Housing Roulette was an absolute trash idea.

[Packetdancer]

Because they're lazy and don't want to give players what they want or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Almost certainly not this. On a wild guess, memory/bandwidth considerations; smaller housing units are easier to persist to and from long-term storage, as a lower number of furnishings (and fewer customization switches to flip) means a smaller maximum size on the data blob being sent back and forth. Apartments staying within a smaller range almost assuredly means that they can instance more of them, meaning they can have higher availability.

Most likely, the housing instance servers have something like "an apartment takes X amount of bandwidth/memory, a small house takes 1.5X amount of bandwidth/memory, a medium takes 3X, and a large takes 6X" or whatever. (Numbers are entirely made up and just for illustrative purposes.) Meaning that for each large house, that same amount of resourcing could run 6 apartments, or whatever the real/accurate number would be.

Changing absolutely nothing else, if you just made apartment interiors the same size as large houses, it's likely we'd be able to have fewer of them 'active' at a time, and the 'you could not leave the area' error when there's no housing instance space available would be a lot more prevalent.

And while it's easy to say "just add more servers", it's also worth noting that the houses need to be saved to/from long-term storage when they're loaded in or unloaded. You need a centralized place for that, and it's quite possible to overload those systems when scaling up; witness the issue when the housing lottery was first introduced, where messages with the winning plot numbers got lost because of the sheer volume of lotteries. It was bad when it broke the lotteries. It would be so much worse if the things that got lost were the changes that people made to the houses they have; spending three hours decorating only to have it drop the changes on the floor would be heartbreaking and infuriating.

All of those problems can be solved from a technical standpoint, yes. But they're best solved at the initial time of server design, and the servers for this game were put together under the gun and incredibly hastily during the ARR relaunch; it's quite possible (arguably, even likely) that those issues cannot be solved with the current state of the back-end servers, so would require large amounts of redesign/rework.

I would actually love for there to be fully instanced housing, because I'd love for everyone to have housing. The reason I personally look for alternative solutions -- decoupling FC workshop or gardening from house ownership, moving FCs onto instanced 'airships' (because there are fewer FCs than players, and if you require a certain minimum rank and membership level, you put a soft cap on the number of instances needed) and out of wards (to free up space for individuals to get the housing plots), etc. -- is just because I suspect fully instanced housing is not feasible under the current server structure.

And while I would not be surprised if the devs, e.g. CBU3, would actually like to redesign the servers such that they could support it -- because let's be honest, anyone supporting a ten-year-old codebase probably wants to redesign it anyway -- I doubt that the publisher, e.g. SQEX, would sign off on it.

(Yes, it's easy to say that SQEX gets a lot of money off of FFXIV and that the money should go back into it, and that getting a team to rearchitect the servers to something more modern and less hastily-slapped-together during the ARR reboot would be a wise investment. While the statement is true, that does not change the fact that it isn't how video game publishing works... at least not at any game publisher I dealt with, in my personal experience. And while none of those were SQEX specifically, I certainly suspect the same is true here.)

[Packetdancer]

It was luck. Not Dedication.

I've said before in many housing threads that I have my personal house due to simple dumb luck.

I had been playing placard-clicking games for hours. I lost one house to someone relocating after I'd been there click-click-clicking for two hours, lost another to what I can only assume was a bot, and at another plot I ran into folks from a friend's FC trying desperately to get a house so they could finally do submersibles. (As I knew from my friend that their FC was trying to get a house, I knew the pleas of the folks there from that FC were real.)

In the end I gave up. And then, right as I was about to do something else, I noticed one house free in Shirogane, and went "Well, I'll disappoint myself one last time." Walked up to it, no one was there. "Obviously the timer's still got hours on it." Clicked... and I owned a house.

"Dumb luck" is not a good basis for home ownership (in reality or a virtual world), which is why the lottery is not great. But "dumb luck that drives you to unhealthy habits in the vain belief it will improve your chances" is even worse, which is why the placard system that left people there frantically clicking (or blatantly botting) for hours and hours to get a house was even worse.

I do definitely think they ought to mail back gil (or send you a notice you won) rather than making you go check the placard... but I suspect the reason they don't is that the quantity of data that would abruptly slam into the systems might make things fall over. And they probably are (rightly) concerned that if people lost the house and then the mail system sent their gil into the void, they would be Rather Angry.

[Joven]

Almost certainly not this. On a wild guess, memory/bandwidth considerations; smaller housing units are easier to persist to and from long-term storage, as a lower number of furnishings (and fewer customization switches to flip) means a smaller maximum size on the data blob being sent back and forth. Apartments staying within a smaller range almost assuredly means that they can instance more of them, meaning they can have higher availability.

