Auto-demolish

[Skivvy]

Given the current system, I won't ever buy a house. I did buy an apartment so I could get most of my furnishings out of retainer storage. But auto demolish is a game breaker. I'm all for making the current system FC only and making some sort of full featured instanced housing for players....or just adding expandability to the apartment system like SWTOR or something.

Ayeee, my thoughts exactly! I also went the apartment route vs. house as I do not like the auto-demo system.

Housing originally launched with Yoshi stating they would not resort to such methods, but here we are. I'm half expecting them to implement it for apartments as well. D:

[Vhailor]

There should be no "auto-demolish" option, we all put in more than enough money into this game to be able to keep what we purchase. I just gave up my FC to a friend because I'm thinking of unsubbing, partly because of this housing problem, and I didn't want the FC house to be lost or for the main control to go to a random player in the company. I have also given up on the concept of a personal house for myself, because of the same issue - I play and craft my ass off to buy a house, then life happens and I have to unsub, then I lose the housing I worked so hard for in-game? Housing shouldn't be a battle between players - it should be an option that will always be there, regardless of sub or no sub, which is why I say instanced housing would allow this.

It's a horrible, but arguably necessary, response to one of SE's most stupendous screw-ups (and that's saying something). There should be no Housing limits, people should always be able to get one if they want one, and once purchased, they certainly shouldn't have to maintain a subscription in order to keep it.

That said, rather than focusing on the demolition, keep bringing up the issue of limited housing on the forums. There are plenty of others who do so routinely, and that's the way it should be. SE has created an awful system, which I can only assume arose from a breathtaking lack of foresight. They need to be held to task, which means focusing on the real issue - limited housing. Bickering about their 'solution' to the problem is a pointless and unhelpful distraction.

[Vstarstruck]

Leasing entirely defeats the purpose of auto-demolition. If I can maintain my house through in-game gil or have a tenet reinstate it,houses will almost never be relinquished. Furthermore, Yoshida's statement still rings true. He never said, "you can take breaks and everything will be exactly as you left it." You can still take a month off without losing your house, so in that sense he is, again, not wrong. They simply don't want people leaving for 2-4 months at a time and keeping something better served to a continuously active player.

Um.. you are simply word twisting... why are you defending someone going back on their word?

Q: Will there be any maintenance fees or other costs for housing, besides the cost of the land and house?
A: In older MMOs, such as Ultima Online, there was a house maintenance fee you had to pay weekly, but in FFXIV: ARR we decided against this system. Similarly, these older MMOs also had a system where your house would break down if you didn’t log in after a while in order to have you continue your subscription, but this is a thing of the past and we won't have any system like that.

"We wont have ANY SYSTEM LIKE THAT" the auto demo system IS like that.

You know why they had to do what they did? Because they do not have enough funding, SE needs to give the FFXIV development team a bigger budget, all it is.

[KaivaC]

snip

Wasn't this statement made back when the game had, like, 1 million accounts, tops, with less than half of that logging in at peak? Maybe they heavily underestimated the amount of players that would be playing?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Um.. you are simply word twisting... why are you defending someone going back on their word?

Those are two different arguments. Criticising Yoshida for going back on his word is not the same as conflating auto-demolition and taking a break. Put simply, you can still take a break, you'll just lose your house if it extends beyond 45 days.

Wasn't this statement made back when the game had, like, 1 million accounts, tops, with less than half of that logging in at peak? Maybe they heavily underestimated the amount of players that would be playing?

I suspect that may be the issue. Doing a little digging, Yoshida had that interview only three months after ARR released—before personal plots were even a thing. He either severely underestimated the turn around FFXIV would have, that housing would be this popular or SE overruled him. Could be a little of everything, honestly. It's a bit naive to think they wouldn't need a system like this with such a limited resource. Granted, not going instanced housing from the get go proved to be their biggest mistake.

