The Case for Instanced Housing

[Barraind]

What I mean is providing services like Beast tribes and the like in wards could or would help depopulate world maps more than they are. Not sure if this would be a good thing. This gets a bit more noticable if you start bringing vendors for Tomestones/relics/etc to a housing ward, thus making older cities and what not moot.

With some of that, I dont know if it would make a difference. I see maybe 1 person at the Amal'ja and Sylph vendors every now and then when I have to buy rivets or whatnot, 1-2 at the Vath vendor, and more or less none at the rest, though the sylph area will have people doing sylph quests.

Part of my idea is that the dev team has said they want the wards to feel like player hubs, but the way its set up now, they dont really do that.

[Shougun]

Probably totally unneeded now but I thought this might help visualize what I was talking about @Melichoir

Currently:


Power for everyone:

To note instanced area can have a representation of your house too, but as it's the Wild Star style of an area so it follows a lot less strict rules and therefore the appearance could vary wildly from the ward (this is why I listed exterior specifically with the ward), but of course there will be a toggle sync 'match' visuals so you don't need duplicate items if you wanted it to look the same. Again if someone has seen Howel's Moving Castle you can really easily picture the system I'm talking about, also good cute movie if you're into anime movies so I really recommend it if people are in the mood (family appropriate movie, it's not an 'adult' anime).

As you can see the house connects to both the instanced land and the yard, and also means if you stopped playing you'd only lose the ward yard and you'd keep the house like everyone else. Yet if you maintained your yard status you'd have a physical location that was present in the world as a sort of calling card. Once everyone gets housing, as mentioned before, I'd also like to see the game encourage more visiting to the wards through seasonal events and other occasional happenings (if you keep them on 24/7 it might spread people out too much and make it feel less like a thing to do, so I think making it occasional would help give it that sort of 'tourism' season). Those who own a yard could put their gardens there or they could put them in the instanced space, the yard may afford them a few more slots but the instanced space, especially with the new customization options that open up over the game (like scale, xyz position, full rotation), should allow for more than enough to fully decorate it (like Wild Star lol).

Allowing people who buy into the ward might be a means to skip some of the story gating as well, if SE wants to slow people down from clogging up memory of the housing for every option (might be silly to give a trial player 500 slots of memory right away.... lol). Some gating might not be skip-able, but for example maybe you have to finish ARR before you can get your own small outdoors space, meanwhile if you haven't finished ARR but you bought a ward you'd obviously be ahead of the curve slightly. These differences are not meant to strictly incentivize wards but just to help keep the drain more towards players who'll definitely be sticking around for a while or be coming back on occasion. The differences at the end will just be 'yard vs no yard'. Like when you hit ShB and 'you know where' concepts can filter into the system, greatly expanding the potential (custom sky boxes, custom weather, custom scaling and positions of all objects), but also adding some extra memory strain.

So if they add a super cool mega-mansion size to the game while there might not be a 'plot' in the ward system that size the ward user can still upgrade their house to that size (the ward yard will have the size that it needs to fit visually but the interior will be mega-mansion, and the exterior of instanced land will be whatever they want that they've unlocked so far). Which is nice so you can own a small house in the wards, even as a FC, but totally have a huge house in actuality (so long as you invested into that). For lore / world setting you may think of it as teleportation or expansion magic, as both concepts would work.

Obviously the airship, if they went node based would be a lot friendly on server stress though and I think would also be pretty neat. Buy a small highwind cid ship that gives you like two rooms, one has to be a cabin, other your choice, can upgrade the tiers/limitations, slot themes into the nodes like Ul'dah Syndicate (desert opulence), the exterior of the ship having some customization too, like banisters, wings, balloon type, flag. That just being a beginning ship, later getting to things like the Prima Vista with many many rooms and options but because it's node based it's still like 50 nodes to store the entire ship (theoretically less than our chocobo saddle bags, if we just haphazardly assume what type of info is needed to store items and load them on demand, and airships don't even need to load as fast as saddle bags.. at least not at all times). Of course making them super customize-able would be awesome too, but I imagine there might be some people who prefer an upgrade / slot house 'option' in so much as they'd love a house but they would like someone else to decorate it lol (like when you play one of the assassins creeds that have house type systems, the cafe or homestead, and you can upgrade it quite a bit but it comes professionally done for you after upgraded).