Most likely, the housing instance servers have something like "an apartment takes X amount of bandwidth/memory, a small house takes 1.5X amount of bandwidth/memory, a medium takes 3X, and a large takes 6X" or whatever. (Numbers are entirely made up and just for illustrative purposes.) Meaning that for each large house, that same amount of resourcing could run 6 apartments, or whatever the real/accurate number would be.

Changing absolutely nothing else, if you just made apartment interiors the same size as large houses, it's likely we'd be able to have fewer of them 'active' at a time, and the 'you could not leave the area' error when there's no housing instance space available would be a lot more prevalent.

And while it's easy to say "just add more servers", it's also worth noting that the houses need to be saved to/from long-term storage when they're loaded in or unloaded. You need a centralized place for that, and it's quite possible to overload those systems when scaling up; witness the issue when the housing lottery was first introduced, where messages with the winning plot numbers got lost because of the sheer volume of lotteries. It was bad when it broke the lotteries. It would be so much worse if the things that got lost were the changes that people made to the houses they have; spending three hours decorating only to have it drop the changes on the floor would be heartbreaking and infuriating.

All of those problems can be solved from a technical standpoint, yes. But they're best solved at the initial time of server design, and the servers for this game were put together under the gun and incredibly hastily during the ARR relaunch; it's quite possible (arguably, even likely) that those issues cannot be solved with the current state of the back-end servers, so would require large amounts of redesign/rework.

I would actually love for there to be fully instanced housing, because I'd love for everyone to have housing. The reason I personally look for alternative solutions -- decoupling FC workshop or gardening from house ownership, moving FCs onto instanced 'airships' (because there are fewer FCs than players, and if you require a certain minimum rank and membership level, you put a soft cap on the number of instances needed) and out of wards (to free up space for individuals to get the housing plots), etc. -- is just because I suspect fully instanced housing is not feasible under the current server structure.

And while I would not be surprised if the devs, e.g. CBU3, would actually like to redesign the servers such that they could support it -- because let's be honest, anyone supporting a ten-year-old codebase probably wants to redesign it anyway -- I doubt that the publisher, e.g. SQEX, would sign off on it.

(Yes, it's easy to say that SQEX gets a lot of money off of FFXIV and that the money should go back into it, and that getting a team to rearchitect the servers to something more modern and less hastily-slapped-together during the ARR reboot would be a wise investment. While the statement is true, that does not change the fact that it isn't how video game publishing works... at least not at any game publisher I dealt with, in my personal experience. And while none of those were SQEX specifically, I certainly suspect the same is true here.)

Um, that was meant as sarcasm and to poke fun at a certain poster here who insists instanced housing is the end all, be all solution for housing and that Sqeenix is holding out on us because they're a lazy, greedy corporation. Which I don't wholey disagree with, but that's beside the point.

[Heroman3003]

Um, that was meant as sarcasm and to poke fun at a certain poster here who insists instanced housing is the end all, be all solution for housing and that Sqeenix is holding out on us because they're a lazy, greedy corporation. Which I don't wholey disagree with, but that's beside the point.

Is it end-all-be-all solution? That's pretty much true. Is it a solution that is in any way feasible to implement within current scope and structure? Lmao. No. I myself dream of instanced housing happening some day as ultimate ideal solution, but at least I recognize the real problems that mean this solution, however great, is very unlikely to even be able to happen.

[Joven]

Is it end-all-be-all solution? That's pretty much true. Is it a solution that is in any way feasible to implement within current scope and structure? Lmao. No. I myself dream of instanced housing happening some day as ultimate ideal solution, but at least I recognize the real problems that mean this solution, however great, is very unlikely to even be able to happen.

Is it really though? People thought the lottery would be a great idea and now there's post after post of people complaining about it. The only constant is you can't please everyone and no one solution is going to fit.

[Heroman3003]

Is it really though? People thought the lottery would be a great idea and now there's post after post of people complaining about it. The only constant is you can't please everyone and no one solution is going to fit.

Ultimately, no solution will be accepted until housing as a whole ceases to be limited. Which is only truly doable with instanced form. Sure, there may still be complaints of "but I dont want instanced, i want in neighbourhood and in specific spot too", but theyd truly become minority. Until then, the roulette is for the best, although I will say, I doubt improvements roulette needs are that hard to implement.

[Joven]

Ultimately, no solution will be accepted until housing as a whole ceases to be limited. Which is only truly doable with instanced form. Sure, there may still be complaints of "but I dont want instanced, i want in neighbourhood and in specific spot too", but theyd truly become minority. Until then, the roulette is for the best, although I will say, I doubt improvements roulette needs are that hard to implement.

