Housing for everyone?!

[Nalien]

We have instanced housing, everytime you enter a house or apartment, it's an instance. Only the wards are zones that take place in the world server maps.

What's your point, exactly? I'm clearly talking about the exterior plots here, which are not instanced... If they were instanced, SE could hopefully get around the ridiculous server limitations they currently impose and as such offer people far more plots than is currently possible...

As far as I know, right now every plot in every ward is constantly taking up server resources, whether anyone is in those zones or not, because they're not instanced. Interiors and apartments on the other hand, the server doesn't need to load them if nobody is using the instance, so it saves space and doesn't load them, thus allows us to; 1) have far more of them, and 2) place far more furniture in them. Apply that to the plots themselves and end this ridiculous scarcity that only exists because of woefully poor planning on the developers part.

Seriously, there is no point in plots being the way they are. Literally nothing is done with this concept. Housing wards themselves are dead, people basically only sit in their own plot/the nearest market board. I'm sure some enjoy walking around the wards, heck I do sometimes, but it really doesn't justify the ridiculous limitations it imposes on the housing system... Can even keep that concept in part by just locking off the plots and making them instanced, you could still walk around Lavender Beds, you'd just need to zone into a plot rather than seamlessly walking into someones garden. I really don't think that feature is worth also saying "Only X number of people can own a mansion" because we're limited on how many can be added as a result of it...

Heck, instanced plots would arguably make the wards feel more alive. Rather than one person occupying plot 1, you'd have multiple people occupying the instances there... The market boards outside would feel much more lively as a result, since you'd be drawing a greater number of players there. More socializing. More people talking about their houses. Better than the few groups hovering around the market boards we currently get...

[Dyvid]

What's your point, exactly? I'm clearly talking about the exterior plots here, which are not instanced... If they were instanced, SE could hopefully get around the ridiculous server limitations they currently impose and as such offer people far more plots than is currently possible...

As far as I know, right now every plot in every ward is constantly taking up server resources, whether anyone is in those zones or not, because they're not instanced. Interiors and apartments on the other hand, the server doesn't need to load them if nobody is using the instance, so it saves space and doesn't load them, thus allows us to; 1) have far more of them, and 2) place far more furniture in them. Apply that to the plots themselves and end this ridiculous scarcity that only exists because of woefully poor planning on the developers part.

Well from my understanding our game is divided into two pieces on the data center. The Server world which contains world zones and all things that go along with it including outside wards towns. Then you have our instances which we call the DF which creates and contains all the things that require an instance like Dungeons, Trials, Raids, Stormblood's Raubahn, and the interior of all houses and apartments. Currently instance houses are a square floating in a blank space, simple to save and reproduce without too much strain on resources. But when you add the outside environment with sky, lighting, weather, so on and so on; it's starts adding up. In fact when housing first came out, there was problem in the DF server similar to SB Raubahn bringing the change that you can't log back into your house but rather in the ward. Unfortunately FFXIV architecture is built and the devs have to navigate within that design. So to sum up my reply, making a instance housing area on the DF server would only move the problem from one area of the game to another. The last thing we want get boot from a raid and hit with error codes because of housing or vice versa.

P.S. I do agree that the wards are empty right now and wish SE would add things to make them more lively.

[Jojoya]

So to sum up my reply, making a instance housing area on the DF server would only move the problem from one area of the game to another.

Not really. The difference between the wards and instanced housing is the wards are always loaded and running even if there are no players present. Instanced content is loaded only when a player wants to enter it.

When people talk about more fully instanced housing, what they're asking for the exteriors of our plots to be joined to the interiors (which are already instanced). You would no longer be able to see what your neighbors have done with the exterior of their houses, being replaced by walls or some sort of backdrop to represent the neighboring houses. Exiting the instance of your house would put you back into a shared common area like a zone.

Instead of having 144 always loaded zones per server just for housing, SE could reduce it to 4 (one for each housing district). You could walk up to a plot and interact with a menu similar to the apartment menu to pick which house you which to visit. There would be far less of a drain on server resources that way.

[Shougun]

Not really. The difference between the wards and instanced housing is the wards are always loaded and running even if there are no players present. Instanced content is loaded only when a player wants to enter it.

When people talk about more fully instanced housing, what they're asking for the exteriors of our plots to be joined to the interiors (which are already instanced). You would no longer be able to see what your neighbors have done with the exterior of their houses, being replaced by walls or some sort of backdrop to represent the neighboring houses. Exiting the instance of your house would put you back into a shared common area like a zone.

Instead of having 144 always loaded zones per server just for housing, SE could reduce it to 4 (one for each housing district). You could walk up to a plot and interact with a menu similar to the apartment menu to pick which house you which to visit. There would be far less of a drain on server resources that way.

Personally still wish for Wild Star (because then you can have a much larger customize-able area) but I want to defend/add to this point that not only does it require less places to be loaded up at once it also removes the restriction on small/medium/large and adds a lot to neighborhoods.

Meaning you've potentially just unlocked a lot of large houses for players, a lot.

Because everyone is on a shared ward space it means that a neighborhood would be MUCH MORE active, like... a lot more people lol. Also they could add some NPC preset houses for plots that are empty, stored client side. Such that the whole ward is never abandoned looking even if for whatever reason a server has no people on smalls anymore or something like that (but I think that would be unlikely for a long while).

[Jojoya]

Personally still wish for Wild Star (because then you can have a much larger customize-able area) but I want to defend/add to this point that not only does it require less places to be loaded up at once it also removes the restriction on small/medium/large and adds a lot to neighborhoods.

Meaning you've potentially just unlocked a lot of large houses for players, a lot.

Because everyone is on a shared ward space it means that a neighborhood would be MUCH MORE active, like... a lot more people lol. Also they could add some NPC preset houses for plots that are empty, stored client side. Such that the whole ward is never abandoned looking even if for whatever reason a server has no people on smalls anymore or something like that (but I think that would be unlikely for a long while).

Not just that but with a fully instanced housing system, we could go back to every character owning a house if the player wanted each of their characters to have their own separate house. No more complaints about grandfathering in a few special players because everyone would have equal access (possibly even multiple houses per character).

[ERMITANYO]

Wild star instanced housing areas, with FFXIV housing architecture and furniture, and the player can select which view they like...middle of the uldahn desert, forrest scene in gridania, island in limsa lominsa, or kinda swallows compass mountains by the sea in kougane