Housing Suggestions

[HyoMinPark]

If the FC leader is gone for 35 days, you've got bigger FC issues at hand than the FC house. It's likely that that FC is already dead.

That’s an unlikely scenario. It’s far more likely that the leader just left the game—be it on break or permanently—and didn’t tell anyone. Doesn’t mean that the FC itself is dying; there have been quite a few instances of posters on here and on Reddit discussing what to do when they’re in an active FC with an AWOL leader.

Better question is why you really need alts in FFXIV in the first place.

A lot of crafters have alts to bypass specialist requirements. Raiders have alts so that they can run with more than one static, or pug fights for practice during loot lockout periods. People that RP have alts with different storylines and different personalities. Some people make alts to run though the story again. There are a lot of reasons why people have alt characters.

I'd rather see greedy thieves like the Mateus couple get the shaft than all the other people that continue to get frustrated because they can't get a house or move to Shirogane (because SE stupidly hyped that up and didn't deliver enough capacity to satisfy the players).

As pretentious as the Mateus couple are, they bought their houses legitimately (as far as we are aware, there was no suspicion of RMT involved). There were no 1 FC/1 Personal rules in place when they did what they did, so you cannot accurately call them thieves. What they did was not ethically right (though that’s subjective), but they technically didn’t break any rules, nor did they steal anything.

SE has stated part of the issue is server side resources, and instanced housing is only going to aggravate that issue. I'm suspecting that's why SE is taking so long to add more wards.

And how so? Instances are created only when occupied—they are not constantly active like the ward are, which would cause far more strain an take up far more resources than an instanced area. SE has stated in the past that more Apartments can be added at a snap of the fingers, and Apartments are instanced. The only reason they aren’t shifting to instanced housing is because of the stubbornness to which they cling to the active wards design.

[Almagnus1]

That’s an unlikely scenario. It’s far more likely that the leader just left the game—be it on break or permanently—and didn’t tell anyone. Doesn’t mean that the FC itself is dying; there have been quite a few instances of posters on here and on Reddit discussing what to do when they’re in an active FC with an AWOL leader.

Which means that the active FCs should already have a contingency plan in place when the leader does go AWOL that #2 should be able to take over everything.

IMO, it's better to tie the FC house to the FC and have rules around when FCs are deleted which will also help with the housing situation because these one man FCs (which, going by the housing restrictions) are not something SE wants to exist.

A lot of crafters have alts to bypass specialist requirements. Raiders have alts so that they can run with more than one static, or pug fights for practice during loot lockout periods. People that RP have alts with different storylines and different personalities. Some people make alts to run though the story again. There are a lot of reasons why people have alt characters.

And yet, it's quite obvious that FFXIV is designed with the developer intention of one character per server per account.

As pretentious as the Mateus couple are, they bought their houses legitimately (as far as we are aware, there was no suspicion of RMT involved). There were no 1 FC/1 Personal rules in place when they did what they did, so you cannot accurately call them thieves. What they did was not ethically right (though that’s subjective), but they technically didn’t break any rules, nor did they steal anything.

And with the current rules, it's in violation of the buying restrictions.

It's like arguing that a slave owner is doing nothing wrong to retain slaves when slavery has been outlawed.

And how so? Instances are created only when occupied—they are not constantly active like the ward are, which would cause far more strain an take up far more resources than an instanced area. SE has stated in the past that more Apartments can be added at a snap of the fingers, and Apartments are instanced. The only reason they aren’t shifting to instanced housing is because of the stubbornness to which they cling to the active wards design.

Instanced housing isn't going to be this magical silver bullet that everyone is hoping for, and personally, I like the wards.

[HyoMinPark]

And with the current rules, it's in violation of the buying restrictions.

It's like arguing that a slave owner is doing nothing wrong to retain slaves when slavery has been outlawed.

I'm not going to argue with you past this post because there's no point, but I want to address this.

Except they were grandfathered into the new system. By that, SE is effectively pardoning their ownership of those 30 plots. Still no rules are being broken. They will never be able to repurchase the plots should any of them auto-demolish. But they are under no "law" to relinquish their plots.


