Crazy Idea: Everyone can get a house

[ASkellington]

You can buy an APT and FC room, again, for the third time i'm going to be saying this. And you can do things others can. Your FC can also put gardening plots down. There you go. You're welcome for me pointing that out ot you. Again

And I'll be the one to point out to you apartments and FC rooms are crap because they come in ONE SIZE ONLY.

That is the problem with apartments and has always been the problem with apartments (and by extension FC rooms). Until that gets addressed stop saying they're a suitable option.

Apartments CANNOT:

- Come in larger sizes

- Come with a floor or loft without glitching

- Be upgraded to have more space or items to be placed as a gil sink

- Be used to garden for certain plants

And before you decide to say it, I'll say it for you: there's already a thread of people asking for Apartment upgrades that SE has yet to implement.

[Doc_Seraph]

Kupo, I am content with my daily turn-down service provided at my penthouse suite at the Limsa Inn <3 kupo lol

[Warpstone]

Would be cool to have a house, but I seen the odds of getting one would be so far against me why even try. I would be happy with if they expanded the apartment size to 3 or 4 rooms with a balcony.

[Derio]

They would have to buy more instance servers to accomodate such a thing and we all know the current chip situation going on in the world so right now that isnt completely feasible at the moment.

[Packetdancer]

They would have to buy more instance servers to accomodate such a thing and we all know the current chip situation going on in the world so right now that isnt completely feasible at the moment.

I mean, I think the bigger problem is that with instanced housing you aren't sure what the required resources are.

MMOs -- at least of FFXIV's type -- tend to operate on an assumption of X amount of activity. We've seen when wards get overloaded and people can't enter the house, or when there are no servers available for a specific instanced duty, etc. Generally their predictions are accurate, but when things skew above that point, we do see the fact that the game -- as with most older MMO architectures -- runs on a set amount of specific hardware, which has limits as to how much load it can actually handle.

With the current housing wards, as I noted earlier, you have a set metric: X housing districts, multiplied by Y wards in each district, with Z houses in each ward. Make the assumption that, say, at most 60% of those houses are in use simultaneously, and you now have a set, concrete number for "you need this amount of computing resource to keep housing running." (And also, "you need this much storage to hold the state for all housing.") I suspect this is also why there is a set limit on apartments, and why apartments -- and FC private chambers -- are limited to a single small room; it's probably to keep the amount of resources any one occupies at a time minimal, thus able to have many more of them.

Anything that has a relatively open-ended number of active instances in this game is, you'll note, something where there's no state to be preserved. When you finish a dungeon, that instance can just go away entirely, any state destroyed/discarded. The game doesn't have to save off which enemies were killed, what treasure chests were opened, etc., in order to restore the same dungeon state next time you run that dungeon; next time you come back in, it's a freshly-loaded-from-defaults copy of the dungeon, with all the enemies and bosses still alive, all the treasure chests still waiting to be opened, etc. The same is seemingly true of inn rooms; they don't have to store anything, because you can't redecorate, so they can be recreated from scratch whenever you enter one. Which I imagine is also likely why inn rooms can't remember what orchestrion you put on when you leave and come back in. (I do think you could get around that by having a record on the character that is applied to each inn room after creation, but that's not really relevant to this discussion.)

Conversely, a house has to remember where all the furniture is, what wallpaper you used, what orchestrion you have playing, what retainers are where, what you have in the yard, etc. That needs to be stored, so that when you leave your house and come back, you don't have to redecorate again every single time.

So even if the server architecture could support instanced housing (which I don't think it can), predicting what resources would be needed for that would be a guessing game at best. With X districts * Y wards-per-district * Z houses-per-ward, you get a concrete number you can work with. Instanced housing could be any number from 0 (everyone decides eh, now that housing is instanced, they don't actually care) to "the entire playerbase". That's... a pretty wide range. Moreover, if you have instanced housing, players would expect to be able to unsubscribe and then resubscribe later and still have their house. That means that for anyone who ever opens an instanced house once, you need to keep around the entire housing record for them for all eternity. (Or until the remaining moon collides with the planet and the servers are shut off a second time.)

So, again: I don't think the developers aren't implementing instanced housing because they still think open-world housing is better; like I said earlier in the thread, I don't think anyone still thinks this system is better. Inanimate objects probably think this system is broken, which is honestly amazing because they can't even hold opinions in the first place! No, I think the developers continue to try to hold to the current system and try stopgap measures and band-aid fixes to improve it because the alternative is probably not viable, at least not without a major and massive reworking of the entire MMO's underlying server architecture.

This is part of why I like to suggest that FCs lose access to open-world housing and get instanced airships at a specific rank. There's still likely a whole slew of architectural problems with that, but the number of FCs -- especially of FCs who've ranked up significantly -- is way smaller than the number of players, which helps to reduce the problem to a (maybe) manageable size. And moving the FCs out of the open-world housing wards would also then free up big chunks of the current housing for personal houses instead.

(Moreover, architectural limitations notwithstanding, the fact that FCs have no ability to interact with the exploratory airship/submersible system or gardening or whatnot without having a house feels like a borderline-unforgivable design flaw. Housing, broken or otherwise, should not gate participation in entire other non-housing-decor-related systems. I understand how they got to that point, and sympathize, but anything else about housing aside, that is an issue that I do think really needs to be seriously addressed. Especially because I feel like that restriction helps to feed into the resentment of the current housing situation.)

