We need a statement from the developers

[Igninox]

bump and boost this thread. need a statement indeed!

[Rysir]

No instance housing. I like being able to see my neighbors and thier houses, it creates a community.

Nothing builds a community like being a total ghost town. When the only jump of activity is a random squad of people running in to attack the FC target dummy I think SE knows where they can shove non instanced housing.

Is it truly worth it to be able to see someone's house and say "Damn thats an ugly ass house" when the ability to do so creates this dumpster fire that we call a housing system?

[CatfishCassie]

If I wanted instanced housing, I could play any number of MMOs that have it. I could still be playing Rift or ESO or EQ2, etc. But I haven't played a game since Star Wars Galaxies that actually has neighborhoods to live in where you can see and hang out with your neighbors. Don't start asking for SE to make FFXIV a cookie-cutter MMO like the others. Just start asking that they be more responsible in ensuring that they provide enough housing for everyone who wants to have that experience. The subs of everyone in a given housing ward pay the cost of creating that ward in less than a week... there's no reason they can't have more wards. It's not like we're asking them to redesign the wards with additional houses, because that *would* require a lot of development time and money.

[Kilyua]

Complain about it in Forum and others will not change anything. The only thing that could impact SE is a financial impact. The only way would be to have a large majority of players suspending their account at the same time to impact them financially for them to start listening. But that would never happen and as such, they will never do anything about it.

[RayneLittlewinkle]

Bump for this thread. They really do need to let us know their vision going forward regarding housing

[Tridus]

They have instanced housing and it's called apartments. The wards exist for a reason, however, and that reason is to inspire a sense of community. No one cares how cool your house is when it exists in a pocket dimension that only you and your close friends know or care about, but being able to see other people's houses as you walk by to your own creates a difficult-to-quantify yet important aspect of community awareness. It's one of the big reasons I've stuck with FFXIV for so long... the fact that they put a lot of effort into little things that really make it feel like you're living in a world instead of just playing a game.

The communities work exactly the same if there's 24 wards instead of 12, except that doubles the amount of people who can get a house. Scaling outward like that is something that modern server clusters do really, really easily. The problem is SE's mentality.

[BlairYS]

There really needs a statement of the reason why they did this and why they can't really add wards without other players assumption of "server capacity" and "money" because of old post back in 2.3-2.4. The story from back then and now are different.

[Pence]

Housing was released > people complained 'why didn't you just make it like XI's mog houses' > they add it > people continue to complain.

[BlairYS]

Housing was released > people complained 'why didn't you just make it like XI's mog houses' > they add it > people continue to complain.

Except the FFXIV apartments didnt get released from 2.1 and didn't stick with it. They added plots of houses. They are proving that they are saving money and trouble because they are lazy to add more wards.

[CatfishCassie]

The communities work exactly the same if there's 24 wards instead of 12, except that doubles the amount of people who can get a house. Scaling outward like that is something that modern server clusters do really, really easily. The problem is SE's mentality.

I'm not arguing with you at all... even with SE controlling their own server cluster, the resources they'd spend opening up a new ward would be paid back in a week's worth of subscriptions from the people in that ward. My desktop could hold all the resources required for every housing ward on the server... it's not like we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here. I mean... *maybe* SE is like the only 10-million-plus user network on the planet that hasn't moved to a cloud architecture yet, in which case *maybe* it requires more than a weekend's worth of rearchitecturing to make that happen. But for anyone else, it's as easy as changing a single UI window and spinning up some new VMs.