Instance plot seems weird to me. Simply because, what about the garden? If you want the whole plot to be instance then you want the garden to be avaible right? Then what will be displayed? A random garden to see? If instance it's not only yours so...
Or have house without garden be instanced like it is for appartment. If you want instance i can only see that. And it could be done for "waiting player" if i may say, the one without a plot. For free maybe, or a small fee, like again the appartment.
But demolition might still be a thing even with that, for ressources sake.

I imagine instanced housing would include the garden. You would either zone outside your house similar to how apartments work or there would be an ellipses line at the gate like when you enter a new city or zone. If they had the funding, they could do something comparable to what the Sims 4 does with neighbours. Allow players to choose say, five friends where each of their houses will load. This would be entirely separate from everyone else's unless they visited.

As for resources, data storage is incredibly cheap nowadays. The issue isn't space since inactive players simply wouldn't have their houses ever loading. It's that each housing ward always remains on idle. Nobody can be around yet all 48 wards still load every individual house, which inevitably strains their system. Instanced housing would be no different than alts, in the sense it doesn't exist unless you're signed in. That's why virtually every other MMO moved towards this direction.

[LyraKuroneko]

snip

The problem isn't data storage it's ressources. DD are cheap, servers are not.

[Caitlinzulu]

Q: Will there be any maintenance fees or other costs for housing, besides the cost of the land and house?
A: .... Similarly, these older MMOs also had a system where your house would break down if you didn’t log in after a while in order to have you continue your subscription, but this is a thing of the past and we won't have any system like that.

"We wont have ANY SYSTEM LIKE THAT" the auto demo system IS like that.

You know why they had to do what they did? Because they do not have enough funding, SE needs to give the FFXIV development team a bigger budget, all it is.

Sometimes viewpoints change out of nescessity. Its not as much going back on their word its more being pragmatic, being confronted with reality realising that what was said before wont work. Its not the first time this has happened to SE or any other company.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Sometimes viewpoints change out of nescessity. Its not as much going back on their word its more being pragmatic, being confronted with reality realising that what was said before wont work. Its not the first time this has happened to SE or any other company.

Actually I'm pretty sure their quotes are being used entirely out of context as they are most likely from very early ARR when housing was FC only and while it was FC only. As originally designed all of those statements are true. The problems arose later when SE saw a great deal of the housing plots basically being an unused resource and many if not most servers did not look like a neighborhood because a majority of the plots were empty. So they made the plots available for personal purchase. The oversight here at this point was likely a miscalculation on just how much of the playerbase would actually be able to afford a house. However once they did this there was no option of going back so they have been left with no real choice but to try patching the system which later included auto demolish for inactive accounts due to the large percentage of plots owned by players that have not paid an active sub in months.

Instanced housing looks good on paper to many players as a solution though again most do not consider the full implications and what would actually be required to make it work in the capacity they are proposing. We recently were reminded that personal instances are not infinite either when Stormblood launched as people could not progress various quests that involved solo duties which created a personal instance.

[savageink]

Instanced housing looks good on paper to many players as a solution though again most do not consider the full implications and what would actually be required to make it work in the capacity they are proposing. We recently were reminded that personal instances are not infinite either when Stormblood launched as people could not progress various quests that involved solo duties which created a personal instance.

That's not really an argument against instanced housing. That's an argument against forcing everyone on the server to create a personal instance at the same time. Personal instances are used in lots of systems. Just entering a hotel room does it.

Edit: I should also mention that those were also combat instances that were the problem which use more processing power.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Instanced housing looks good on paper to many players as a solution though again most do not consider the full implications and what would actually be required to make it work in the capacity they are proposing. We recently were reminded that personal instances are not infinite either when Stormblood launched as people could not progress various quests that involved solo duties which created a personal instance.

Only because an entire datacenter worth of people were all trying to shove into a single instance that was never likely built to support that degree of throttle. Housing, by comparison, would be built with the intent to support a far larger pool of players. The only hiccups likely to occur would be during the initial rush, and even that may simmer down quickly if everyone were able to have a house as there wouldn't be a need to rush.