How To Frustrate Your Player Base 101

[CaptainLagbeard]

I wonder if they could automate the adding of new Wards as they fill up... Since that would solve some of the issues with the limited number of houses.

[Oizen]

As someone who already has a house I'm contractually obligated to pretend that the system has no faults at all.

[Soge01]

Had a feeling this was gonna be a out housing... Though one of the biggest issues is allowing a single player to buy more than one house.

[Jybril]

There are way better topics that could be getting attention, but no. Let's do another housing thread.

What should we talk about then, Dev? Because all you do is cry about other people "crying".
Perhaps if SE didn't make the housing situation a piece of S people wouldn't be posting
topics for nearly 10 years of a trash housing system!

I get being sad about not getting your plot, but why are so many people suddenly so butthurt? .

This isn't suddenly. It's been a joke for years. Is it better? A bit but it's still RNG
for a HOUSE in a MMO that you have to even sub to keep.
It's one of the most casual pieces of content SE can't get right. It has been 10 years LOL.

[Themarvin]

This is your guide on how to exacerbate your player base.

First step create an elitist housing system where only a handful of players can enjoy a massive portion of content that is incredibly important to many many MMO players.

Second step lottery the very small limit quantity of houses

Third step draw the results and watch as the majority of your player base is upset and anguished over losing while a handful of lucky players are happy and having a fun time enjoying content that the rest of us paying subers are locked out of...


Now for real check out my other post about how EVERY player in the game should have a house not just a handful of elites.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...d-Have-A-House.

Constantly running full wards is a massive drain on system resources. The majority of resources for instanced houses are not being used if no players are there. Please leave the past behind and come to the present/future of gaming which is instanced gaming.

To get a house at all to begin with... got a small one instead, up to 100% chance for a win, to me it look like you are one of those that only put in a lottery number for medium and the odds rolls against you, if you won one of those bids, you would not be making this post.

Get a house, ANY house, or end standing with empty hands... from there on you can casually put in your ticket for whenever a medium or large comes up, but going to get an easier small house first is recommended, at least you would have a roof and a small garden to attend to...

[Packetdancer]

Just give everyone a housing plot. By some miracle even Wildstar (rest in peace) managed to do that. Without melting their servers down. And even with furniture slot limits like 4000.

Okay, while all my theorizing about the FFXIV server backend is just that -- theorizing -- I can actually speak from a position of at least some passing knowledge on the WildStar servers; I was one of the earliest closed beta testers, I spent time down at the Carbine offices, I nearly took a job at Carbine, and during all of that I had more than one conversation with Pyaray about server architecture.

And the long and the short of it is that WildStar's servers were designed from the start with that housing system in mind.

FFXIV's were not. There are almost certainly significant barriers to doing that. As an example, think of when the housing lottery was introduced; we saw results get lost because the amount of traffic between the lottery server and the actual ward servers was so high when sending out results, some of the results simply got lost.

This strongly suggests that the servers were not designed with communication channels between them really meant for that high a volume of communication.

This is important because if your housing is instanced, it needs to all be stored somewhere; there needs to be a persistent server that holds all the information on how you've customized your plot, where you've put your decorations, all of that. And if the housing is truly and fully instanced, it means the housing can be brought up on any number of other servers, meaning all of those servers need to be able to talk to the storage system.

If you have static wards, the exterior information is tied to specific ward instances. Yes, you need to pull information from storage when you instance individual houses, but... well, we know there's a limited supply of houses, so there's also a practical limit on how many houses are getting instanced at once.

If you have fully instanced housing, with no upper limit on it... think of it like you have someone coming up to you every 10 seconds asking you to do something. "Hey, can you pass the salt?" "Can you tell me where this book is?" "Hey, what's your favorite color?" "Can you give me the grocery list?" Etc. Can you answer all those questions without forgetting one or accidentally ignoring someone?

Based on what they said about the lottery fiasco for that first housing lottery, that's how the lottery winner information got lost. That makes me deeply suspicious that the mechanism to communicate from various other servers -- including, potentially, the actual persistent storage -- is not well-suited to extremely high-volume data traffic.

