SE's housing system doesn't favor anybody...

[Kisagami]

Did your complaints about housing require two threads? In any case, I agree instanced housing would fix the current issues. I suggested instanced housing away from the wards - something similar to Black Desert, but people protested against it and the thread died. The community seems against this change.

[Claviusnex]

Oh I see. I'm not really much into player housing so don't really know much about it in this game. Couldn't they just add the ability to do that with pots? Seems like kind of an arbitrary restriction.

Yes is is arbitrary. While you won't get the same yield apartment owners have wanted to be able to crossbreed from pots for a while now as. I've always thought it was a reasonable request

[Syrehn]

Did your complaints about housing require two threads? In any case, I agree instanced housing would fix the current issues. I suggested instanced housing away from the wards - something similar to Black Desert, but people protested against it and the thread died. The community seems against this change.

It's honestly not that simple. Or at least it wasn't a few years back when this was really being talked about. I posted a bit out why on the previous page.

[Claviusnex]

The problem is that instanced housing still takes storage space on their servers (object placement, character location etc.) and SE's original issue with our current model was not having the server capacity needed to "add more land". More land = more server space/storage, thus instanced housing is equivalent to needing "more land" anyway because it still needs server space/data storage to be purchased.

Here's a quote from Yoshi-P on instanced housing from back in the day:



This opens up a completely different debate regarding SE's financials and investment capital regarding additional storage purchases, but that topic's been beaten to death.

Yoshi is kind of using a strawman argument. When not instantiated the only server resource an instance takes is on disk. Disk capacity is cheap and easy to add or remove. The only time it would take higher cost server resources like memory is when it is loaded and executing. It should take less memory to run a housing instance that the current method as the wards are always loaded and running on the housing server whether someone is in the ward or not. Keep in mind someone is only in the ward if they are outside of a house. Once they enter a house the ward goes idle again. Another thing with going fully instanced is SE could handle unexpected demand by dynamically adding housing servers and removing them when the demand goes down. Again making system management easier with better utilization.

[Zarabeth]

I wasn't a FFXI player, but I did have friends that played it and wasn't it instanced housing in FFXI? Why change the system?

I was an ffxi player and the "housing" was an inn room in your home town. One room. No outside at all. You could invite people into your room but they had to be in party with you and if you left they got tossed out. We had flower pots to grow things in. No gardens and definitely no crossbreeding and results were rng based. Basically what an apartment is now but smaller.

[Syrehn]

Disk capacity is cheap and easy to add or remove.

Assuming they aren't using SAN storage but my guess is that they are, and it's actually quite costly. If they are it would make more sense why they only add new wards periodically.

[Claviusnex]

Assuming they aren't using SAN storage but my guess is that they are, and it's actually quite costly. If they are it would make more sense why they only add new wards periodically.

No it doesn't make more sense to add wards. To add wards means increasing the server capacity or adding another one. That is expensive for something that sits idle most of the time. All a SAN or NAS does is allow the sharing of storage among multiple servers (if desired). A SAN will still have disk or solid state storage hardware that holds the actual data. Again this storage is much cheaper than adding static servers. It will cost SE less IT money and be easier for them to manage by going to fully instanced housing. The problem isn't money it is SE's inability to think past what they currently have for the housing system and/or a lack of understanding of system design.

[AvalonBright]

Instanced housing is a godawful excuse that does nothing but kill the game's community. I hope to god if anything, Yoshi and the team are smart enough to realize this much, at least. Or do you all want a repeat of Warlords of Draenor when everyone did nothing but complain about sitting in Garrisons the entire expansion?

The only real answer is Square doesn't care enough to upgrade servers and put the game's revenue back into it. LotRO has had dynamic housing for years. There is no excuse for Square's incompetence.

[msfakefur]

Did your complaints about housing require two threads?

They actually made three

[Tridus]

SI just say 300 Players in the Lochs is a good Stress Test on their Server, now do that with over 50.000 Instances loading.

The Lochs is 300 people in a single instance, rather than 300 people in 300 instances. The communication is far less in the latter case because you don't have to tell 300 clients what 299 other clients are doing. And the housing instances only load if someone is actually in it, which is exactly how it works now except there's also a bigger instance for the ward that is shared, always running, and usually empty. A better comparison is to Raubhan's Wall, because that was a pile of solo instances. (But house interiors are ALREADY instances, so the only change is to make them big enough to also have an outside.)

Wildstar managed to do it, and they don't have anywhere near the budget SE does.

You can kiss the Server Goodbye or you need to cut out a lot of Gameplay Options (Such as Inventory) just to make it enjoyable.

Or they could upgrade to something that isn't hamster wheel powered? At some point, "the servers can't handle it" ceases to be a reasonable explanation and is simply incompetence. The absurd server limitations they claim to be under are not even remotely justifiable in a subscription (aka: premium) product. Someone needs to tell them that it's not 1995 anymore. Server capacity is cheaper and more readily deployed than ever before, and it's getting cheaper all the time.

People always think they snip their Fingers and the Magic is done flawlessly, ya sadly not in Reality.

If you're running a modern cloud infrastructure, you can bring storage online in minutes by clicking a few buttons. If SE is still caught in 1999 server management practices, that's their problem to fix. Storage is the easiest and cheapest thing to deploy aside from extra compute.

Let alone their Reasoning not to give us Au Ra the Option to seperate our Horns due of Issues coming from the Data.
Maybe in 10 or 20 Years we're rid of those Issues but not in the near Future, not with the Way SE is working currently.

It does seem that way. But that's not a justification to just throw our hands up and pretend that it's fine. Generic F2P MMOs have fewer server constraints, it's indefensible. Either they need to not siphon off so much of the sub money and give the team the budget it needs to not run on a shoestring server budget, or they need to go hire some talent from the ops side of other MMO companies that actually can do this.