A Residence Reborn - Instanced Housing the Right Way

[Eoko]

This post is to outline an intensive break down on how to introduce an entirely new, instanced housing system, while leaving the current one intact (at least for now).

How We Put it All Together

The Social Hub

The social hub will replace the idea of a neighbour area. This location will be tailor made to show off the unique beauty of each residential area, while also creating places that will encourage players to come to the hub for more than just accessing the house.

GPose Heaven: Create specific locations designed specifically to give players amazing gpose backgrounds or interactable pieces. Flower walls, succulent and cactus gardens, under water gardens, a plethora of colorful fish, fireflies that come out at a certain place at night, all could be glorious. And a fancy outdoor picnic area complete with canopies, and adorable tables and chairs, and even fancy seating with, perhaps, unique /sit and /rest options?

Unique Settings/Activities: Underwater sunbathing in a Limsa bubble? A large scale maze with jumping puzzles within to help orient yourself in the maze in Gridania? Dune surfing in Ul’dah? The sky is the limit! Though, I have some quick sketches and photoshops to demonstrate.

Basically, imagine if every City, instead of a Neighbourhood (times x number of wards) was essentially 1 zone like Lyhe Mheg; an amazing, contained expression of utter joy and creation. And...maybe we can have some new emotes inspired by these areas. Personally, I would love to cheekily lean out from behind a cactus, or have sunbathing options on interactable towels. What about “Shaded View” where you lift your hand and look up rather than peering about like with /lookout? Or some poses with our hands held in ways like we are cradling a flower, or a firefly? What about a dramatic hand-to-head faint? Or a victorian/edwardian style swoon?

[Eoko]

The Instanced Plot

Housing is already instanced. What is not is the plot. Essentially, an instanced plot would all have the same max capacity in terms of size, but those parts that were not unlocked would be “covered” in foliage, thus incorporating the plot into the greater background without having to actually create different sized plots. Ideally, the process would be that you would have more options in customizing this upgradeable plot. For this suggestion I have added XLarge to the list because why not dream big.

Backgrounds
3-4 “backgrounds” that would act as your surroundings in the outside portion of the plot. This would essentially be like 360 degree views from your house that you could choose and change.

Foliage
3 levels of sparse to lush for the foliage around the plot that has not yet been unlocked. This would basically have the first level, and just add more plants/rocks/cacti into the barren spaces as you increased it, rather than having 3 wholly separate foliage types.

Housing Footprint
More options on housing placement on the plot.

Small House Position Options on XL Plot

Medium House Position Options on L Plot

XLarge House Position Options on L Plot


Separate House and Plot Upgrade
If you want a tiny cottage on a very large plot of land that you want to treat as a farm, or if you want the biggest house possible on the smallest plot possible, this should be an option. There should be some limitations, such as you can only go up one house size for each plot size. Ie, you can have a Medium house on a Small plot (and have almost no yard space), but you couldn’t have an Extra Large house on the Medium plot.

A Market Board at the Gate
The social hub would have one or more gates that open up a menu like with apartments. Place a Market Board at every Gate so that simply exiting your property would have you at the MB in no time. Additionally, when leaving a House, have the option to leave the house, or leave the plot. This should be the same as entering via the Gate.

[Eoko]

Optional Display of Yards
Since the social hub is where housing is accessed, it could be possible to have a certain number of plots around one or two sides of the hub that show off the exterior of houses. One would expect there would be an opt in feature within the Housing tab and X number of plots would be randomly selected each week. You could not enter the plot from the social hub, but there could be a plaque on the wall/fence that had the details/address so that you could visit it in the same way as apartments. I do not know how difficult it would be to take a “snapshot” of a plot and smack it into an out-of-bounds area. This is simply an optional suggestion to help counter the concern of not being able to easily show off property exteriors. However, I do think that we could also see an increase in content of people exploring instanced yards because of them being not viewable at large, generally in the theme of streams and videos.

What We Do with the Old System

I am operating under the assumption that instanced plots would be highly desired. Thus, it is my belief that as people leave our regular system for instanced plots, those plots in the regular system should be removed/condensed. How this would work would be via collapsing the wards down. When someone moves from Ward 20, Plot 16 into instanced housing, then Ward 21, Plot 16, would automatically get moved to Ward 20. Ideally, the coding would work in such a way that the highest number ward moves to the lowest number ward. This would require more coding than simply waiting for an entire ward to be abandoned, but it is much less likely to result in a small handful of standouts scattered all throughout the wards. Of course, this transfer would have to leave everything intact and not require people to redo their layouts. Since they are transferring to the same plot, this should, conceivably, be possible.

