Plots everywhere demolished and open!

[GeminiReed]

The worst I've done was trying to buy a guild house. I think 4-5 of us stood around the target placard for 4-6 hours just clicking. Mostly it was click through the menus, pause, repeat but a known flipper showed up occasionally so then it was a mad clickfest until they got bored and left. I did get a personal house right before ShB when a whole bunch of plots opened up in a similar situation to this one. I got another on an alt completely by accident. A nice-ish spot (#22) in the Mist was open and I was curious. Probably should have stuck my gil on a retainer first but oh well.

I had some high RP hopes for the first plot but the combination of the atrocious chat implementation plus how much of a let down XIV housing was compared to Wildstar I've pretty much left it to rot.

[Packetdancer]

I had some high RP hopes for the first plot but the combination of the atrocious chat implementation plus how much of a let down XIV housing was compared to Wildstar I've pretty much left it to rot.

To be fair, WildStar's housing would be a hard act for anything to follow.

[GeminiReed]

To be fair, WildStar's housing would be a hard act for anything to follow.

Yes and no.

Everybody got an exterior plot with a good amount of room. Various dwellings could be added to provide interiors. If you were careful there were few, if any restrictions on where you could put stuff. The entry portal being a notable bone of contention. Adopting these two features alone would improve the XIV housing experience enormously.

IMO, Wildstar's housing should have been considered barely adequate instead of the Gold Standard MMO housing enthusiasts seem to consider it. Like many things in WS the community was able to work around some of the worst shortcomings of the interface thanks to their add-on API. Think of this: It was barely better than Bioware's NWN toolset and that was 10+ years old by the time WS released.

While it was completely instanced I've had significant better social interactions in both quality and quantity in WS than XIV's ward system. That's more the fault of XIV's awful chat interface and the lack of addons that allowed the RP community to replace WS's stock chat with one more suitable for RP.

[Shougun]

Yes and no.

Everybody got an exterior plot with a good amount of room. Various dwellings could be added to provide interiors. If you were careful there were few, if any restrictions on where you could put stuff. The entry portal being a notable bone of contention. Adopting these two features alone would improve the XIV housing experience enormously.

IMO, Wildstar's housing should have been considered barely adequate instead of the Gold Standard MMO housing enthusiasts seem to consider it. Like many things in WS the community was able to work around some of the worst shortcomings of the interface thanks to their add-on API. Think of this: It was barely better than Bioware's NWN toolset and that was 10+ years old by the time WS released.

While it was completely instanced I've had significant better social interactions in both quality and quantity in WS than XIV's ward system. That's more the fault of XIV's awful chat interface and the lack of addons that allowed the RP community to replace WS's stock chat with one more suitable for RP.

To be fair, or unfair? carrying on your yes and no comment lol, I have some really great memories of WoW's interface. Some features I still greatly miss and I'm like dang FFXIV why can't you---.. and then I remember that 98% of the reason why WoW's UI was so good for me was that it was modded to oblivion and back. XD

I think the comparison isn't quite perfect but you could say WoW gave the infrastructure (underlying potential features) for the community to go hogwild, so similarly Wildstar did that too (so I think it's worth saying they should get some credit, but perhaps not the typical kind you'd think of). The amount of power and creative control in Wildstar takes HUGE, MASSIVE, whacks at FFXIV- absolutely no comparison, miles and miles and miles better. But yeah maybe some weird quirks that the community had to get around lol. Certain games have done more or less, I just like the general whole package as a great piece to example (skydrop, weather, land, house, z axis, scale, massive amount of objects both inside and outside of your house- both of those limits mind you, for players that don't know what we're talking about, is much larger than FFXIV's, allowed players to join house power to create substantially larger full power community zones for things like basically in game cities, etc). ESO, another system a few people have mentioned- so I'm refrencing it, for example caps out at like 700 for the biggest house (and if you're subbed), but they have their own neat feature in that you can own all of the houses (so you could own like 42+ houses).

So Wildstar sitting at 1000+, ESO with the ability to own multiple 300+ houses, and then there is FFXIV where they can barely handle adding more limited quantity 400 item houses. .. . /playing my violin lol. Thankfully the entire game isn't just one feature.

To FFXIV credit, at least on the UI, a lot of stuff is much better out of the gate. I don't need to troubleshoot any of my UI and "it just works". Not sure how much credit I want to give to housing though since the glitches you have to do and repeat objects because scale and z axis control are not a thing.. FFXIV community has a lot of hurdles to deal with too (meanwhile getting way less power than Wildstar, and many other mmos). Objects in FFXIV are quite pretty, but .. you know.. the whole game is lol, that's about where I want to give credit for FFXIV (on the topic of housing at least, other parts FFXIV has done very well).

I think the social interaction part I want to add though is just proof though that instanced systems are not the death of social events, which is sometimes the counter argument people have to them. Like if you have that system then social interaction becomes the grave (which is often funny to read since the areas I go to are already dead or very nearly, lol). Certainly for both systems there are things that can be done to improve interactions, like if you had an instanced system it would be important to have a search able house board so you can find that cafe or whatever. May even have a weekly challenge log for some of the easiest tokens of your life, just because SE can (like venture tokens, to fit the theme, or perhaps MGP, or it could relate back into some other house feature, visit these houses get a bonus to your garden, or something). As an aside though while I think FFXIV's current wards are just about if not more dead than any sort of instanced system, with rare exceptions usually based on very specific types of people, I would say if FFXIV had kept housing FC only that then it would probably be much more social by the nature of lots of people (but that ship is long gone).

[Packetdancer]

IMO, Wildstar's housing should have been considered barely adequate instead of the Gold Standard MMO housing enthusiasts seem to consider it. Like many things in WS the community was able to work around some of the worst shortcomings of the interface thanks to their add-on API. Think of this: It was barely better than Bioware's NWN toolset and that was 10+ years old by the time WS released.

I would argue that comparing the Aurora Engine to an MMO housing system is sort of like comparing a sports car to a freight train; they both have wheels, yes, but they're sort of different categories, even if you can say "the train is better because it can pull more weight". And comparing a modern sports car to a train from the 1950's does not change the fact that you're comparing a car and a train.

If you're going to do that, then you might as well go "I can make more impressive stuff in the Unreal Engine than I could in WildStar housing" which, yes, is true. Because one is a game engine, and one is an MMO housing system.

I will definitely give you the fact that the default interface for editing housing in WildStar left something to be desired. But what you could build with that interface still seemed pretty powerful, and I've personally not encountered an MMO with more flexibility in what the end results of the housing system could be.

While it was completely instanced I've had significant better social interactions in both quality and quantity in WS than XIV's ward system. That's more the fault of XIV's awful chat interface and the lack of addons that allowed the RP community to replace WS's stock chat with one more suitable for RP.

Trust me, I'm well aware of the benefits of an addon system like that; I'm the one who wrote the original RP-aware chat log replacement during the WildStar closed beta—along with quite a few other things—and nearly took a job with the company as a result of that addon work. I'm already firmly sold on the "addons can be very beneficial" stance.