Mog House Thread [dev1002][dev1017]

[Psion]

The second half to the mog house epic I'm composing!

The Support Facilities

Along with options for making your basic house structure, there would be a second set of options, those of supporting structures. These would be things like a blacksmith's forge, or a garden outside you could harvest from. Like housing options, each level increase includes more options than the last, with different looks and better bonuses. A simple blacksmith's forge that gives basic guild support for free (hey, you already paid for the forge) might open up a couple different looking options for better forges, that give advanced guild support instead of basic. Along with various guild facilities, you can also make landscaping options, allowing a safe place for disciples of the hand to gather wares. For instance, you might first buy the ability to create a grade 1 harvesting node in exchange for lots of gil and some items like moko grass for their seeds, which has basic crap items. Buying this option would open up the ability to create grade 2 nodes using grade 2 items and gil, and the ability to improve the results of your grade 1 node for gil and better grade 1 items. So your grade 1 node might only have moko grass at first, but you can add more items to it by bringing more of that item and some gil to seed the nodes with those plants. Of course, to balance this out, it would be pretty costly to make this safe haven of gathering paradise, and you probably would have to make a sort of minimum spacing requirement to keep people from placing a few harvesting nodes right next to each other and leveling super quickly to 50 botanist, but I'm sure the development team can think of how to do that. ^^

Of course, not just harvesting nodes can be created, but all nodes. Trees you can plant that let you log (obviously before you can create any node you need a place for the node to be gathered from!), rivers and ponds you can aquascape to fish and spearfish from, an entrance to an extensive underground cave and boulders you can mine and quarry from. But not only can these be places to gather from, they can also be used for aesthetics too! You might give items and gil to mog to create visible fish that swim around in your pond, a miniature bridge to cross your river, birds to roost in your trees, glowing crystals and stalagmites to decorate your cave. You could even have things like underground rivers and ponds as well, and things like fungi to grow in them.

The Furnishings

The last type of items would be furnishings, and like FFXI, these would be simply crafted and sold on the marketplace and no requirements are needed to place them in your residential area. Of course, because this wouldn't just be a room but an actual house with an outdoor area, the type of furnishings you could make can be quite varied, from a simple bed, to a couch, to an outdoor patio complete with iron-wrought chairs and table to gather with friends at. Some items might give moghancements as well, or do interesting things, such as a music box that lets you change the area's music to any song you've heard in the game before and bought the record for.

Interaction with Other Players

As for the house itself, it would probably best to keep it to an instance, providing a low lag area and quiet place for the player. However, they can invite people over to their house, opening up interesting options! For instance, you could choose to make your house open to friends and linkshell members of your choosing, so that whenever they want to drop by they can do so. You could also create entrance tickets that you can then trade or put in your bazaar, for rental purposes. That is to say, if you have a great mog house that has superior crafting facilities that surpass even the guilds, or high grade nodes with lots of items, you could sell tickets that give x amount of hours to enter your house and make use of the facilities and nodes. This could create a new market for people who spend the huge amounts of gil, items, and time to create the best places to gather and craft in, or those who have a gorgeous mansion and want to lend them out to people wanting a great place to have a linkshell meeting or event in. These tickets would have an option that a potential buyer could view to see what facilities and other relevant information that house has, a preview picture of the house, and a comment from the seller.

There is a possible problem from RMT, which is abuse by having a bunch of them pooling gil and resources together to create a mega crafting/gathering facility and using it to bot from, but because it's an instanced area, it should be easy to detect such bots. If someone has been gathering and crafting and such for the last two days nonstop for instance, it's obviously a red flag to check for botting behavior! And of course, in this case, it wouldn't just be one RMT but a whole cluster of them, allowing for the Special Task Force to clear them all out, get rid of the house in question that cost them a large investment in, and put a major hurt in their operations!

The Future, and Conclusion

Whew! After all these words, you might wonder if such a system would be worth the time to create. My answer is, of course! There are many players who play a game simply to "play house" so to speak. Look at the popularity of "The Sims", or "Minecraft", and you can see there's a large market for players who simply like to decorate their homes and live their life. You could potentially attract a large playerbase from this alone, as the graphics and potential of FFXIV is far higher than other games of this type, and an added bonus of other activities you can do along with it. It would also generate a large amount of content to do, and remove lots and LOTS of items and gil from the economy. This is always a good thing, especially as the game currently lacks itemsinks and gilsinks. Because the items would come from all sorts of sources, it would provide new ways for disciples of the hand, land, war, and magic to all make gil. On top of that, you can also connect future content to mog houses. For instance, if you add the ability for players to breed chocobos in this game, you could have the option to build a chocobo stables to the support facilities category, and let the players raise chocobos in their own home, taking their darling chick through strolls in the garden, letting it fall asleep on the couch, and showing it off to friends. A delivery box system could be put in place with Mog to receive packages, you could do gardening like with FFXI... there's so many possibilities with this system!

It would take a lot of work, but let's not get stuck in the same old boxes we called home in FFXI. A system like this would have vast potential to add content to this game, allowing for new synthesis systems, new quests, customization, a place for players to relax in, a boon to the economy, attract new players, and more. With the amount of threads that appeared in the feedback forums already requesting mog housing, it's clearly a hot topic, so let's give the players what they want!



On another note, here is the previous thread on this forum before the forums got split into new catergories:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ate-residences

and the original thread on Zam's feedback forum that started it all:

http://ffxiv.zam.com/forum.html?foru...6283820&page=1

Finally, I'm really sorry this took up so much space. I have a tendency to ramble on. But I'd love feedback as well, and this could also be a thread for other ideas on mog houses!