Equating owning 30 virtual houses with slavery is quite a comparison, and not a very good one either, considering it violated basic human rights where as the Mateus people do not. Best to stay away from hyperbole if you want to make arguments.

[MizArai]

Which is why SE needs to retroactively force housing release.

It wouldn't be the miracle fix you and others think it would be.

IMO, it's better to tie it to the FC, and force the FC to meet minimum ownership requires and then release the house if they fail to meet those requirements.

While I'm not a fan of one man FCs, there are plenty of times when it's better for a crafter to have their own FC than to try to please FC leaders to gain access to airships/ subs for materials. Although I'm not one for advocating that people lose their privileges or items in game, so even if SE implements a better way for everyone to have access to these features, I wouldn't want them to limit how many people had to be in an FC before the house was taken away. Also, would you give a grace period for this, like you have 5 days, 10 days, 45 days (the amount of the demo timer) to find a new member if your FC dipped below the threshold?

Right, was thinking FC chest >.>

As there are FC chests in the main cities, there is no reason to have a house just to access the FC chest. That's why there are so many RMT FCs, they want access to the chest for trades.

Better question is why you really need alts in FFXIV in the first place.

HyoMinPark answered this perfectly. Personally it's a cross between liking to replay the story as well as giving each of my characters a little bit of a different personality. Though I know crafters and raiders that have alts for the reasons mentioned.

I'm referring to grandfathering in things that actually matter, not these frivolities you seem fixated on.

"All game functionality should be consistent among all players." Either you want nothing grandfathered in and want everyone to be on the same playing field or you are making exceptions. Please tell me which it is. I find it very hard to make rationale arguments when you change stances on things. Mostly I think you just fail to grasp how difficult what you want is. Probably the biggest reason things get grandfathered in is because of what a huge pain it would be to "fix" things. Much easier (and better for everyone in the long run) to let things be grandfathered in with things sorting themselves out in the long run.

I think you're underestimating how many people own multiple houses. Either way, that's still 2-3 wards per servers that would help a lot.

Real issue is that FFXIV is at about half the wards it needs on the high pop servers, and with the existing houses not being well utilized, someone is going to get screwed regardless what happens, and I'd rather see greedy thieves like the Mateus couple get the shaft than all the other people that continue to get frustrated because they can't get a house or move to Shirogane (because SE stupidly hyped that up and didn't deliver enough capacity to satisfy the players).

The real issue is that 2-3 wards is a drop in the bucket of the amount of housing that is needed currently on most servers. The only reason there are still multiple plots for sale on all servers is because personal housing cannot be purchased. Once that is lifted, everything will sell out very quickly again. And I expect much crying, especially since people will have had to sit there and wait to buy open houses, only to not be able to but one in the end. Until apartments are expanded or we are given triple the amount of wards we currently have, there will always be a shortage of houses on most NA servers. And as I stated before most of the large servers probably need about 50+ wards for housing. We're currently at 18 wards. So we need about 3 times the amount we currently have. And even then Balmung (and probably Levithan and maybe a few others) will still have a shortage.

SE has stated part of the issue is server side resources, and instanced housing is only going to aggravate that issue. I'm suspecting that's why SE is taking so long to add more wards.

Wards are always present taking up server resources. Every house, every NPC, every item in the yards, every part of every ward is always rendered. Adding more wards takes up a lot of resources server side, which is why they normally take forever to add more. We already have a crap version of instanced housing with apartments. If they would just expand apartments like they said they were trying to do and add apartments to friend teleports that would probably help the housing crisis quite a bit.

[Almagnus1]

Would it kill you to be concise?

It wouldn't be the miracle fix you and others think it would be.

I'm suspecting it'd free up about a third of the housing market.

While I'm not a fan of one man FCs, there are plenty of times when it's better for a crafter to have their own FC than to try to please FC leaders to gain access to airships/ subs for materials.

I don't know why we aren't working closer with Garlond Ironworks, or some other way to give us workshop access.

Also, would you give a grace period for this, like you have 5 days, 10 days, 45 days (the amount of the demo timer) to find a new member if your FC dipped below the threshold?