[Eldevern]

Since I owned two mansions, I have some kind of experience of "neighborood". Most of time, it is dead empty. Sometimes when it is a ward with a big FC you can see a few more people but it's not what I call lively since most of time, they don't interact, they just stand half-afk, waiting a roulette to proc or are remaining here while they are gone.
People visiting house? Since I was used to craft in the house, visit are rare, maybe one a week, sometimes two but it is really rare to see more people.
Apartements? Dead empty too. I sometimes see the same and only one player... two times a month?

This said outside of an FCs. Is it different when we are part of an FCs? Not really, most a time, we see... three people and that's all.

If we talk about social aspect, I can't make another conclusion than : it's a sad fail. Many FCs are not lively either.

Considering we currently can lose house, I don't regret I gave up my mansions. I would gladly exchange the whole system for an evolutive instance where you can start little and upgrade step by step. With Wildstar, we know it is technically possible, since the game has been released in 2014 and then, based on a 2010-2012 technology, the current state-of-art allows a lot more (especially thanks to GAFA : they need both a lot of storage, a lot of dynamic memory and a high availability. Since this kind of technology is now ten years old, it is not experimental anymore but the growing standard). People who think they would lose a lot with a complete overhaul don't realize the changes in server technologies.

There is something else to consider : even if there is no new AAA MMORPG to be released anytime soon, FFXIV already somehow look outdated to compare with BDO (that can run on mobile) and it is worst with the coming next-gen. If SE wants the game to last ten more years, they will need a big overhaul.

[Melichoir]

Snip snips.

Are we trying to give everyone property so everyone can have a house, or are we trying to create more social player interactions?

Now, you can suggest that housing is a fail for social interaction. I can see the argument for that. Maybe it hasnt been that effective as it couldve been, and SE has been trying small fixes to to get people to be more interactive. But youd be hard pressed to say that housing doesnt have the intention of increasing social interaction. Since it is apparent that was part of the initial goal of housing, it doesnt make sense to create a housing system that does the opposite of that. So completely instanced housing that removes the neighborhood system, along with bells and whistles that would make visiting cities obsolete, is incredibly counter productive. All you would do is encourage player isolation.

Two ideas brought forth are already superior to this: Shouguns idea on pocket space so you can have your own property to design with works fine. The caveat is that you shouldnt be able to make it a replacement for major social hubs lest you want to promote player isolation. So design to your hearts content for funsies, but it wont be a city hub. The other one is turning the wards into a hub in of itself which I think was Barraind's point. Creating a centralized shopping district within a ward that would function like most city centers do while having some instanced housing.

I would think the solution is somewhere in the middle of all this. Im still of the mindset that providing and upgrading apartments would solve much of the issues (and as a side note: Make GCs have Airship/Subs something you can do there if you dont have FC/housing access, but thats a separate discussion), but also creating a central shopping district within wards would probably help create more player traffic and interaction as well as promote more property usage.

As for the game needing an overhaul, yeah some graphical issues need updating but were not running on new tech here. It's worth noting that FFXIV 1.0 was released in September of 2010, and that ARR was in 2013 and built using the same engine and set up as 1.0. BDO looks nice but that was released in December of 2014. Speaking broadly, BDO came out 4 years after FFXIV did, and was built differently. When they say there are limitations to updates, YoshiP and the devs are not BSing us. It is unfortunate, but to cut costs and relaunch the game, They relied on what already existed and modified it. For them to really overhaul graphics and looks of the game, that would more or less require rebuilding the base architecture of the game - something that is extremely time consuming and expensive. At that point, youd be literally remaking the game from scratch. You see this very same issue from all MMOs that have survived for more than a few years. Aspects get outdated, and they apply bandaids and clever techniques to get around it. But these are only small short term solutions. The game will not have as much graphical fidelity as newer games designed on better engines and techniques. Give BDO another 10 years, and that too will look outdated and poor in quality and there will be nothing they can do to fix it beyond small hotfixes.

