Yoshi Interview at PGS

[Skivvy]

He never said everyone would be able to point-blank get a house, he said they were going to add a system where everyone can have a chance at obtaining a house fair-and-square.

I'm struggling to find many ways that they will make this fair. My thoughts are 1) new wards will be created as they fill up, letting everyone get a house if they want, and 2) some sort of lottery system where they can register ahead of time.

It's not going to be fair if people still need to contend with server queues or possibly another 3 a.m. PST launch.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I'm struggling to find many ways that they will make this fair. My thoughts are 1) new wards will be created as they fill up, letting everyone get a house if they want, and 2) some sort of lottery system where they can register ahead of time.

It's not going to be fair if people still need to contend with server queues or possibly another 3 a.m. PST launch.

Speculation seems to be leaning towards a lottery system where everyone essentially purchases a raffle ticket and a random winner is drawn who then has x amount of hours to legitimately purchase the house. Basically, remove mass log-ins as an equation. These types of lotteries are apparently quite common in JP. And according to reddit, the JP community is rather content with that solution, hence the speculation.

[DamianFatale]

Speculation seems to be leaning towards a lottery system where everyone essentially purchases a raffle ticket and a random winner is drawn who then has x amount of hours to legitimately purchase the house. Basically, remove mass log-ins as an equation. These types of lotteries are apparently quite common in JP. And according to reddit, the JP community is rather content with that solution, hence the speculation.

I can’t stand anyone who actually suggested a lottery system. That idea is the worst housing idea EVER.

[Alleo]

I'm struggling to find many ways that they will make this fair. My thoughts are 1) new wards will be created as they fill up, letting everyone get a house if they want, and 2) some sort of lottery system where they can register ahead of time.

It's not going to be fair if people still need to contend with server queues or possibly another 3 a.m. PST launch.

And I do kinda question how much fairer a lottery system truly is. Maybe people will not need luck to get on the server on time but instead of that they need one heck of a luck to even get a house in the lottery. Also depending on the way they do this people with lots of gils might have bigger chances to obtain a house. (Like if you can bet on each plot if you have the Gil available) At the same time if you can "buy" your lottery ticket beforehand we will have even more people trying to get their hands on houses since now even those that work or are otherwise not able to play the game can buy a ticket and get a chance to own a house. This may be good for them but at the same time this increases the pool of possible house owners a lot thus decreasing the chances for each person itself more. So in the end if they dont increase the wards by a huge amount of numbers most players will probably still be without a house..especially if they use a system where you need to put money down to even bet on this which will decrease the chance for those that have less Gil..

So I still cant see how such a system would change the housing situation at all.

Also I do kinda question if that means that any old house that open up over the time has such a system too so that you cant just simply buy a house anymore and need to relay on luck even outside the first housing rush..

[Skivvy]

good points, sorry to snip

You're probably right. It would have the potential to heavily favor those FCs/individuals that have hordes of money saved up. At this point, I'm just really curious as to their plans for the next housing release.

In my perfect world, they'd just make new wards available as they fill up. Or maybe just bring on instanced housing as not everyone needs to have that neighborhood feel.

[SenorPatty]

He never said everyone would be able to point-blank get a house, he said they were going to add a system where everyone can have a chance at obtaining a house fair-and-square.

But that's how I'm reading it. My statement didn't mean getting a house for free. From what I understand, if I have the gil, I can get one.

Or is this "fair and square" thing still involves luck?

[alimdia]

But that's how I'm reading it. My statement didn't mean getting a house for free. From what I understand, if I have the gil, I can get one.

Or is this "fair and square" thing still involves luck?

You're looking at it in a vacuum, you can't ignore the context, when wards were added in 4.1 people were at the mercy of login server issues, whether you got a house or not in 4.1 depended solely on login server issues and house transfer lockdown error.

This lead to Yoshida issuing a public apology and announcing they would add more wards in 4.2, and mentioning they were working on something to prevent the issues that happened in 4.1.

This interview is just talking about that something to prevent those issues, so everyone has the same chance to get a house instead of those who don't get hit by login server issues.

[Alleo]

So if we would get more scars and stuff like that the servers would explode from the stress? How in the world will this game last for a long time if we cant even get some more customizations? Are they at least working on changing that over time or will we hear "server limitation" as a reason forever? Come on you are one of the most successful P2P MMOs out there and one of the big cash cows for your company...you should be able to do so much more.

Also why would FF lose its appeal if we get more faces? That does not make any sense? (And lets not talk about a lot of glamour stuff that destroyed the fantasy feel anyway...like those Yokai things..)

[But at least they put their time and money in making an app..I just feel my salt rising]

[reiichi]

Based on stories provided from people I've talked to who worked at Japanese companies doing server development, SE's toolset for the server is probably from the 90s (ok, c++98 and c99 are 90s still). Or at least the programming standards are. Even the software company I work for is built on a database software that hasn't exactly changed in the last 30 years and the primary language used to interact with it is BASIC and an outdated proprietary customized c library.

Based on assumptions about SE's server architecture (how the servers are run, not just how they're programmed), we're looking at a messy database with little sharding and likely nobody with a good background in server infrastructure engineering, because that's a senior position, and they'd rather give it to a senior developer. So we get a server that's programmed with limitations in mind which is then strained on an unoptimized architecture passing our character data back and forth between temporary servers (think instances). And all that traffic adds up.

It's not that it's particularly horrible to send that data to a single character, but when it has to do so for hundreds in a map or thousands on a server, things get pretty sloppy, which is where all these server limitations come from. A lot of the current character data is basically stored in about 1-4 bytes per field. This is why it's probably easy for them to add hairstyle after hairstyle, but for something in a smaller container (say, faces) a single byte is likely used, and then packed/compressed. To give more customization, they'd need to first increase the current minimum amount of character data transfered for our current options, followed by adding in whatever additional fields would be needed for said customization. Like to split the Au Ra face and horns, they'd need twice the data. To add more faces, they'd need to increase the size of the variable holding that information, and so on. ...and someone probably ran some numbers, saw the increased bandwidth cost, multiplied it by the number of active characters and they said "no, our server cannot handle that additional load." Which kinda sucks, but we can't see their source code.

[bass9020]

lol what a joke.

Thank god Bless is coming out soon, its a mix of xiv and bdo. Luckily they have a decent CC and an open world like bdo. Ill put my money into that game when I can.