[TaleraRistain]

Allow me to point out what instanced housing will never bring a player...



This screenshot I took of my message book it not to boast or brag. I don't even have any idea what would constitute a high number of likes and messages. I am posting it for a couple of other reasons:

The first is I don't know 597 players. Not even close, let alone talk to that many players. I think you can like a plot more than once, but I digress.

The second are the comments. I can only show one tab, but I have 3-4 tabs with comments about my home. I put an astonishing amount of time into my place, and it was finished long before message books were even available. Each and every single one of those comments made it all worth it. It also makes me wonder how many players have actually stopped by that I don't know about.

To know people have came and visited my plot, loaded into the house, looked around, loved it, and left me a comment, and did so completely unsolicited means so much. I can't even describe the elation that is felt. If housing was instanced, like so many players feel they want and would make things better; this would not exist. I would have this home I've spent hours on, and nobody can see it. It just exists in this little tiny corner in cyberspace. All by itself.

Might as well put instanced housing in Ultima Thule. That would be a very fitting zone to have them.

People can still see your work in EQII. You can set it so anyone can go inside. And there are outside areas. All they would need to do is have inside and outside in the instance and we could still have fully decorated houses like we have now. Even better, because your door would function as an inside-outside door instead of a portal completely separating things.

The one thing they could do to help is maybe have a way that someone can see a preview of the outside before they go into the instance. So that would still serve to grab someone's attention like neighborhoods do.

I mean Seraphor and Packetdancer have basically nailed it. It's technical limitations. But if they could figure out a way to handle those, then instanced housing could work very much like what we have now.

[Jybril]

Housing has been in shambles since it's release. I really don't care about neighbors at all.
I wanna decorate and own a mansion for myself. I have an Apartment that I've had since they
introduced them and I ain't seen anyone in my area for years. So, yeah.

We also shouldn't be having these silly, dumb lotteries that they can't do and it really
should not be a fight to own a house in a video game. It's ridiculous lmao.

[MicahZerrshia]

It is a 'crazy' idea because you're the thousandth person to request this despite the team stating for years its not possible given the servers as they are.

I have never heard that, but I do remember Yoshida saying years ago when asked, that we are not getting instanced housing because he prefers the ward system. That was a sore point for a lot of us at the time.

[SenorPatty]

Some of the responses about instanced housing is just absolutely mindblowing and I don't know if it's because these people are not knowledgeable about how other games ran their instanced housing or maybe they're just being obtuse about it or have limited imagination or a combination of all three. Seriously, go take a look at other game's instanced housing, do some research, then come back before saying things like instanced housing is an isolating experience or apartments are sufficient enough. Unless you're someone who really loves the exclusivity of owning a house or you simply just don't want SE to funnel resources to a hypothetical development of instanced housing, GO LEARN IT FROM SOME OTHER GAMES, then come back and make a proper case.

Also, I wish this was stickied somewhere but there has been absolutely NO STATEMENTS regarding housing in Island Sanctuary. None. I know I'm just yelling into the void with countless others because knowing this playerbase, when it does finally come, I can safely bet my life savings there will be at least three threads on day 1 release, complaining that housing didn't come.

[Jojoya]

Allow me to point out what instanced housing will never bring a player...



This screenshot I took of my message book it not to boast or brag. I don't even have any idea what would constitute a high number of likes and messages. I am posting it for a couple of other reasons:

The first is I don't know 597 players. Not even close, let alone talk to that many players. I think you can like a plot more than once, but I digress.

The second are the comments. I can only show one tab, but I have 3-4 tabs with comments about my home. I put an astonishing amount of time into my place, and it was finished long before message books were even available. Each and every single one of those comments made it all worth it. It also makes me wonder how many players have actually stopped by that I don't know about.

To know people have came and visited my plot, loaded into the house, looked around, loved it, and left me a comment, and did so completely unsolicited means so much. I can't even describe the elation that is felt. If housing was instanced, like so many players feel they want and would make things better; this would not exist. I would have this home I've spent hours on, and nobody can see it. It just exists in this little tiny corner in cyberspace. All by itself.

Might as well put instanced housing in Ultima Thule. That would be a very fitting zone to have them.

RIFT's housing proves you wrong. Their Dimensions systems are fully instanced and some of them have thousands of likes from players who discovered them from word of mouth or using the Dimension search tool.

As long as you enabled guest access to your house, thousands would still have the potential to see it. With RIFT's system, you were able to teleport directly into a housing instance from any open world or housing instance location.

So many players get hung up on wards because they've never experienced what a good instanced housing system can be.

Also, I wish this was stickied somewhere but there has been absolutely NO STATEMENTS regarding housing in Island Sanctuary. None. I know I'm just yelling into the void with countless others because knowing this playerbase, when it does finally come, I can safely bet my life savings there will be at least three threads on day 1 release, complaining that housing didn't come.

People have been confused by the translation of YoshiP's response to Shenpai's question during the media tour last Fall.

Where he was attempting to say housing has X features and Island Sanctuary will have features other than that, they took it to mean that Island Sanctuary would include the housing features.

It didn't help that a few content creators immediately jumped on the "it's housing!" bandwagon (though most if not all retracted those statements later).

That so many players are grasping to make those connections goes far in showing just how problematic the state of housing is. They're tired of band-aids. They want solutions.