"Housing is Pain", or "Why We Can't Have Nice (Instanced) Things"

[KurohNeko]

People greater underestimate the toll and cost on servers instanced housing would take when we just had a problem playing the game itself when Endwalker launched due to the influx of new people. Not to mention the issue you brought up of people buying a house changing the wallpaper or something and never logging on again or not logging on for months taking up server resources. I don't think instanced housing like that will be possible anytime soon, maybe if it were a separate subscription rate you pay on top of your current subscription but I can already hear the bitching from people.

As for housing locked game features, that's not really broken considering it doesn't hamper the rest of the game and is a nice exclusive feature for those who got a house. Same goes for free companies and air ships and submarines and stuff.

[Skivvy]

Gonna preface this by saying I know nothing of coding and the like, and it will probably show, buuuut.......as far as our "instanced" options in XIV, are the inns, apartments and house interiors not on the same playing field so to speak? Functionally speaking, inns are incredibly limited, but you're still popping off into your own little space, no? :X

I can begrudgingly accept that what I consider to be "proper instanced housing" will never exist in this game due to <reasons>, but I would still like to see things tweaked so that all players have access to the various activities that are currently only available if you own a house (cross-breeding, making higher-tier buffs and the workshop). I'm hoping island sanctuary takes care of the cross-breeding concern, but perhaps they need to look into building a stand-alone workshop instance where those poor homeless FCs can do the other activities.

Anyhoo, going back to the inns, I think it would be spiffy if they gave those an upgrade so that you could actually decorate the interior at the very least. This would essentially give every player some very basic housing using an already existing feature. If loading personalized rooms into each of the various inns is too much (again, NO idea how all that works...), have the player set a city as their main hub or something, then have the other inns just show as default decor when they visit (à la XI).

[Heavenchild]

but I would still like to see things tweaked so that all players have access to the various activities that are currently only available if you own a house (cross-breeding, making higher-tier buffs and the workshop).

Most people with houses don't do crossbreeding. It's just too..., complicated. :')
Most do when they have their house 'new'. And then never touch this again. xD

(same for the higher buffs)

[Packetdancer]

Most people with houses don't do crossbreeding. It's just too..., complicated. :')
Most do when they have their house 'new'. And then never touch this again. xD

(same for the higher buffs)

This is not actually entirely true, in my experience. I'm sure it's true for some folks, yes!

But my FC often has a Thavnairian Onion loop going in one stage or another, because we keep the FC chest stocked for newcomers who are leveling their chocobos. I also spent the better part of a year gathering the materials (via submersible) to stockpile the Grade 3 company buffs for XP and reduced teleport costs, as well as charging them up ahead of time. We were thus able to have chonky buffs up constantly for quite a while when Endwalker launched (month and a half or so, I think it was). And I know of at least three other FCs who did the same sort of buff stocking, albeit in less obscene quantities than I aimed for.

(I grant I won't bother with the grade 3 buffs again until like... probably somewhere in patch 6.3, but once we're there I'm absolutely going to start that long project once more, to prep stockpiles for whatever 7.0 might be.)

And I know quite a few people who enjoy the gardening system and tinker with it. The "tenant" slots on my house are actually all used up by friends who do not have a house and like to play with gardening; I just use the FC plots for my own gardening projects (as they're basically always on behalf of the FC), and let the friends in question use my yard for theirs.

[Iscah]

But I'd argue that gardening and FC airships aren't "rewards" for housing, but other systems on their own. And the reason I say this is that there are people who do not care about housing -- they don't want to do interior decoration, they don't care about how the house looks. But they do care about doing airships, or crossbreeding seeds, or whatever. I don't think it's a benefit to gate those behind housing when the result is you end up with people buying houses who don't actually use them as houses, just a place to have a garden plot or for their FC folks to work on construction projects.

...And that seems a design flaw, at least to me.

If I can speculate on why they would want to limit access to gardening and airship building, I think it would be to limit the daily flow of "making gil out of nothing" into the game, same as things like levequests have a daily limit. Tying it to the finite number of houses could therefore make sense, especially as the system was originally intended to be strictly for FCs while personal housing would be implemented in some other way that either never eventuated or was supposed to be limited to personal rooms and apartments.