It should be obvious that SE should do that, and that I have to actually state such....

As there are FC chests in the main cities, there is no reason to have a house just to access the FC chest. That's why there are so many RMT FCs, they want access to the chest for trades.

If by RMT you mean Real Money Transaction - that should NEVER be encouraged because that's how the gil farmers make their money, rip off accounts, and do a whole host of not good things.

"All game functionality should be consistent among all players." Either you want nothing grandfathered in and want everyone to be on the same playing field or you are making exceptions. Please tell me which it is. I find it very hard to make rationale arguments when you change stances on things. Mostly I think you just fail to grasp how difficult what you want is. Probably the biggest reason things get grandfathered in is because of what a huge pain it would be to "fix" things. Much easier (and better for everyone in the long run) to let things be grandfathered in with things sorting themselves out in the long run.

Give me an actual example on something that matters, and not some weird bug that's basically about placing daisies in your house. Otherwise your point is frivolous.

The real issue is that 2-3 wards is a drop in the bucket of the amount of housing that is needed currently on most servers.

If the existing stock gets 2-3 wards per neighborhood freed up (I think it's probably higher) because of forcing release, it's still going to help the situation because that's adding in 8-12 wards back into the pool.

The only reason there are still multiple plots for sale on all servers is because personal housing cannot be purchased. Once that is lifted, everything will sell out very quickly again. And I expect much crying, especially since people will have had to sit there and wait to buy open houses, only to not be able to but one in the end.

That and SE needs to start adding more and more wards.

Until apartments are expanded or we are given triple the amount of wards we currently have, there will always be a shortage of houses on most NA servers.

Instance housing is not the solution here because that's going to put far more stress on the server than you think it will, and have load times that aren't basically instant because the server will have to fetch the instanced house from disk to load into memory, rather than just having the entire ward already in memory and being able to quickly work with the ward.

If you can't argue the technical side, please stop.

And as I stated before most of the large servers probably need about 50+ wards for housing. We're currently at 18 wards.

Your math sucks, we're at 4*18 = 72 wards total.

[HyoMinPark]

Instance housing is not the solution here because that's going to put far more stress on the server than you think it will, and have load times that aren't basically instant because the server will have to fetch the instanced house from disk to load into memory, rather than just having the entire ward already in memory and being able to quickly work with the ward.

Except the wards being constantly loaded into memory are what's causing a lot of the problems with housing. Data isn't cheap; SE doesn't own their servers, they rent them from a company and pay for the accompanying data. Combine that with the fact that there is still a lot of 1.0 code floating around in this game being tricky to work around on occasion, the wards cause more strain that I think you realize. If the big wigs don't want to allocate more funds to purchasing more data for expansion of the wards, then we end up making do with what we have. Data isn't endless.

If the servers use SSD hardware, fetching instances takes next to no time. Instances are only loaded into memory when they're occupied; the Wards are up 24/7. Being as intricate as they are, they strain the servers, which is one reason it takes so long for them to add more, and why they can't do something like dynamic wards, where when one fills up another pops up, and so on. Again, the developers have stated multiple times the strain the wards place on the servers.

Your math sucks, we're at 4*18 = 72 wards total.

I'm fairly certain they were meaning we would need 50 wards per district, where as right now we're at 18 per district. Not just 18 total.

[Mahrze]

Your math sucks, we're at 4*18 = 72 wards total.

I think you just missed the entire point of their explanation and tried to be cheeky with this math reply and being pedantic about it.

If you can't argue the technical side, please stop.

With windows 32-bit limitations, you can explain it with quantum computing and those 32-bit limitations and spaghetti code will make your explanation moot. Instanced housing -could- be the solution, more houses more often is -another potential- solution, trying to take houses form people who already have multiple ones without a good outcome is not a solution. If you can't explain it in simple terms, you don't understand it.

[Flashgordon1975]

I would say your reading comprehension is the issue...not their math skills.

Stop complaining and wait for auto demolition to kick in and you will get your house. The way you argue it seems like this is a matter of national security.