A Historic District

There is also the option of allowing for a small number of normal wards to remain. My personal thought would be around 5 wards that maintain the original layout. Of course, they would have to perfect the system of buying houses in the Historical Wards before even really considering this option. These Historical Plots would also not get any of the new benefits or upgrade options that the instanced plot system would have.

[Eoko]

A Terrible Timer Turnaround

Speaking of the current housing system, we can all agree that the random timer system is horrible. It mostly fixes the problem of players gouging other players financially and replaces it with a system that can literally be a detriment to the wellbeing and health of those camping the signs for a house. At least in the old system we didn’t have people clicking on a sign on a laptop while driving to work, or spending 3 days with nothing but power naps to get by. So what is the solution?

It’s time to move to a lottery. We already have lottery systems in place. We already have the ability for the game to limit you to one per server. We need to bring these together. Here are my suggestions:

1. When a plot is abandoned there is a 4-6 hour window where people can enter their name into the lottery for that plot. This is not a hidden timer.
2. The gil cost for that plot is reserved and inaccessible until the lottery is over.
3. A player may enter no more than two plotteries at the same time.
4. A player can remove their name from a plottery at any time by going to the plot in question and removing it from the menu there.
5. If a player wishes to change the plot they would like to enter and already have their names in two plotteries, an option to replace one will appear when attempting to enter the third or subsequent plotteries. This will remove the need to return to a previous found plot to remove their name before entering the new plottery.
6. If the player wins one of the two plotteries, their name is automatically removed from the other.
7. In the event that two timers complete at the same time, there is a short period after the end time of the plottery to resolve any issues with winners entered into two lotteries, though this should not really ever happen.
8. Plottery locations a player has entered would be observed in the Housing menu.

And, clearly this is destined to be because “plottery” for a lottery based solely on achieving a plot of land is perfect. GIVE US THE PLOTTERY!

[Eoko]

Nay to No Neighbourhoods (Paid)

A further option would be to allow neighbourhoods in a limited way. Like with retainers, we pay 2USD a month for access to them. My suggestion here would be to also allow for a monthly fee for a house in a small neighbourhood consisting of a max of 20 plots.

This one is likely the most difficult and controversial. My thought process would be that these plots act in the same way as instanced plots in regard to upgrading, but would not have the option to change scenery, obviously. For access to the paid neighbourhood, and rent, I would think 2USD a month might be suitable enough, but realistically one would want to see these neighbourhoods essentially pay for themselves, thus not costing the company any more than they are making to run them, and thus having the ability to, cost effectively, host as many as desired.

FC Neighbourhoods

With this system I could also see the option to purchase the first month of an entire 20 plot neighbourhood. FCs could collect payment from interested players and make the initial 40USD purchase and receive a code that would have to be added to a player’s mog station account to claim their first free month and confirm payment for future months. Once the neighbourhood is in place the purchaser could go in and have first pick of the plots. Perhaps with these pre-purchased neighbourhoods a password/code would be required on the plot plaque when purchasing your plot to guarantee that these plots got to the right people.

I am not sure if the 2USD a month should come with a “small plot” by default that you can then upgrade for Gil, or if the monthly fee should only pay for the access and continued contribution to the neighbourhood as a whole. I am leaning towards the purchase of the plot maintaining the same Gil amount as it would be to purchase an instanced plot of the same size, thus making the two plots equal and the only difference being the neighbourhood which is being paid for.

There is also the problem of once people leave an FC, or the housing plot within the neighbourhood. My thought is that the intention would be to have all paid neighbourhoods at full or near full capacity at all times. Otherwise they are not paying for themselves. This would inevitably result in things not staying as a cohesive group but the same is true when current FCs try to get a bunch of members to buy houses during a new ward release. However, this might also not be a bad thing. People could also move from one paid neighbourhood to another in a similar way to how things function at present, so maybe there could be a neighbourhood message board where people could post that they were seeking to purchase a house in a certain FC neighbourhood and see if anyone wanted to move to allow them to do so.

[Eoko]

Would a Paid Neighbourhood Cause Abuse of the System?

My initial thought would be no, because these neighbourhoods would not be limited. Because they pay for themselves, there is no need to cap the resources put into them like we have to do for the present system. At least, that is the ideal scenario.

Could You Lose Your Paid Neighbourhood Home?

Yes. You are paying for access to a specific feature. If you stop paying for that feature, it goes away. This is difficult because it is a monthly payment so a warning would not work. And there really could not be a grace period because people would likely pay for a month, grace for a month, pay for a month, and repeat. They could lock access to everything on the lot, including the house, until the fee is paid, but there are also people who would set up the house to their liking and then let it stay locked and not use it.