FFXIV isnt the most stunning game Ive ever seen, but it holds up pretty well IMO. Theres a lot of small things they can do in the short term that would help quite a bit (update textures to be high res, as an example), but I think overall were gonna be stuck with what we got til this game goes the way of all MMOs.

[Eldevern]

...

Don't get me wrong, my intention isn't to sound harsh on SE.

In my opinion, the first idea of SE about housing was right : make it FCs only to favor social interactions.

When they have opened it to individuals, it has changed. Back in ARR times, some plots were available and it was not that lively, but full individuals (or ghost FCs) wards are just dormitory cities. As far as I can imagine housing, Wildstar is the system that looks to me to have the best balance.

My main grievance on SE is to make FCs and individuals to compete for a content designed for FCs. The best solution (and realist) we could have is :
Extended apartments : three size. Opened to FCs.
Greenhouse as an option for players and FCs.
Workshop as an option for FCs.
(why not to place the door for the workshop and the greenhouse at the apartments hall).

..

The idea of FCs wards is probably not that tricky for ressources if housing becomes shared with alts and if they keep the lock one FC house and one individual house per server per account.


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What I wish -without illusions- is a FCs wards system where the three sizes are replaced by options : everyone can have the S size but you have options to make the garden bigger or add rooms/levels to the house. With the lock and shared with alts, an expandable system can be opened to individuals.

[kaynide]

Are we trying to give everyone property so everyone can have a house, or are we trying to create more social player interactions?.

I am very specifically not proposing anything geared toward more social interaction. Not that they can’t happen or shouldn’t. I am assuming you mean like, random social events between players, like bumping into the neighbors.

If SE were to invest time in more social stuff, I would suggest adding it Gold Saucer. Things like a theme park with rides would be fun

[Melichoir]

I am very specifically not proposing anything geared toward more social interaction. Not that they can’t happen or shouldn’t. I am assuming you mean like, random social events between players, like bumping into the neighbors.

If SE were to invest time in more social stuff, I would suggest adding it Gold Saucer. Things like a theme park with rides would be fun

I just want to see where this all sits at, because the criticisms for ward housing and the like are all over the place. As suggested here, people have said that all housing should be instanced since they never see anyone in the wards as it is (I disagree but thats just from personal experience). I dont think this was the intent of the devs based on how housing was set up.

I suppose what Im more worried about is going down a path, even with instanced housing, that would make major cities moot at that point and promote player isolation. Some suggestions to improve housing (after making it instanced), was to also then start incorporating elements of city life, which pretty much would make going to cities a moot point all together. Im personally opposed to this direction cause I think increasing player isolation would be overall bad for the game.

Thinking about Shougun's ideas about instanced housing and airships, and to increase the usefulness of GCs, I was thinking what if they created a new housing system based on Airships like suggested. However, you have to build it.

So there would be Airship and Submarine workshops at GCs. You can build airships and subs for expeditions. And (as long as your rank is high enough), you can then build a personal airship that can operate essentially as a mobile cottage. Instead of forking over 3.5 Million, you would be required to craft/create the items needed to develop that airship. Once built, itll pretty much have an interior/exterior set up. Interior a lot similar to a cottage, exterior will have an area for housing placement. While you wont have a ward, you would have a mobile home essentially. You can take your airship and travel to hubs. While there, teleportation fees from your airship will be cheaper depending the locality. Places it could be stationed would be Rhalgers Reach, Idilshire, your home GC, Kugane, Ishgard, etc. Each location would have its own theme surrounding area. Maybe we would have to have GC items like fuel kits that you spend ventures on that you need to buy to move your airship from a location. Upgrading your Airship to larger sizes will require more parts and advancements, but you can slowly overtime build up your airship, going from small, medium, to large.

