FC Great Hall and Personal Housing: Separate and Unrelated Housing: In Depth View

[SerenityLuministia]

(Scroll down to SUMMERY section near bottom of post, if you want the highlights of the in-depth post)

We are all very frustrated with housing including myself, so instead of talking about all the faults with the current system as many have already done in great lengths. I would instead like to talk about what I think this game needs instead of the system we currently have. I would like to also add that this is my opinion that I thought about in great lengths about and would like others to add their opinions as well. There are plenty of other threads about the downsides of the system so let’s keep this to a positive topic about what housing could be.

For starters, in my opinion I believe every form of content should be accessible to everyone equally. That’s not to say everyone should be just handed everything. Earning and reaching goals is part of the fun, so the only barrier to you should be you, be it skill level, or points earned or in game currency. As long as you are willing to work for something, every single player should have the same opportunity for everything. I state this because I keep this basic thought in mind as I write out my suggestions of what I think housing could be in FFXIV.

FC Housing and Personal Housing should be completely separate and unrelated Housing:

FREE COMPANY GREAT HALL:
-After your FC reaches a certain rank, you are automatically granted access to your FC Great Hall
-The FC Hall is instanced
-The FC is able to choose the style of Hall they want, Ul’dah, Gridania, Limsa Lominsa
-The FC Hall is a Large open room with pillars, high ceilings, banners, etc. (mostly empty…for now) Depending on the style your FC picked the walls, pillars, views outside windows will vary.
-Your FC then has the option to pick color themes for Hall that would change things such as carpets and drapes, etc. to match your FC theme (Imagine picking main color blue, with gold as secondary this would change the rugs and drapes to blue shades with gold trims)
-Your FC then has the option to add FC logo to banners (large banners would hang down from the tall ceilings displaying your FC logo)
-The FC Hall would have all the basic needs, such as mailbox, summon bell, armoire chest, glamour dresser, mender npc, etc., even a Market board
-The FC Hall would also include a new type of board: “Scheduling Board” members of the FC could use this calendar type board to schedule events.
-As your FC ranks up the Great Hall expands and rooms are added such as a Garden Area, Bathhouse, Dinning area, Kitchen, Trophy room, Armoire Room, etc.
-The FC Great Hall will have FC achievements: for example, if the FC as a whole defeats Shiva EX: 500x then Shiva life size trophy is added to the trophy room. Or the botanists of the FC could take care of the FC garden and unlock new plants to be added to the garden. Etc.

Examples for the room types:
-An aquarium room: An aquarium hallway that’s a half circle with the sides and ceiling as glass. Leading into a large open room where walls and ceiling are all glass aquarium. The fishers in your FC are filling this empty aquarium with fish they caught and decorating the inside of the aquarium with coral, rocks, a sunken ship, bubble makers, seaweed, etc.
-A music room: A room filled with all different kinds of musical instruments where your FC members are creating music and saving it into the musical instruments. Then are able to play it to others, even playing multiple musical instruments at the same time.
-A fashion room: A room filling with mannequins, lets say 20 or so. Glamour enthusiasts in your FC are able to save their creations onto the mannequins. Others in the FC are able to walk by and try on the outfits from the mannequins as well as glamour on the entire creation if they so choose.
-A theater room: A large stage and guest seating area. Players are able to put on a show with the ability to select the backdrop, curtains, special effects that show up such as fog or rain, etc.
-A Bathhouse: A large Roman bath type room where players can splash around together and just have lazy fun. (Fishers can also fish here and pull up silly things like: Suspicious Trunks)
-A Kitchen/Dinning room: Culinarians in your FC can use the FC kitchen to create FC only meals, that can then be placed in the dinning room. The meals will have different stat boosts FC members can eat as use up. Then more needs to be created in the kitchen.
-FC Garden: In the garden starts off simple and boring, the Botanists in your FC can take care of plants. The plants grow and change, new plants unlock and Botanists can place then in different parts of the garden.
-A trophy room: As your FC defeats bosses or raids, under certain conditions or X many times, w/e the pre requirements are. The FC then unlocks trophies to represent these wins.
-So on with other fun rooms your FC can enjoy together....