Those are the sort of things that WildStar designed into their server infrastructure from ground zero... and those are the sort of things that FFXIV would likely need to revamp their server infrastructure to account for, if fully instanced housing was to be a thing.

This isn't to say it's not possible, but think of it like needing to redo the wiring or plumbing in a house entirely before you can do a smaller renovation you want to do; it makes it a bigger project than it might otherwise seem, if that makes sense.

[Arzalis]

I don't think anyone is saying it's an easy fix.

I will point out they've had literally almost a decade to fix it and refuse to, though.

They added housing relatively quickly, but every decision after that has done nothing but entrench the current system instead of actually fixing anything. It's just a series of really poor decisions combined with SE's typical stubbornness on things imo.

[Deveryn]

I don't think anyone is saying it's an easy fix.

I will point out they've had literally almost a decade to fix it and refuse to, though.

They added housing relatively quickly, but every decision after that has done nothing but entrench the current system instead of actually fixing anything. It's just a series of really poor decisions on SE's part imo.

It was really just that initial decision of having wards. They've been stuck since then and trying to alleviate it as best they can. The way everything is separated with outdoor and indoor just looks like a mess to correct.

[Packetdancer]

I will point out they've had literally almost a decade to fix it and refuse to, though.

In my experience, it's rarely "refuse" and more "this is a massive change and we cannot get upper management / the publisher / whatever to actually sign off on taking the amount of time it will take to do this."

(And as I've pointed out elsewhere... we like to think that the dev and the publisher are the same, but they're not. CBU3 and SQEX itself are separate entities, like Bioware and EA or Naughty Dog and Sony. SQEX just has not had their individual development houses do separate branding until very recently -- witness Forspoken's "Luminous Productions" or how FFXVI has a CBU3 logo associated with the trailers -- so it's easy to forget that they aren't actually the same.)

The FFXIV servers were, by all accounts, written extremely hastily during the legendarily-rushed development for ARR; I suspect we are still paying off a lot of technical debt to this day as a result, and I certainly don't think there was a lot of future-proofing for "hey, maybe someday we'll want something other than static wards" or whatnot.

And in my experience technical debt that isn't directly causing a live service game to stop functioning is very hard to get approval to work on fixing. So, I'd love to see them fix this... but I suspect the dev team would also love to see improvements to the servers that could allow those sort of changes. I'm just not sure that they're in a spot that they get to make that choice, based on my own experiences.

In a perfect world, yeah, fully instanced housing would be the ideal. But the perfect is the enemy of the good, and while I'll continue to hope they can someday pull off the revamping of things necessary to support something like that properly, I admit I'll personally also keep hoping for interim solutions that make the current trash fire of a housing situation be -- as I've put it before -- 'uncomfortably hot bonfire' level trash-fire, as opposed to 'raging cinematic inferno' level.

Because even if they someday get approval to make the necessary changes -- heck, even if they have already gotten said approval and begun quietly making the changes -- those changes likely won't be fast (because if you get to rearchitect things you absolutely take the opportunity to do it right and try to future-proof things better). And I feel like there's probably room for improvement in the meantime.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[WP1990]

This is your guide on how to exacerbate your player base.

First step create an elitist housing system where only a handful of players can enjoy a massive portion of content that is incredibly important to many many MMO players.

Second step lottery the very small limit quantity of houses

Third step draw the results and watch as the majority of your player base is upset and anguished over losing while a handful of lucky players are happy and having a fun time enjoying content that the rest of us paying subers are locked out of...


Now for real check out my other post about how EVERY player in the game should have a house not just a handful of elites.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...d-Have-A-House.

Constantly running full wards is a massive drain on system resources. The majority of resources for instanced houses are not being used if no players are there. Please leave the past behind and come to the present/future of gaming which is instanced gaming.

I would be grateful that you didn't have to spam click a placard for 10 hours while competing with bots.