Housing Solution Proposals

[Kailani]

TLDR: There is a severe housing shortage on many servers, and I think that Square Enix should fix it by giving us the option to buy island sanctuary lighthouses, regional instanced houses, customizable ships, or by adding more wards.

I am a sprout here, but when I play other games, I love playing with their housing features. I enjoy making a pretty customized house or business, then showing it to friends or opening it for public viewing. But here, it is nearly impossible to buy a house, due to the severe shortage. It took me several weeks to get even an apartment, as all of the apartment buildings on Balmung were completely full. While I do like the community housing system FFXIV currently has, it is quite vexing to be unable to buy a house or even an apartment in a timely manner. So, I have thought of some possible solutions to this problem, that would preserve the uniqueness of the current housing while giving sprouts and solo players another way to decorate.

1. Island Sanctuary Lighthouses. Island sanctuaries are already going to be instanced, so they are a perfect place to add new housing. Because they are islands, and to differentiate them from existing housing, we should be able to build lighthouses on them. These lighthouses could have a different interior layout (tall and octagonal perhaps?) than current houses, and different exterior designs than existing estates, to preserve the desirability of the current housing system. But it would still give us a cool place to decorate, hang out in, and show off to friends.

2. Instanced houses with a fixed region-based appearance. For instance, you could have a treehouse in the Shroud, a windmill in La Noscea, or an observatory in Coerthas. These would not have modifiable exteriors and would, again, be very different from current housing while still providing an alternative.

3. Add more wards to servers with high housing demand. This solution is likely the simplest, since it does not require designing any new structures.

4. Large airships, boats, or submersibles as housing. These vehicles are very cool, and would provide a way to add instanced housing that fits perfectly with lore and world design. Since these vehicles are often out at sea, or in the sky, it makes sense that they can only be visited by friends and associates of the captain. We often see them during quests, and ride them, so we should be able to buy them. We could paint them, swap out their major components, and decorate an interior with a ship-shaped layout for a change. This would also be great for players who roleplay as pirates, pilots, and fishers.

I think that any of these solutions could solve the housing crisis, or at least reduce its severity, by giving players (especially sprouts) a way to enjoy decorating a home without having to wait weeks or months for a vacant apartment or a lottery win.

[Greyhawk]

Reinventing the already spinning wheel isn't a solution (#2). Instance the existing structure, I've laid it out how it could be done in another post.

#3 - Stop this mindset. Throwing more wards is not a long-term solution. Instancing an existing structure is one. I refer to this as the 'same turd, same smell scenario'.

#1 & #4 - We can't even get enough housing for people. Your proposals aren't solutions to a problem, they are really making more of a mess of an existing one, IMO.

[Kailani]

#1,#2, and #4 are all suggestions for instanced housing, which would give enough housing for everyone. Just not the exact same type of houses that the wards have. I like the ward system, and I'm sure many other players do too. It is nice to look at other players' homes, and it is useful for roleplay events. Instead of just instancing the existing housing, I would prefer they add an additional housing system that is instanced. I would be fine with instanced versions of existing houses, but I think a new type of house for the instanced housing would be more exciting. Also, island sanctuaries are already going to be customizable and instanced. Logically, it makes sense to put housing on them.

#3 is not the best long term solution imo, but it would be the easiest and quickest one for Square Enix to implement. Which is why I suggested it. Any other solution requires them to create new systems at least, and maybe new structures, which will take time and money.

[Divinemights]

#1,#2, and #4 are all suggestions for instanced housing, which would give enough housing for everyone. Just not the exact same type of houses that the wards have. I like the ward system, and I'm sure many other players do too. It is nice to look at other players' homes, and it is useful for roleplay events. Instead of just instancing the existing housing, I would prefer they add an additional housing system that is instanced. I would be fine with instanced versions of existing houses, but I think a new type of house for the instanced housing would be more exciting. Also, island sanctuaries are already going to be customizable and instanced. Logically, it makes sense to put housing on them.

#3 is not the best long term solution imo, but it would be the easiest and quickest one for Square Enix to implement. Which is why I suggested it. Any other solution requires them to create new systems at least, and maybe new structures, which will take time and money.

Whether you accept it or not, FF14 already has instanced housing in which is called FC room and Apartment.
Air ship may sound interesting at a glance, but practically impossible due to the size of "airship" in FF14.
You may suggest to force lore to have Ragnarok class airship from FF8 into FF14; but still not making sense because interior space will not be bigger than apartment and still no "garden"

[Kailani]

Whether you accept it or not, FF14 already has instanced housing in which is called FC room and Apartment.
Air ship may sound interesting at a glance, but practically impossible due to the size of "airship" in FF14.
You may suggest to force lore to have Ragnarok class airship from FF8 into FF14; but still not making sense because interior space will not be bigger than apartment and still no "garden"

Apartments are technically instanced, but they are not unlimited housing. On Balmung the supply of apartments often runs out. There are currently a few left in Empyreum, but all other apartment buildings are generally at capacity, and Empyreum will probably run out within a month or two as well. FC rooms are effectively unlimited housing, but they are only accessible to players who are in an FC that owns a house. If you are not in a FC, or want to help start and grow a new FC, you cannot get one. When I said instanced housing I was thinking of a form of housing that allows every single player who wants one to buy one.

And yes, I suppose the airships are a bit too small. I was thinking about the size of real airships when I wrote it, but FFXIV has much smaller ones. Lighthouses and sailing ships would definitely still be large enough (I think both could be the size of a medium house), and those would both fit well thematically with island sanctuaries. I am not worried about gardens since the island sanctuaries are already intended to be a way for all players to garden and raise chocobos without needing an FC or needing to compete with other players.