This will give players a bit more flexibility. Players who want to upgrade and improve on their 'lot', well now you have it. Players who want instanced housing, You got it. Promoting Crafting and Economy based actions, There you go. GCs now have a bit more use than just being a thing that exists. You want a larger property but cant get a spot, done. You control that now. Upgrade as you want. You want a property in multiple places - covered. As for look and feel, the base model will look the same, but will have features that will be specific to certain GCs, as suggested by Shougun. So you want a certain looking airship, better sign up to that GC for those features. Also yeah, you get to name your airship. You want tenents, yeah that should be fine (the only thing I can think of that would be an issue is if you had a tenent on your property as you moved it. Im guessing you would have to force disembark them before you fly away. This is to avoid allowing a lower level player reach a place they shouldnt technically. Like a level 25 character being in Ishgard before theyve even unlocked that part of the story.

If you wanted to go next level for this, you could have Small, Medium, large sized Airships for individual players, then FC sized airships - A special airship that can only be built by FCs that has special features and abilities. What features? Dont know. but Im sure we could think of something.

Accessing your airship can be done manually through the airship nodes already in places like Gridania and the like. Youd go there, could select to use a GC airship (if you still used that feature), select your own, or visit someone elses airship thats docked there by opening up a list of airships, their names, owners name, and private message. Otherwise you can teleport to that airship if youre already a tenant, or if you use the estate teleport feature through friends list.

And wards would still exist - If you dont want to, or dont think you can build your own airship, then just pay the flat rate fees for a ward house.

This would be a parallel housing system and would come with caveats. Mainly, if they were to develop this system, it would likely sap resources from other areas of the game for a time. They wouldnt be able to easily recycle what is currently on hand. And there are obviously some thigns that would have to be considered, like how current exterior housing items work. There may unfortunately be limitations where you cant add certain items to the exterior housing of your airship.

Furthermore, this wouldnt be an easy endeavor. Gating is probably something we should be concerned about and promoting because you want to avoid 'dead housing' - people who just take up housing space and dont do anything with it. While its not bad like it would be in a ward, it is still junk information the servers have to store. Let alone if you did have a list system as mentioned above, you want to avoid having players who dont do anything with their property clogging up that list. That was a problem with Wildstar, and not something I would want repeated here. So part of the suggestion would be that it would require untradeable unsellable crafted items. This means that a person who wants to have an airship will have to put time and effort into it. The material costs may add up to be the same price as a ward house of equivalent size but you may not necessarily pay that much directly in Gil.

People may not agree with me on this, but making an instanced house something you have to work a bit for by promoting player action (such as actually picking up crafting) is probably better for overall health of hte game. If you have higher level crafters, then youre set. If youre jumping into crafting for this, youll have your work cut out but the benefit of doing this (beyond your own personal place) is now you will have functional crafters leveled which will help you out in quite a few other ways. I think itll hurt RMT services a little bit as well. While you can argue that people will use RMT to buy gear to do the crafting, the simple fact will be that RMT will not level your characters. You wont be able to buy the items off the MBs to build the airship. Youll have to do some of htis yourself. Parts can be exclusive to GCs as well - spend GC points to buy some of hte necessary materials for the crafted items. The point is this kind of housing wont be accomplished by only having tons of gil. Part of why you would want this gated, btw, is to actually discourage excessive housing. Part of the reason we have limits on interior items is due to server constrictions. Opening up housing to everyone without any form of catch to it is gonna really up the server burdens. People who want housing and want to do something with it would be rewarded through their efforts. Having an airship house will be more than just "I had the gil therefore I got it without issue." Thats my thoughts though on it.

Could this work? Sure. Some of what this requires would be no different than how apartments operate currently. The biggest effort would be the mobility and listing issues, but I dont see any reason why the devs cant technically due this as is, because retainer locations and access is also based on City State Locations. So its obvious they can actually move player assets around as necessary. Checking up on housing and information can be done already with the ward lists. Houses are considered individual locations in this model, so that shouldnt be an issue either. I think the game fully has all the parts to do this. They would have to bring it all together.

[Eldevern]

...

It's just an opinion (also my experience), but as a player since ARR beta, players isolation started both at the PF release and after some dramas related to Coil statics, FC chests thiefs and chat shouts, if not malicious, at least with a dubious humor.