I feel like the most acceptable option would be that if you stop paying, the lot is transferred to a regular instanced lot. Since these lots are all the same, just one is in a paid neighbourhood and one is completely instanced, this would preserve everything in and around the house as it was. At that point the paid neighbourhood lot could be locked for 2 weeks, giving the player an option to reinitiate the payment and return the plot to its original location. This seems like the most ideal options since the player would lose nothing that they have crafted in either their house or the yard, but would also prevent abuse of the system and allow SE to maintain paid neighbourhoods at full capacity.

[Sauteed]

Hello, Eoko!

I'm not into any special circle of knowledge, but, while yes I would love for something like this, I doubt it will happen.

The upfront costs of designing and implementing this system would need to be dealt with. In the United states every year there is a NDAA (national defense authorization act) basically a little budget summary of what is needed to sustain and upgrade our national defense strategy. Basically a list of ideas and costs for the year. This is a rough summary of that act, there are all kinds of politics and underhanded stuff snuck in there, but that is beyond my point for this conversation. Let's say at the onset of planning for an expansion or some large update, the dev team comes up with a roughly equivalent list of ideas/hopes and a rough budget /cost scheme in there. They probably don't get to do this yearly but probably once per expansion. They would have to list this among those options for the expansion. This will be heavily scrutinized by who ever is in charge of allocating whatever funds are available for the game. I'm almost certain there has been a genuine discussion among the development team and Yoshi-P and Yoshi-P and his select committee to the board of fund approvers detailing a need to address the housing situation but it is probably being shot down, time after time and thus we get the update on the situation we recently got. That and also as legitimate or not as it may be the COVID-19 response has greatly affected the ability to add physical systems needed to really give relief to the strained system.

I'm sure you know all or some of this, but adding a recurring payment system to this to sustain it is a good idea. It is that initial cost that is probably having a hard time being justified in the eyes of the key handlers of the game. The Dev team is good, I do have my complaints specifically about PVP and the ward system of housing, but I think they are making every effort they realistically can short of like protesting and striking and potentially losing their jobs. In general I feel the dev team is passionate for the game, and I'm thankful for a lot of what is there. But yes, for the record, I like the idea.

[Eoko]

Oh, yeah. I don't think it will happen. And there would be a fairly major initial cost. My thought is that if the numbers are crunched, then the initial cost of the new system, plus the saving I assume it could generate, would then be more cost effective than the present and continued cost of the present system, plus inevitable future Ishgard. Of course, this also has to take into account the life of the game. Though, I would think that an instanced system would be exceptionally better as the game goes start to drift, or if another FF MMO comes out down the line. As players leave the game or log in much less frequently, more and more instanced houses would not have to load. Whereas, if wards start to become sparsely populated, but say 20% of people are still present in a ward... they still have to maintain that whole ward.

I know Yoshi P also wants to redo textures, because they weren't done in high res to start with. At the end of the day it would all come down to money, I would think. Totally random numbers, but if it cost 250k to implement the new system, and that new system, even with some historical wards, then cost 25k a year to maintain, then after 5 years it might have cost them 375k. But, if the present system costs them 100k a year to maintain, over five years that's 500k. So while it would be a 150k increase over the initial housing budget of that first year, it would save them 125k in the long run, and only continue to save them more over time. That is assuming that instanced housing would indeed be cheaper, which I feel like it might be since basically every other MMO does it that way. It's all a numbers game, and I would hope they would be crunching the numbers over a 5 year plan, since we're definitely getting 6.0, have about another year of 5.X, and could possibly see a 7.0.

But no, I don't think they'll change it. I think it's been like this for so long they are just going to bite the bullet and deal with people getting extremely frustrated every time the housing crunch pressure starts to build again.

I would very much like to see the bloody timer go though. If nothing else, do the plottery. The current system is atrocious.

[Jojoya]

At the end of the day it would all come down to money,

I imagine it's less an issue of money and far more one of time. Creating an Ishgard housing district was primarily adapting the existing housing district code and adding new textures. Creating what you suggest would mean writing completely new code.

You can't just throw money around to make that happen. There's a lot more to it than hiring a couple of extra employees.

[Solarra]

While I do like your ideas, I agree it might be asking a bit too much. I'd happily settle for a simpler (i.e. cheaper) system. They could use the unused exits in the existing wards in ARR areas to access the instances and use the MB and Bells already in place. In fact, that might do something to breathe a little life into the existing wards, where it can be unusual to see other players.

I don't like the idea of a lottery so much because it's going to be massively unfair. RNG doesn't care how long you've been waiting for a house, or if you really want one or are just entering the lottery on a whim. I can only imagine the upset when people who have been waiting months see a few lucky new players get houses as soon as they hit 50!