Having The FC set up as a Great Hall allows it to be completely separate from the personal housing experience. The Scheduling Board along with trophy and FC achievements allows everyone in the FC to feel involved. The FC as a whole should have the feeling of teamwork towards a common goal.

PERSONAL HOUSING:
-After you reach a certain point in the story you unlock personal housing, depending on where your starter city is determines the house location and style (for now, this can be changed later)
-The personal house is instanced
-Your friends can have temp. or permanent allowance added to your house allowing them to visit or live with you.
-As you progress in the story and come across new locations a new “skin” would be unlocked for your house as in the background such as the ocean view or mountain view, along with the house styles allowing you to mix and match where your house is located and the style it’s in.
-When you enter your personal housing instance you have your starter city background (ocean ex: if Limsa Lominsa) and a blank empty lot, you also have a workbench off to the side, and a limited furniture copy machine.
-Workbench is your main tool for creating new building blocks for your house and changing backgrounds and styles.
-The Workbench will need to be traded in raw materials to create items.
-Workbench Building Blocks are almost like Legos. (There is no outside and inside of the house, so no instance within an instance situation) This also allows for building more then square shape houses, any size you want. You can even choose not to build a house at all and build a garden or ruin, etc.
-You can select what “Level” you are currently working on, like basement, ground level, first floor, second floor, third floor. Allowing you to build upwards if you want multiple levels. Basement allows you to make something underground.
-From the Workbench you can change the background of your area. You can also choose the style of the blocks
-You create a wall and pick both sides of wall decoration: (let’s say you want wallpaper type A on one side and Brick style on the other side) This allows you to then place the exterior wall and interior wall at the same time. Or Select Clear Glass wall allowing a wall size clear glass block that you can use as a full wall window. Or Select Wall with opening and choose window/door type then choose the wall styles on both sides.
-The workbench can also add major housing elements such as stairs and pillars, etc.
-The workbench can also be used to place certain items such major garden elements like ground type and rocks and trees and rivers/ponds.
-Furniture will be obtained normally either by crafting, events or quests.
-Furniture that is common must be reobtained if you want multiple allowing crafters to stay in business.
-Furniture that is considered rare or unobtainable after a certain period can be placed in the Limited Furniture Copy Machine. From then on, its image is saved, and you can copy it as many times as you need.

Having Personal House set up this way allows it to be completely separate from the FC Great Hall experience. The Workbench allows for creativity and expansion of your personal house beyond a square box. Personal Instance allows everyone to have a house at their leisure and with a background location and style of their choice.

SUMMERY:
-Both FC Great Hall and Personal Housing separate and unique experiences
-Both FC Great Hall and Personal Housing both instanced
-FC Great Hall Expansion
-FC Great Hall Scheduling Board
-FC Great Hall Trophies and Achievements
-Personal Housing Friends Visitation
-Personal Housing Expanding Backgrounds and Styles
-Personal Housing Workbench Building Blocks
-Personal Housing Building on Levels
-Personal Housing Furniture Common must be reobtained
-Personal Housing Furniture Rare placed in Limited Furniture Copy Machine

*Edited 6/26/22 to include more FC Great Hall room types

[Kytrin]

Reading through, I think you should maybe drop this in over on the Housing Ideas and Feature Requests thread. The devs actually read that one. You've got a number of interesting thoughts going on in this, though I can't see them making changes this extensive to what they already have in place. They'd have too much to scrap and remake. Still, I'm definitely digging some of the features you've mentioned. They would be some very nice distinguishing characteristics for FCs and personal houses both.

[Themarvin]

Instanced housing sucks, and has sucked through every game I played with it, FFXIV partly allow me to have a house almost same way as I could have on in Starwars Galaxies... the only instanced part there was inside of the house, and that was it and could litterally be placed anywhereon the maps of planets that was not dedicated adventure planets.

