Potential Housing Solution

[Necrotica]

Have been doing some research and found this.

"In massively multiplayer online games, an instance is a special area, typically a dungeon, that generates a new copy of the location for each group, or for a certain number of players, that enters the area. Instancing, the general term for the use of this technique, addresses several problems encountered by players in the shared spaces of virtual worlds."

Now my idea is to take this concept for dungeons and apply it to player housing.

Think about it! Each house could exist in one of these 'instance' things. And instead of a limited number, more could be created whenever a new player purchases a house. This could then allow everyone to buy a house of any size they wanted!

I have put much time and effort into this research. And while I do not expect any kind of payment for this totally new and original idea, maybe some mog station credit wouldn't be out of the question.

HOLY CRAP! Just thought of this! What if you used money you made from the mog station to help with the housing issues!

Ah wait wait wait. You already said you would do that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttP4vMOWSVo&t=7s

[Soma_Farkreath]

what a shocking idea SE should hire you right away! i cant believe they couldn't come up with this themselves XD

[Juun]

We already have instanced housing its called apartments.

[Theodric]

We already have instanced housing its called apartments.

They're by no means equal to the benefits provided by an actual house. They're much smaller and outdoor furniture can't be used.

I say this as someone who is lucky enough to own a house of my own and who has looked at how rival MMO's such as ESO somehow manage to provide player housing to everybody and avoid demolishing someone's house if that player happens to take a break.

[Packetdancer]

While at a first glance, instanced housing seems to solve all the problems, it is worth remembering that this game dates to an earlier era, and has both finite resources—as opposed to resources that dynamically scale—and that almost all instancing systems do have a point where the instancing system runs out of actual "space to put instances" (or otherwise breaks down).

We've seen this in the game already in a number of places. It's obscured for dungeons because we do not expect an instance to always be available immediately; many people are queued in as incomplete parties, and if you run out of servers to instance a duty on, you can just temporarily not fill those incomplete parties and leave people in queue until resources free up.

But other systems can make the limits more obvious. Even with the current limited housing, it's possible to run up against hard limits. We saw it early in Endwalker, where people could not enter their houses because there were simply no more servers left on which to instance said housing. We've seen it on other systems, too, like the infamous "Raubahn (Extreme)" situation at Stormblood's launch, among other things.

Instance servers are likely not entirely interchangeable. And while it's possible to add resources to make it possible to have more instances, it's not possible to make it entirely open-ended. If every single player suddenly created housing for themselves, you could have anywhere from "no one in houses at this time" to "every single online player at once", and that's a wide range of potentially required resources.

This game's server architecture is, in all likelihood, a Mess. (Many server architectures are.) And the main reason I strongly suspect there are architectural issues that do not allow housing instances (which we already have for house interiors) to scale to the level that you could have one for every single player?

Originally, when this system came out, Square-Enix would talk about how they thought it was a good idea. But now? Any time they mention housing, it is to apologize, or else to try to stick band-aids on it to hold it together. If they still believed it was the right approach, we would see them explain why this system is a good one—what the benefits they see in it are. The fact that they don't do that—that they instead apologize for it—tells me they don't have that faith in it any longer. It feels like there's no way they don't know it's a bad system at this point.

So the fact that they haven't tried to do more than scale the current system—and apologize for it along the way—strongly suggests to me that there are issues with the game's current architecture which make it impractical to do.

[Doragan]

Yeah, instanced housing.

It's probably not going to happen due to a few reasons really.

1. The cheer amount of data that would require for every character/account, atleast with the current infrastructure. You would need to set its data to "default" for all "27 million service accounts" (according to the trailers) too. "Why not just initialise/default the data when someone asks for it for the first time?" Well, that would lead to load times, queue times, and a huge strain when everyone comes to get theirs ready once the feature is out. After all, aside from like load times (which are local, due to your console/PC) and matchmaking times, that would asking the customer to wait until their side of the data is ready. That could be a PR/IT nightmare if not handled properly. You would also need to hire and train new people to this purpose. On top of the maintenance that was taken to implement the feature. Making a system that would be guarenteed to work with all of them. And ofc, that would mean making sure that their servers can handle the weight of all that data. I'm sure it must not be really heavy for a single person since it's mostly coordinate numbers and stuff, but it's still something to consider. Plus, currently you don't really have a limit to the amount of people that can enter a house or be outside. You would need to have a limit to the amount of friends you have over with an instance.
   
2. Unfortunately, you can't just put housing in an instance and call it a day. You would need to save the data everytime you come and leave. Since it would be an active place, that would also mean needing to initalise the data server side, then copy you in. You don't need to do that with current housing because the data is passive there. You can log off and it will be there at all times. Not instanced housing. It could take some time to load, and also, due to how things are currently done, it would need a timer. Are you ready to get kicked off your home every 120 minutes? I can imagine it being bothersome for a lot of people.
   
3. How would that work as gil sink? Because yeah, buying a terrain is pretty much the main gil sink system integrated to the game currently. I mean by that that the gil you use will just go to the void, everytime some buys a plot. If everyone gets access to an instanced housing area with a single plot, should it be higher priced or lower priced than the current one? How would you price it fairly? Remember, there's a demolition timer if you didn't visit your house for a while. How would that work with instanced housing?

Ok, that was the 10 minutes risk assessment.
Let's be honest, that would've been done if SE saw a direct way to monetise it. For the low low price of like 5£ per month all of these issues would've been dealt with in less than a day. However, that would lock a signficant amount of content behind another paywall. I'm not sure a lot of people would be willing to spend extra money for their own houses in game, when current players don't need to pay for it if they own a house already. I think that would create a fairness issue, too. Though, remember they did lock one retainer slot to the Companion App behind a separate sub. Though, I'm sure that the number of the Companion App subs are really, REALLY low for them to have shot down that idea, though, but it's just speculation.

tldr; Money. They need to get more people to assess, implement and help with troubleshooting if issues arises with it, so that would mean a little less money for them. So probably not for now.

I would like bigger appartments personally. Wouldn't solve the issue, but atleast you would have some better options than a glorified FC room.
Maybe if they give a full, static server for housing specifically, that could solve a lot of the issues.

All of this being said, if you want it, please, keep the conversation going. Send messages about what you wish to have in the game, so it can be loud and clear to the dev team, and SE.