I don't think instancied housing would change things. People still have use of the cities aetherytes, at least when they visit other worlds or just because they travel from an area to another. I don't see why instancied housing would make cities empty. Because of minions and mounts show-off (or weird RP/emote spam) some people already avoiding some places as much as possible because of the mess it creates on the screen (when it doesn't lead to have lags and other latency problems). Some NPCs remain only in cities too.

I understand the problem about some features people ask to be added to housing, but for example, take the MB in housing disctricts, some people where complaing it would kill MB in cities... do you feel it actually happened?

The game often look empty but it is mainly due to the number of maps, the routine feeling (sound more fair than a "lack of content") between two patchs and the fact to play during the rush hours or outside of them.

[Packetdancer]

The spaces that ARE the player housing options have an interactable placard. Click the placard for a house, and navigate through the list of everyone on that server who owns a house at that spot. Select someones house, it displays the exterior of that house for you as a preview. You can then select to visit it, taking you to the instance of that house. Leaving that house puts you back near the entrance. You can also select to purchase a house on that plot from the placard.

I admit, I don't like this. Both for social issues and for technical ones.

The social ones are relatively minor, I grant; I think a lot of the reason people like yards is so that they can show them off. I have a lovely little zen garden yard, and people who wander through the ward sometimes come by, stop to enjoy the yard, and write little "I love your landscaping work!" messages in my guestbook. If my yard was, say, 20 units down on the list of houses for my particular plot, no one would ever wander by and randomly notice the garden and stop in to enjoy it. That's a relatively minor point, like I said, but I admit a lot of why I made that zen garden-ish yard was for the enjoyment of other people who happen to stop by. I don't know if I would've bothered with doing that if I knew no one else would ever see that garden unless they specifically chose my house out of the list of 20 or 30 others on that plot.

From a technical standpoint my concerns are much bigger.

For reference, right now I can stand in my yard and my neighbor can walk by on the street, I can wave to them, they can wave to me, and we can talk over my fence. There is, for purposes of how the game handles things, no difference between "inside the fence of Khit's house" and "outside the fence of Khit's house"; we're in the same Shirogane housing ward instance regardless of where we stand relative to that fence. Now let's say that we do phased housing, and someone walks past my house and I see them on the sidewalk just outside my gate. I /wave to them... but they haven't picked my house from the placard.

How does this work?

• Is the yard difference just visual? I.e., no matter what yard I have picked from the placard, you see me still standing in whatever yard you have picked? This can create problems where I want to use the yard for gardening, someone else in the same plot wants to use their yard for a gathering, and now from their point of view some random person is gardening in the middle of the fountain in their yard while they're trying to hang out with their friends, while from my point of view a bunch of people are just gathered and talking inside the middle of my bamboo grove while I'm trying to garden. It's probably an even bigger issue with FC houses; my FC has a tendency for folks to gather in the yard when we're queuing for stuff or considering doing something as a group. It's not uncommon to have a couple of parties of people chilling there while waiting for the queue to pop. If someone else had the same housing plot, they'd probably feel overwhelmed having seven or eight people chilling there chatting, sitting on things you can't see, attacking thin air because they're practicing on training dummies, etc...
• Are the yards visually separated? I.e., I just become 'invisible' when I'm not in the yard you're seeing, but you can still see emotes/say that I make? ("Khit Amariyo waves to X'ample Tia.") Still could get surreal/awkward if you're in one yard trying to hold a conversation with folks about using the training dummy to try out a new rotation, while someone in a different yard of the same plot is trying to RP a tea party; you could "hear" each other in the chat box but not see each other.
• Are the yards fully instanced? I.e., you can see a yard visually from outside the fence based on what you've picked, but have to choose to walk through the gate and load into an instanced yard before you can see anyone in that yard? Then even neighborhoods that do have activity would seem dead because you'd never see anyone in their own yards unless you deliberately chose to walk into that yard (loading screen and all, like walking into a house). And similarly, while you could look out across the fence to see the neighborhood, you would never see someone walking past (because you're actually in a separate private instance) unless you walked back out of the gate into the ward proper (again, loading screen and all because of how instances work in this game). In this case, fences would probably turn into invisible walls you can't jump over, and the gate into/out of a yard would become a clickable entrance/exit, like with the "Additional Rooms" door inside FC houses.