Also your slave owner comparison is simply atrocious and shows just how extreme you are in your view if you feel that way. In my opinion housing is a prestige item and should be a scarce resource. SE is under no obligation to ensure all people GET all content. Their obligation is to give players an opportunity to get all content. They have done that. Stop being a salty beach.

[MizArai]

I'm suspecting it'd free up about a third of the housing market.

There is no way.

It should be obvious that SE should do that, and that I have to actually state such....

Well, with some of your ideas so far, it was a valid question.

If by RMT you mean Real Money Transaction - that should NEVER be encouraged because that's how the gil farmers make their money, rip off accounts, and do a whole host of not good things.

I wasn't encouraging it. Just stating a well known fact.

Give me an actual example on something that matters, and not some weird bug that's basically about placing daisies in your house. Otherwise your point is frivolous.

I gave you a real example of people having alts on friends list. You said that should get fixed, then said people should be able to use houses to pass stuff to alts, you apparently meant they should be able to use FC chest to do it, except I have alts in multiple FCs, so to me, that's a super silly idea. Especially when you consider that most people don't have access to most items in their FC's chest.

If the existing stock gets 2-3 wards per neighborhood freed up (I think it's probably higher) because of forcing release, it's still going to help the situation because that's adding in 8-12 wards back into the pool.

I really don't understand how me saying 100-200 houses would be reclaimed and you translated that into 2-3 wards somehow turned into 8-12 wards worth of houses being added back in. There is no way there's 480-720 houses that would get reclaimed per server from people owning multiple houses. I know of 3 people with multiple houses. All of them have 2 personal houses. With housing being a huge interest of mine, I often talk to people about housing. If you assume that about 5% of homeowners have 2 houses, then you'd be reclaiming 216 houses with your no grandfathering take all the extra houses away stance.

That and SE needs to start adding more and more wards.

Instance housing is not the solution here because that's going to put far more stress on the server than you think it will, and have load times that aren't basically instant because the server will have to fetch the instanced house from disk to load into memory, rather than just having the entire ward already in memory and being able to quickly work with the ward.

If you can't argue the technical side, please stop.

Instanced housing would actually help a lot, since it would only put a load on the server when people were inside the instance of the house. (And technically we already have instanced housing, it's called apartments. And it's probably why they said they'll look into trying to make small, medium, and large apartments because that would be easier on the servers than continuing to add more and more wards like some people want.) I think you're very confused about the technical side of things, so I'll just save you any further embarrassment by not pointing out further flaws about this.

Your math sucks, we're at 4*18 = 72 wards total.

Um, look at your equation. You did 4*18 because there are 18 WARDS in each district, so we're at 18 wards. My math is fine. Thanks for proving that you just want to fight though. If you must see my math though here goes:

Total Wards Needed = Total Houses Needed/(4*60)

NA has at least 8 servers with over 10k "active" players. If you do a base line of 12,000 needed houses (10,000 for players, 2,000 for FCs), then you end up with needing 50 wards. Like I said before, that still wouldn't be enough for Balmung, Leviathan, Greg, Cactuar, or Excalibur. It might be enough for Hyperion, Behemoth, and Sargatanas. Though the smaller servers would be swimming in extra houses.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

That and SE needs to start adding more and more wards.

Instance housing is not the solution here because that's going to put far more stress on the server than you think it will, and have load times that aren't basically instant because the server will have to fetch the instanced house from disk to load into memory, rather than just having the entire ward already in memory and being able to quickly work with the ward.

This goes to demonstrate you have very little understanding on the subjects you speak on. Instanced housing operates on the basis house plotting only load if an active character were in the location. Otherwise, they remain compressed data, severely limiting strain on the servers. Comparatively, current wards function akin to City-States. All eighteen remain active indefinitely, and must render each of the thirty plots and their maximum potential limits. Unlike the former, this constant activity places considerably more strain on the servers. Your solution actually makes things worse—a sentiment corroborated by the developers themselves hence "server limitation" issues and why they don't just add additional wards willy-nilly. Meanwhile, they outright said they could double Apartments on a whim.