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

[Wanzzo]

When this game came out they didn't expect so many players (even at the beginning with long queues and a very limited space for only 5000 players or something in each world).

So if they created the wards with only FCs in mind, I think they should just go for that. All plots for FCs only. One for each FC and nothing else. No more personal houses...

Besides, we all have access to the Inn's room, right? Is it possible to somehow make it customizable? (instanced, but allowing only 1 char - you, in this case). If that were the case, we would not need apartments and we would only have the FC house to receive our friends making the place even more interesting... (in this way, instead of an inn room, we receive a small "apartment" at the inn, see?). oh, and we could get rid of rooms inside the FC's house as well, in order to make way for more wards (for more FCs to come).

Am I making any sense or is this all junk in my mind and I have to shut up about it 'cause this wont solve nothing? '-'

[SenorPatty]

When this game came out they didn't expect so many players (even at the beginning with long queues and a very limited space for only 5000 players or something in each world).

So if they created the wards with only FCs in mind, I think they should just go for that. All plots for FCs only. One for each FC and nothing else. No more personal houses...

Besides, we all have access to the Inn's room, right? Is it possible to somehow make it customizable? (instanced, but allowing only 1 char - you, in this case). If that were the case, we would not need apartments and we would only have the FC house to receive our friends making the place even more interesting... (in this way, instead of an inn room, we receive a small "apartment" at the inn, see?). oh, and we could get rid of rooms inside the FC's house as well, in order to make way for more wards (for more FCs to come).

Am I making any sense or is this all junk in my mind and I have to shut up about it 'cause this wont solve nothing? '-'

This just feels like settling and when it comes to video game housing, people loathe settling. Whatever the original intent was when it came to housing, it's irrelevant now. People want a place they can call their own, of their choosing, of the size and location they want, where they have absolute control, this last part being something that FCs can't provide. There are those out there who feel FC housing or apartments should be enough but those people typically have their own personal housing of their taste or they don't have any stake in housing and are just looking to shut the issue up.

I know there are also those who are trying to explain why certain things can't happen for housing like instanced hosuing or near infinite wards but I'm gonna put my money on the thought that most people at this particular point in this game's life don't care or have stopped caring about the why's and are more interested in a proper, genuine fix.

[Packetdancer]

I know there are also those who are trying to explain why certain things can't happen for housing like instanced hosuing or near infinite wards but I'm gonna put my money on the thought that most people at this particular point in this game's life don't care or have stopped caring about the why's and are more interested in a proper, genuine fix.

I agree, honestly. I strongly suspect Square-Enix agrees.

But unfortunately, people being tired of it and wanting a fix doesn't change the fact that the only real fix -- instanced housing that supports all the features available to housing now -- almost certainly isn't possible with the game we have (or specifically, what we can reasonably infer about the server architecture, based on everything else in the game).

And any fix other than that one is still just going to be a bandage at best. Adding more wards...? Even if you added enough for every current active player to have a house, somehow, that's still only a temporary fix; we'd be right back here the next time the playerbase grew and there weren't enough houses for the new players to get one. Etc.

I think the closest you could come to a real fix would probably also not be popular. Namely, do away with personal housing entirely.

You can have personal quarters with your FC, and an apartment in one of the main cities (if you aren't in an FC). Demonstrably, it's feasible to have a large (albeit still finite) number of apartments or FC personal quarters, possibly because they are small and somewhat limited compared to the actual plots.

You can expand the apartments slightly, having a patio or 'rooftop garden' with a single gardening plot to allow gardening.

Then do away with the wards entirely. FCs with more than X members and who have achieved at least Y rank can get an instanced airship. The airship has a big open deck (for outside housing items), a greenhouse (for gardening), and a company workshop (for company workshop stuff). They can have personal quarters, just like an FC house can now.

It doesn't actually solve the issues this system faces in regards to instanced housing, but it places a limit on how many instanced houses (or, well, airships) can exist; the number of FCs that would meet the criteria of, say, "at least 5 different players" (not characters, players -- joining more than one alt to the FC would be fine but wouldn't count as more than one player) and "have hit at least rank 8" or something... that'd be a much smaller number than the number of total active players in this game. And it would also mean that Free Companies aren't locked out of having a company workshop if they happen to be unlucky when it comes to housing.