I think the reason that BDO's phased housing works, from my experience playing BDO, is specifically that they don't have exterior yards or customization. The different instances of the house are determined by which instance you pick when clicking on the door; you're already transitioning from outside to inside, so there's a natural division and it becomes easy to instance because folks outside aren't chatting with folks inside anyway. In that sense, it's like the "Private Chambers" option inside an FC house, where you always go through the same "Additional Rooms" door to get to private chambers, but you pick which set of private chambers you're going into. (Or going into apartments from the apartment building lobbies, for that matter.)

While I think phased housing is a great idea where it works, I think retrofitting it into the ward system would become clunky and a mess of half-baked compromises, just because the wards were built very much around the idea of exterior customization happening in a larger shared instance.

If we move to instanced housing of some form—which I do think is a good idea, because housing scarcity locking people out of various game systems like gardening and airship/submersibles is Not Good—I think it either needs to be in addition to the existing ward system, or to replace it entirely (and give folks who have existing houses some form of in-game recompense). And since we're working on constructing a new Ishgardian housing ward right now, I doubt "replace it entirely" is one the devs will have on the table.

[Packetdancer]

So, rather than just shooting down the phased housing idea on the grounds of technical/implementation concerns, I thought I should probably contribute an idea or two of my own.

I've already talked about improving apartments; give more size/layout options and an instanced rooftop garden or greenhouse to pick from, so that you a have the option of gardening. That doesn't solve the social side of things, but means players aren't shut out of the gardening system.

I've also advocated FC airships as one way to do things. That way, you free the wards up for individual owners who want yards, FCs don't have to rush to try to get a house, etc. The airships could have a nice greenhouse (for gardening), a workshop (for submersible/smaller airships, so as to allow expeditions), they could also have personal rooms aboard like in existing FC houses.

You could even sail them around to different hubs, so that you can pick what 'zone' you see when looking out the windows or up on the deck; with only needing to set up the scenery below, it would be fairly feasible for the devs to add places which don't normally have housing. Want to park your airship over the Yfaem Saltmoors and look down on the ruins of the Weeping City? Sure! Want to park it over Mor Dhona with the Crystal Tower below? Why not! Settle in above the Doman Enclave, and even have the view below based on the progression of a given person's Doman Reconstruction efforts. Etc. You could even have places we haven't been yet. Maybe you can park your airship somewhere that you can see Radz-at-Han in the distance, or Dalmasca, or Thavnair. Park it where you can see Old Sharlayan on the horizon, or the New World, or head south to Meracydia! Could be an interesting way to let folks get an 'early look' at somewhere we haven't been yet but will go, and would make the airships potentially more desirable than the houses are.

But here's another thought, to come at it from the social side that folks are talking about now: have a type of smaller ward (wholly instanced) where an FC can buy the ward. Big building at the center is the FC house, and then you have a bunch of small housing plots around it which can only be purchased by the FC members. It has the issue that if you leave an FC you lose the house, but that's already the case with FC private chambers... and given the setup, the housing plots could be far cheaper than normal ones, so you wouldn't be out of bunch of gil if you did lose it. Moreover, you could have a far more gracious grace period on those than the current 45 days, since houses in an FC neighborhood aren't a resource that everyone is competing for. It would also lead to a more lively neighborhood if you have an active FC.

It does still have server resource implications; right now, since there's a set number of wards, houses in wards, etc. and even apartments and private FC chambers have a set maximum, you know the ceiling of what resources you might need to allocate for housing and to store layout/etc. By having an open-ended number of instanced FC wards, you now may end up running over the resources you planned for. But that's going to be a problem with any instanced housing that isn't artificially limited in how many are available, including the airships suggested previously. And those issues are not insurmountable, even if they're probably a major pain to address given what the devs have said about the FFXIV server architecture and the forked Luminous Engine 1.0 codebase on which FFXIV is built.