[Shibi]

-The FC Hall is a Large open room with pillars, high ceilings, banners, etc. (mostly empty…for now) Depending on the style your FC picked the walls, pillars, views outside windows will vary.
-Your FC then has the option to pick color themes for Hall that would change things such as carpets and drapes, etc. to match your FC theme (Imagine picking main color blue, with gold as secondary this would change the rugs and drapes to blue shades with gold trims)
-Your FC then has the option to add FC logo to banners (large banners would hang down from the tall ceilings displaying your FC logo)
-The FC Hall would have all the basic needs, such as mailbox, summon bell, armoire chest, glamour dresser, mender npc, etc., even a Market board

This makes it sound like it's a set design which we play no real part in outside of colours.

No thanks. The best thing about housing is being able to decorate it yourself. Banners, carpets, drapes, mailbox, summoning bell, chest, mender NPCs all in fixed places is very boring.

[SerenityLuministia]

This makes it sound like it's a set design which we play no real part in outside of colours.

No thanks. The best thing about housing is being able to decorate it yourself. Banners, carpets, drapes, mailbox, summoning bell, chest, mender NPCs all in fixed places is very boring.

I picked this version of the FC Great Hall very intentionally. The Personal House is for your creative ideas and expressing your design. The FC Hall is for Team Play. If allowing too much decorative freedom towards the FC Hall then the leader/whomever has allowance to change these features will have more advantages then their FC members. This will lead to more Shell FC because everyone would want to decorate the FC Great Hall as well. Keeping Personal House and FC Great Hall as separate allows them to focus on their differences.

[Shibi]

I picked this version of the FC Great Hall very intentionally. The Personal House is for your creative ideas and expressing your design. The FC Hall is for Team Play.

It removes the ability for the FC to hold events and makes it very bland. Basically only suitable for boring raiding FCs without any creativity, decorators, or style. Do a raid, get a trophy, fill a preset empty slot.

How can you decorate the hall for say - halloween or christmas - if it's all locked?

No thanks. And seriously considering the major part of your plan is instanced, who the heck then cares if shell FCs have a hall? In fact, instancing removes the need for them to exist, as housing is endless.

[SerenityLuministia]

It removes the ability for the FC to hold events and makes it very bland. Basically only suitable for boring raiding FCs without any creativity, decorators, or style. Do a raid, get a trophy, fill a preset empty slot.

How can you decorate the hall for say - halloween or christmas - if it's all locked?

No thanks. And seriously considering the major part of your plan is instanced, who the heck then cares if shell FCs have a hall? In fact, instancing removes the need for them to exist, as housing is endless.

Thank you for bringing up some points I didn’t think of. I will attempt to answer them in how I envision this system working:

You mention FC events:
-The Scheduling Board would be used to schedule events, I envision just a calendar where you can type a small note under each date.
-If you mean Role Playing Type events, remember you can invite people to your personal house, and with the personal workbench work and make it into mansions, gardens, winter wonderland, use the basement as to create caverns. If your entire FC loves RP, everyone in your FC could have a different themed personal house expanding your RP experience further since you can invite the entire FC into the personal house. Plus, with the FC Schedule feature you could schedule what time and at who’s personal house the RP event would take place.

You mention lack of creativity and decorations in the FC Hall:
-You can still have creative freedoms in the hall, such as choosing the hall’s basic city theme. You can pick your FC’s color theme, and FC’s Logo. As you unlock rooms you can pick basic layout and types of items in that room such as the type of bath in the bathhouse out of a selection of several for example. As I also mentioned in my post botanists can take care of the garden and unlock different plant types you can add to it.

You mentioned Holidays:
-Decorations for holidays are great, I see these being similar to how the wards get decorated. For each holiday event the hall would be auto decorated with themed items. (Remember in your personal house you can decorate exactly where you want the holiday themed items, plus have them year-round if you want. Plus, with the limited furniture copy machine you can copy the holiday item as many times as you need without worrying about it taking your inv space when not using it.)

You mention Shell FCs:
-Even instanced, housing isn’t endless it still requires resources. I’m not saying shell FCs won’t exist, I’m sure they still will with some people wanting to solo obtain trophies. However, I do believe limiting decorating in FC and focusing more on team work will have less shell FCs overall and take up less resources.