Because if you can't solve a resource-scarcity problem by making the resource infinite, the second-best option is to limit how much of the resource is consumed and hope the demand stays below the level where things break. (I suspect this is precisely why SQEX already currently requires you to reach a certain rank in your Grand Company before you can have an apartment.)

But I don't think folks would be super happy with that, either. Because it would be taking away a thing we have now -- personal houses where you can have yards and stuff -- and taking something away is never popular.

[Wanzzo]

This just feels like settling and when it comes to video game housing, people loathe settling. Whatever the original intent was when it came to housing, it's irrelevant now. People want a place they can call their own, of their choosing, of the size and location they want, where they have absolute control, this last part being something that FCs can't provide. There are those out there who feel FC housing or apartments should be enough but those people typically have their own personal housing of their taste or they don't have any stake in housing and are just looking to shut the issue up.

I know there are also those who are trying to explain why certain things can't happen for housing like instanced hosuing or near infinite wards but I'm gonna put my money on the thought that most people at this particular point in this game's life don't care or have stopped caring about the why's and are more interested in a proper, genuine fix.

Well, maybe this game just need a new and "modern" engine focusing on it's current size in gaming industry and not anymore on a limited by resources as it was created. A new housing system (without the conflicts with instanced stuff) and a lot of changes...
There, inside a new engine, they could solve all those problems we see now (I believe). And, maybe, put a little more effort on animations, graphics improvements (like the type they annouced, but even better). The 1.x version of the game had a slightly better animation on characters during cutscenes (at least, for my eyes. They felt more smooth and natural). Oh, and the problem with Viera's and the animation lock for high ping scores (like mine) could be adressed as well! Maybe, a new system and a new engine could get things on a better path?

Again, is my brain just going inside an insane trip, or this could fix anything? '-'

[Packetdancer]

Besides, we all have access to the Inn's room, right? Is it possible to somehow make it customizable? (instanced, but allowing only 1 char - you, in this case). If that were the case, we would not need apartments and we would only have the FC house to receive our friends making the place even more interesting... (in this way, instead of an inn room, we receive a small "apartment" at the inn, see?)

I'm going to go with a "maybe" on this one. You'd still need to store the inn "apartment" state on the server side -- if you kept it client-side and had to reinstall the game, or tried to play on a different computer, you'd be missing all the decor state. But as soon as it becomes a guaranteed-solo instance of something -- like the inn rooms -- and no one other than you can ever go in there, you do immediately get rid of the requirement for the instance itself to be handled on the server. That does functionally open up an infinite number of possible "inn apartment" instances, since no matter how many are in use, the client using each one is responsible for that instance.

(Side note: this is a factor in why the glamour dresser is only available in those solo instances, so far as I know.)

As soon as you add anything like a training dummy or whatnot, of course, you immediately need the place you are to exist on the server as well (for combat to work). And things like gardening are problematic, because you need the server to be authoritative on those; otherwise, people could just walk into their inn room and then hack the client to be like "the plants are ready" or "this plot now has Thavnairian onion seeds planted! Ignore the fact that I didn't actually have any!" or whatever.

(You can prevent that sort of stuff, but this game's architecture is also Not Great at that as it is even in shared instances where the client isn't the primary authority; witness gil-farming bots and people cheating in PvP or whatever. I can't imagine it would do better with instances where it has to trust even more that the client is telling it the truth about things.)

The biggest problem, though, is that by its very nature as a client-hosted solo instance, you cannot ever have anyone come and visit your hypothetical "inn apartment".

And that, more than anything, seems to be what appeals to many people about the housing system: the social aspect. Having friends over to see what you've done with decorating. Wandering around house-to-house to see what other people have done and get ideas. Being horrified that your friend has turned their FC personal quarters into a shrine to both moogles and Nanamo, and immediately leaving while resolving to never speak of this again. Randomly discovering your in-game spouse has turned the basement of their house into a small cult-room, with a horde of stuffed Alphas in a ritual circle clearly trying to summon a primal. Etc.