[Divinemights]

Apartments are technically instanced, but they are not unlimited housing. On Balmung the supply of apartments often runs out. There are currently a few left in Empyreum, but all other apartment buildings are generally at capacity, and Empyreum will probably run out within a month or two as well. FC rooms are effectively unlimited housing, but they are only accessible to players who are in an FC that owns a house. If you are not in a FC, or want to help start and grow a new FC, you cannot get one. When I said instanced housing I was thinking of a form of housing that allows every single player who wants one to buy one.

And yes, I suppose the airships are a bit too small. I was thinking about the size of real airships when I wrote it, but FFXIV has much smaller ones. Lighthouses and sailing ships would definitely still be large enough (I think both could be the size of a medium house), and those would both fit well thematically with island sanctuaries. I am not worried about gardens since the island sanctuaries are already intended to be a way for all players to garden and raise chocobos without needing an FC or needing to compete with other players.

Again, Balmung problem is unique of its own because people refuse to get off that server.
Apartment on other servers are pretty empty so is FC housing.
They certainly can add more apartment space as they said they have that ability but there is really no point to do it just for one server.

[UkcsAlias]

#3 - Stop this mindset. Throwing more wards is not a long-term solution. Instancing an existing structure is one. I refer to this as the 'same turd, same smell scenario'.

This most likely also matters on how wards are handled. I think this currently is relatively inefficient. Caching can do a lot at optimizing here, but because everything is dynamic and also relies on collisions, its not as easy as it seems to apply this. But with caching a single ward can very likely be just as easy to manage as a single house (caching servers are often optimized for transfering data, and while delayed, they can handle mutations quite well). But as things like collisions matter, this atm doesnt seem to be an option, and as a result each ward needs to be calculated seperately. If those collisions would not be considered, then you can effectively handle the same number of players that are in for example limsa, but in all wards at the same time. And this scales up VERY well then.

Instancing is just efficient handling of a resource. And wards on that should just be handled similar to an instance like a house. A lot of collisions are relatively easy to check: basic collisions that are from the ward itself are always applied and dont need any extra check, houses themselve are already taken care if even if not built. Its only the objects that players can place that matter, and delaying here does seem to be an issue as collisions might end up strange.

I even think that while most regions do require quite strict collision detection, houses on that shouldnt care too much, client side checking would in most cases be fine. If someone ends up under the map, their client could still correct this. Since teleporting within such region is not that much of an issue exploit wise. There is nothing to gain other than a little bit of time (and obvious abuse can still be detected anyway since coordintes can still be checked on a speed aspect, even if that is just a rough check).

Now the object count is an insteresting discussion, since people also complain about not being able to place enough of thoes. A large house can store 400 inside, yet a ward (actualy its subdivision) can store like 800 of them. Wards are on that relatively expensive, but at the same time, the objects within do not change often and are very restricted in placement, both which are generaly well suitable for compression and caching. If wards are properly instanced, maybe even those object counts can increase.

More wards is because of that still a possibility. Its most likely however not a simple thing to do because it most likely requires a complete rework of code to make these wards work as instances. And thats why i think islands have a higher priority, they are a very good test for instancing with a lot more objects. And unlike wards, you can restrict the load here a lot better.

[Greyhawk]

IMO, Island Sanctuary already showed us that they can instance housing. Everyone can get their own instanced island and expand it. I'm sure we would all love for them to make this a housing solution, but we know it won't be - at least not right away. This is me hoping that SE sees the potential for this and gives us the option to make it an option for housing at some point. With all the work that was done to current and new wards and locations, I seriously doubt it will ever come to fruition.

Time and money is something we know SE has, especially after posting their profits so far. Every single expansion has used the same excuse - more hardware needed. Nothing new here, and we know they need more hardware for housing which they have but are only adding two more wards. What they should be doing instead is instancing housing.

I've said this before - we can still have the 'neighborhood feeling' that you and Yoshi-P want to experience, even though I've never seen my neighbors at all, I wouldn't mind that either. You can do it by having one ward per city, instance the housing at the entrance to the plot instead of the house. This allows people to pick what size, decorations, gardening, dyes, etc. to have at their plot they purchased. It gets rid of some of the most idiotic instancing we have to go through now for housing. It keeps the neighborhood, where the one ward is your common area. Teleport to your friends' houses using your Friends list like we have now, or pick from the list of houses at the NPC like we can now.

Instancing can help with their hardware issues - this is why we run VMs in a server environment, it's no different here. It allocates resources based off need, not dedicating resources to things that don't need it, or even over-dedicating resources. Empty wards still requires overhead to run whether or not they are filled with players. SE needs to really start thinking about efficiency with their structured mess of a system and stop making things more complicated than they need to be. Like I said in the past - we are all in this position because of a certain director's pride and not letting go of wards because he wants that 'neighborhood feeling'. Set the pride aside and start thinking.

[Kaiproberts]

Why do people always suggest instanced housing? There is a reason a lot of us are obsessed with housing in this game. It is very rare for a game to have non-instanced housing and it is the reason I started playing the game in the first place. I don't even participate in combat in the game; I just like the housing. So no, we can't just have instanced housing because it would ruin the whole point of housing for some people. More wards, and unfortunately more SE money spent on servers, is the only way.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

Why do people always suggest instanced housing? There is a reason a lot of us are obsessed with housing in this game. It is very rare for a game to have non-instanced housing and it is the reason I started playing the game in the first place. I don't even participate in combat in the game; I just like the housing. So no, we can't just have instanced housing because it would ruin the whole point of housing for some people. More wards, and unfortunately more SE money spent on servers, is the only way.

I mean you could have both. If we are able to have every player have their own personal island alongside wards already existing. Why can we not also have instanced houses o.0