Again, I am looking to have a clear difference of game play for both the FC Great Hall and Personal Housing.

[Nepentha]

I rather like many of these ideas. A pity they didn't take this route initially.

[Solarra]

I like the idea of having a way for FCs to schedule events in-game. That's one thing this game has been sorely lacking.
I have to be honest though, the Great Hall idea sounds awful. I've played games with the 'hook' system where you have no customisation beyond being able to place a specific item in a specific place once you've unlocked it and quite frankly, it sucks. WoW Garrison anyone?
It would also put pressure on FCs to do content they might not enjoy if they wanted to unlock particular items. Would the devs include things like Savage or Ultimates? Or would they leave those out of the trophies since only a tiny proportion of players complete that content? I can see problems if If they implemented a system like this there would be a huge backlash, it's such a step down from what we have.

I get that there are issues with the current form of FC housing, especially with members not having access to place furnishings, but as a FC leader and the main decorator, I also know that trying to undo an innocent move of a glitched item can take a huge chunk of my playtime, and I've got better things to do. But what you're proposing isn't really any better. Instead of any member being able to customise the space, if granted permission, nobody can customise it. It's fairer perhaps, but I don't think it's going to be fun.

Your ideas for personal housing sound much more interesting, in fact I'm surprised you came up with all that for solo play, because I think some of those ideas done right would have the potential for a lot of group fun for FCs. Of course, done right is the issue. I remember getting excited for FC crafting, and then being disappointed when it turned out that the most efficient way to do it was for one person to feed the crafting station while three others stood around and watched.

[SerenityLuministia]

I don’t think I was fully portraying my thoughts for the FC Great Hall as well as I could, so I am going to edit these in as well:

The trophy room is just one of the many types of rooms the FC Great Hall will unlock. Imagine for a moment your FC decides to have Limsia Lominsa as your FC Hall type, with each room you unlock the doors open and there is a suspended bridge to the next cliff face with your new room. The entire FC hall would be suspended and connected on bridges in a similar style to Limsa Lominsa city. After your FC Great Hall is complete with all it’s different rooms it will be the size of at least 10 mansions, enough to fit 100 or so players comfortably.

Examples for the room types:

-An aquarium room: An aquarium hallway that’s a half circle with the sides and ceiling as glass. Leading into a large open room where walls and ceiling are all glass aquarium. The fishers in your FC are filling this empty aquarium with fish they caught and decorating the inside of the aquarium with coral, rocks, a sunken ship, bubble makers, seaweed, etc.

-A music room: A room filled with all different kinds of musical instruments where your FC members are creating music and saving it into the musical instruments. Then are able to play it to others, even playing multiple musical instruments at the same time.

-A fashion room: A room filling with mannequins, lets say 20 or so. Glamour enthusiasts in your FC are able to save their creations onto the mannequins. Others in the FC are able to walk by and try on the outfits from the mannequins as well as glamour on the entire creation if they so choose.

-A theater room: A large stage and guest seating area. Players are able to put on a show with the ability to select the backdrop, curtains, special effects that show up such as fog or rain, etc.

-A Bathhouse: A large Roman bath type room where players can splash around together and just have lazy fun. (Fishers can also fish here and pull up silly things like: Suspicious Trunks)

-A Kitchen/Dinning room: Culinarians in your FC can use the FC kitchen to create FC only meals, that can then be placed in the dinning room. The meals will have different stat boosts FC members can eat as use up. Then more needs to be created in the kitchen.

-FC Garden: In the garden starts off simple and boring, the Botanists in your FC can take care of plants. The plants grow and change, new plants unlock and Botanists can place then in different parts of the garden.

-A trophy room: As your FC defeats bosses or raids, under certain conditions or X many times, w/e the pre requirements are. The FC then unlocks trophies to represent these wins. (EX: Defeating Shiva EX 500x total times combined in FC will unlock her life size statue)

-So on with other fun rooms your FC can enjoy together....

This is an ideal of what I would like to see. Dream Big!