(And yes, those are both actual things that happened.)

As SenorPatty says, I don't think removing the social aspect of housing would be a popular choice.

Well, maybe this game just need a new and "modern" engine focusing in it's current size in gaming industry and not on a limited by resources that it was created anymore. A new housing system and a LOT of changes...

Sure, it could absolutely use a newer and more flexible architecture. But keep in mind, the changes -- at least insofar as housing is concerned -- would need to be on the server side (which is, I guarantee you, a great deal more code than the client side). And moreover, that making those sort of changes would be on at least the scale of shutting down 1.x and creating A Realm Reborn.

They would, in essence, need to shut down this MMO and create a new one.

Again.

Though, hey, we do still have one moon left...

(Also, aw. The forum says I've posted too much for today and it's cutting my posting privileges off until tomorrow. So, uh, I guess I'll be quiet for a bit.)

[Arzalis]

At the end of the day, the ward system is incredibly wasteful. Since house interiors are instanced on demand, they are infinitely more efficient than the actual wards themselves.

The part of this that people seem to not realize is that each division/subdivision of a ward seems to be "always on." This means the servers are always dedicating resources to it, even if zero players are present. It's impossible to know without seeing internal stuff, but I'd very much wager the resource cost of running the wards is significantly more than the subset of houses inside them that are active at any time.

When you think about that and then really consider how many wards, divisions, and subdivisions the game has a lot of arguments about the server cost of running instanced houses really start to break down.

You mentioned needed to be able to supply enough instances from 0 players to the total number of accounts, but that's not very realistic. You only need enough to cover the average amount of housing instances that are actively open with a little bit of overhead for random surges in demand, which would be very rare. They already basically do this for dungeon instances, so it's probably not a particularly hard problem for them to figure out. Absolute worst case scenario, in periods of excessive demand, there's a small queue to get into a house. I think that is infinitely better than the current system where most people get nothing at all.

The resources are there, they're just being allocated poorly because the system isn't very well designed in a lot of ways. It was very much intended for a smaller player base.

Short term though, they could allow apartments and FC rooms to be upgraded in size. There's functionally no difference between an apartment interior and a housing interior except more item positions saved in a database and a different layout. Both things are negligible in terms of the anything the server is concerned about. They would also probably want to look into expanding the number of apartments since they are more or less full on some servers. This was actually mentioned as something they are capable of doing when apartments were first introduced. They've just never actually done it.

[Iscah]

Another strike against customisable inn rooms is that there isn't one room but several, and they're not interchangeable. The early ones not so much, though you'd still probably not want to drop decorations from one into another; Ishgard has the fireplace; Kugane the railed-off entrance and side window; Crystarium and Sharlayan utterly different to the others, and used as story locations besides.

[Valfreyja]

I love the idea of an instanced Airship for an FC.
Assign a cost to purchase it at around 25 million or so and let it be one size for all. Say like a Medium to Large interior.
Remove all the Housing Districts and replace them. Apartments and FC Private Chambers for personal stuff.
If any FC can just put down 25 million for an Airship, then it destroys the FC Resale Market.
Sure, you will get some that set up an FC, get the Airship, level the workshop/rank up the FC.
But the buyers will be significantly fewer. Some whales might buy for convenience.
However it's a lot more work involved, and substantial risk in that nobody will want to purchase it.

Gardening on the Island Sanctuary.
Hydroponic Interior Placeables for Apartments/FC Rooms/Airship Interiors.
Set the current Garden patches to the Deck of the Airship.

Move Workshop access to your Grand Company. Require a permit of 5 million or so gil to get setup. Let them start with a free Bronco Airship as well. Fuel purchased from the Grand Company for seals, or let people buy it for straight gil at a higher cost. Reduce Materials on Projects that require heavy GC seal purchases (the ones that require Coke and the like).

None of this should be "exclusive" or locked behind anything. It should be open to all.

Bare Minimum: The Workshop entry should be placed at the Grand Company Squadron door, and immediately available to any FC at rank 6. Whether you own a house or not.