Houses in general seem to be exceeding the number of players wanting them in a lot of cases, however, since they're not the specific houses people want then it's seem as "not enough".

[MrJPtheAssassin]

Is it really though? People thought the lottery would be a great idea and now there's post after post of people complaining about it. The only constant is you can't please everyone and no one solution is going to fit.

Imo the only people who would be mad about IH would be those to want to show off their houses. Like I get wanting a neighborhood feel but wards are mostly ghost towns bc ppl who own houses either sit in them doing their own thing or afking in limas or some other city-state. The neighborhood dream is just that a dream and nothing more. If ppl want to be social they not going to hang out in their own wards, they going to go to a city-state or hang out inside their FC's house.

[Corvus_V]

Imo the only people who would be mad about IH would be those to want to show off their houses. Like I get wanting a neighborhood feel but wards are mostly ghost towns bc ppl who own houses either sit in them doing their own thing or afking in limas or some other city-state. The neighborhood dream is just that a dream and nothing more. If ppl want to be social they not going to hang out in their own wards, they going to go to a city-state or hang out inside their FC's house.

Correct. I've encountered maybe 3 neighbors in 2 years. Not worth it. On the other hand, allowing more people to be creative could actually drive others to visit the places they're allowed to decorate, as well as making crafting furniture more lucrative.

The only people who wouldn't be pleased by it are people who can't mind their own business. Not exactly a demographic worth catering to, as they just drive everyone else away. Or RMTers, house traders, etc. People who break ToS in a way that can make things suck for everyone else, ala Seraph. Or at least be part of the issue.
People aren't happy with lottery for the same reason they weren't happy with placard spamming. Some people are happy with lottery because they won their lottery. Some people are just happy they don't have to placard spam, even if they lost. Maybe some of them are just saying that due to the hatred for the former. It was undoubtedly pretty awful, but if there's anything we've learned from this system its that people don't want the small houses, and they'd have to nearly double the wards to accommodate demand for the other sizes. IH is definitely a better option.
All those people, people who lost lotteries, placard spamming, and the ones who aren't satisfied with not being able to own the size they want would be served by IH. Whether you give it to the highest bidder, whoever subs for the most service accounts, placard spam or lottery, the current ward system is not enough. It doesn't need to be a shitty experience if they'd give people a worthwhile and actually similar alternative.

Is it end-all-be-all solution? That's pretty much true. Is it a solution that is in any way feasible to implement within current scope and structure? Lmao. No. I myself dream of instanced housing happening some day as ultimate ideal solution, but at least I recognize the real problems that mean this solution, however great, is very unlikely to even be able to happen.

Apartments already exist. You can own 2 of them per character as well. It's definitely not as far-fetched as you think. Unlikely? Probably, especially if people make speculative excuses for them and they refuse to address it. Also because This problem may not be as prevalent in JP.
They're also definitely a greedy corporation that just diverts a shit ton of resources away from FFXIV, when they make the most money here, so I'm absolutely not wrong about that. Rather than trying to invest in NFTs and games with awful writing and dialogue they could definitely be bothered to try a little harder. I'd say that in terms of issues the game has, this one kind of tops the list in terms of what everyone is very, very pissed about; since for the most part you aren't barred from doing anything else.

[Joven]

I also think demand to abandon FC and server where friends primarily play is rather unreasonable one to make. You could make an argument that 'well if they want a house that much-', but reality is, housing is presented as something that is just available rather than particularly exclusive, and there's little reason for it to not be available without limit EXCEPT the server size and storage issues that SE acknowledged in the past, and issues with securing expansions. Hence, why I do agree that instanced housing is best solution imaginable; but also acknowledge that in current constraints it is just unfeasible, and just extra wards being added over time, with priority given to servers that struggle to fill said demand, and all following the more fair roulette system is good enough alternative.

Housing has always been exclusive. Why do you think the number of mediums and larges are so low? But people don't like not having something so they complain.

Imo the only people who would be mad about IH would be those to want to show off their houses. Like I get wanting a neighborhood feel but wards are mostly ghost towns bc ppl who own houses either sit in them doing their own thing or afking in limas or some other city-state. The neighborhood dream is just that a dream and nothing more. If ppl want to be social they not going to hang out in their own wards, they going to go to a city-state or hang out inside their FC's house.

It's the same argument as glamour: some people want to be seen and show off their creativity or their need to be gaudy. Other people take inspiration from seeing those creatives for their own designs, which wouldn't be possible in instanced housing unless they were invited.