If that was the intended approach and they had stuck to it, then theoretically every house would be occupied by an FC and there could be someone in every FC tending a predetermined maximum number of garden plots and airship voyages.

[Packetdancer]

If I can speculate on why they would want to limit access to gardening and airship building, I think it would be to limit the daily flow of "making gil out of nothing" into the game, same as things like levequests have a daily limit. Tying it to the finite number of houses could therefore make sense, especially as the system was originally intended to be strictly for FCs while personal housing would be implemented in some other way that either never eventuated or was supposed to be limited to personal rooms and apartments.

That's a fairly astute observation. I hadn't considered it, but I actually should have, because I've done stuff like that to try to put economic limits on things in games before. Not professionally developed games in this case, but just the sort of "written in spare time" games that folks throw out there on the internet.

(It doesn't work, for the record; the best you can do is slow it, at least in my experience. If you set up a sort of invisible "central bank" and put any money paid to NPCs or taken as market tax or whatever into that central bank, you can pay out from that when people sell to NPCs or whatever. But that creates the possibility that if the "central bank" runs out, people can't sell to NPCs any more. Or that running things/questing doesn't give you money anymore, because there's none to give. Have the bank just create more money when it runs out, and you're right back to "money out of thin air" at which point you might as well not bother with all the effort of some sort of central bank. ANYway.)

But even if that was the original intent, which I can believe, I'd argue that the airship has sailed on that. (Ha ha.)

Submersibles and gardening are the least of the economic balance problems on this game, and I suspect that locking folks out of those systems does more harm (bitterness/resentment of the housing system blocking people from stuff) than good (some degree of slowing the literal money-faucet creating money out of thin air); I'd thus argue it's proven to not be a good design. And that is something that can be changed.

[Driavna]

That's a fairly astute observation. I hadn't considered it, but I actually should have, because I've done stuff like that to try to put economic limits on things in games before. Not professionally developed games in this case, but just the sort of "written in spare time" games that folks throw out there on the internet.

(It doesn't work, for the record; the best you can do is slow it, at least in my experience. If you set up a sort of invisible "central bank" and put any money paid to NPCs or taken as market tax or whatever into that central bank, you can pay out from that when people sell to NPCs or whatever. But that creates the possibility that if the "central bank" runs out, people can't sell to NPCs any more. Or that running things/questing doesn't give you money anymore, because there's none to give. Have the bank just create more money when it runs out, and you're right back to "money out of thin air" at which point you might as well not bother with all the effort of some sort of central bank. ANYway.)

But even if that was the original intent, which I can believe, I'd argue that the airship has sailed on that. (Ha ha.)

Submersibles and gardening are the least of the economic balance problems on this game, and I suspect that locking folks out of those systems does more harm (bitterness/resentment of the housing system blocking people from stuff) than good (some degree of slowing the literal money-faucet creating money out of thin air); I'd thus argue it's proven to not be a good design. And that is something that can be changed.

Gardening and FC ventures don't create gil out of thin air (not in any relevant quantity, their npc value usually is double digits), their value come from the market place and it has a tax attach to it already. Said tax remove some gil from the economy.

Problem here was SE repurposing a concept designed to be exclusive and out of reach for your regular solo player.

[Azuri]

Gardening and FC ventures don't create gil out of thin air (not in any relevant quantity, their npc value usually is double digits), their value come from the market place and it has a tax attach to it already. Said tax remove some gil from the economy.

Oh, you sweet summer child. So who is going to tell them?

I recommend doing a bit if research before making such absolutist statements. You can print 400k gil per day quite literally out of thin air with the right knowledge.

[Thorio]

I would be happy if they just copied bdo's housing system.

[RealityCheck]

Copy Rifts housing 100% and finally have the best housing in any game.

Ability to BUILD and create beyond placing items and glitching lol

This housing design is a disgrace...not to mention not enough for everyone lol ffs how ridiculous