't on the top of their priority list...

[Dyvid]

While I love this game, I absolutely hate the housing system in this game. The lack of meaningful solutions by the XIV team compounds this. Two issues I see that are most needing attention:

1) Artificial lack of availability
2) Multiple plots owned by a single account

Solutions to these are below:

1) Solution: Make more Wards. There needs to be at least 20-30 Wards (preferably 30) per residential area and open new Wards as old ones are completely populated as was done with apartments. While it may seem excessive to flood the market with housing plots, this will effectively kill the incentive for house flipping and curtail a black market that frankly should not have ever existed in the first place.


2) Solution: Enforce an account-wide limit of 1 Personal House and 1 FC House (if they are the FC Leader) per account. This way individual accounts are not hoarding houses between their multiple characters and fostering a real estate black market. Also See Solution #1

1) Shirogane: 720 new houses and 1980 new apartments. I think this covers your new wards request.

2) Live Letter Question: Give it a like so it might be asked.

I posted this question in the live letter thread, but I would also like to ask it here: why is housing the only thing in this game that limits the number of players who can engage with it?

Just think about it for a sec. The game doesn't magically run out of gathering/crafting mats. Monsters don't go extinct. Dungeon drops don't dry up if too many people run the instance in given amount of time. NPC vendors don't run out of inventory. Even A and S ranks will always be back to see another day.

So why was housing, of all things, the one thing in this game they decided would be fine to limit? I'm aware this following statement may sound hyperbolic, but this limit seems to go directly against everything this game stands for. I just can't fathom the reasoning behind this decision. I mean, yes, I get that server space is a thing that one needs to take into consideration, but again...why just this one thing? You allow every player access to every facet of the game except for this one thing and I cannot comprehend how they signed off on this in the first place.

Maybe I can help answer this. The Data Center is broken into two parts; worlds and instance (DF, Trials, Solo, Guildhest, Raids, etc...). Housing Wards are loaded onto the world side of the server and the interior of houses are loaded onto the instance side of the server. When housing first came out a player could stay in there home, join a DF, and instantly be place back in their home after the DF was finished. This caused lag for on the Instance side of the server and was changed so you would need to re-enter your house; move from world to instance. The reason for the limits is so housing won't create instability in the Data Center; See Raubahn issue were the instance side was overloaded.

Now another option other MMO's have done in the past is have stuff loaded from the players hardware but this would mean larger files and take up a lot more space on hard drvies. For consoles players this would sucks considering this day and age all games are loaded onto the HDD rather than read from the disk. Can you imagine how pissed people would get when they pop in a new game and have to delete FFXIV because it takes up so much space? It sucks that not everyone can have a plot of land but it's for actual reasons rather than the devs just wanting to cause players grief.

[Naunet]

You were the one saying people can own 8 of them because they like to decorate... that's not always true...

I was responding to someone who posted that people who own multiple houses are all hoarders and house flippers. That was nonsense. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to want a house on each (or at least more than one) character.

Instance housing SHOULD be near the top of their priority list. These forum threads aren't here to reiterate over and over what SE has already done or not done - but to encourage them to do better.

[Auloriel]

If Square doesn't have the data infrastructure to open enough wards for all players, they should just make the housing instanced and do away with the neighbourhood thing.

Neighbourhoods aren't worth housing being cut off from 90% of the player base.

It's not cut off from 90% of the player base though. There's like 5000 players on most middle pop worlds, and there's soon to be 2880 available homes on each world. So that's housing available to over 50% of the player base, not counting multiple homes per account (because it's hard to know what percentage of homes are owned by the same account). There's a significant number of free company owned homes as well, so that lowers the number of available for individual players. On lower population worlds wards aren't even filled up, even though none of the lower population worlds have less players than available homes.