Airship as Guild Housing and Docking at Floating Cities!

[DemonForest]

I like the idea, but not as much as I like having your FC mates living in a neighborhood with you on beach-side residences.

In terms of this actually happening, I don't see someone actually flying the ship but rather an NPC that is selected (similar to selecting a companion) and the ship being instanced.
From this, I have some ideas (sorry if its been stated. I didn't read through the whole thread)

1) If it is instanced, there can be an additional option in the menu called called "Call Airship". Once your Free Company has bought and built an airship, players can call it to them (with maybe a 5-10 minute wait) and then they are then transported to the ship flying above.
2) This can make the airship become a central hub for meeting prior to raids and such (even take away some of the congestion in Ul'dah)
3) The airship can drop players off at a certain camp without having to have all of the players in the same party. This would make it possible for traveling as a Free Company rather than traveling as a party.

The reason I don't see the airship being pilotable is because I can't imagine how the devs could possibly make a bunch of airships flying around in the sky work, let alone make flying work while dividing the map into smaller zones.

Instanced would be the easiest way to code/impliment this design.

Allods Online

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVx6M1Jdgm0

Ship serves as sort of Guild House, as you have to keep loot in it during Astral visit. Opposing Guilds can fight you, board you and take your loot. IMO we could use more refine on this and it could works.

This is actually a really cool idea/battle concept. That would work for the new Grand Company Siege PvP content that they are already developing.

Overall this is one of the most brilliant suggestions I've seen put forth. SE could use this as a huge time/gil sink and it would help the economy from just running away.
On the flip side this would be a nightmare to code. And outside of the instanced idea this would be an extremely large server load. SE would have to invest in almost EVE level of server mainframes to tolerate the load of that many ships moving across the world. Not to mention that Ezora is not that large of a world/continent. Its big, but not that many hours to cross by Chocobo.
At earliest this would have to be an expansion. Unless Yoshi has this up his sleeve as a secret for 2.0 anyway.
However he has mentioned the possibility of eventually having flying chocobos. That could be peoples way of getting on/off Airships when they are in range. That would be a blast.

I love all of the ideas put forth here and I really hope SE takes a good long look at this idea. It has merit and deserves to be mapped out and found if it is at all affordable to implement. Hopefully they are building the world in such a away to leave it open for the possibilities of something along this line in the future. Who knows, XI has lasted 10 years now, who knows where XVI will be in 10.

[AsterBarnivere]

Great idea! I call the name Bhujerba! I CALLED IT! D:< my home shall be a sky city!

[Madrox]

so much potential, do want

[Hycinthus]

At earliest this would have to be an expansion. Unless Yoshi has this up his sleeve as a secret for 2.0 anyway.
However he has mentioned the possibility of eventually having flying chocobos. That could be peoples way of getting on/off Airships when they are in range. That would be a blast.

Great idea with the Chocobo. Overall, lots of great ideas, contents, and items that SE can sort through through this Airship guild housing, from simple to very complex like that video from Allods Online.

There is no talk about anything like this for 2.0, as far as I am aware. In my wildest dreams, again (lol), that Yoshi has this up his sleeve. But in my less wild dreams, this idea can take off (pun intended) with the devs for content for expansion.

[Gilraen]

I can totally see a flying city, too... and it's name'd be Garlemald. And, again, I don't see airship battles being all that popular unless there was some manner of incentive to it. "Just because" didn't do a thing for Galaxies because everyone wanted to be the pilot and noone wanted to be Mr. Fixit. Literally that was the only incentive to it in Galaxies, the fun of being the person flying the ship.

[DemonForest]

Great idea with the Chocobo. Overall, lots of great ideas, contents, and items that SE can sort through through this Airship guild housing, from simple to very complex like that video from Allods Online.

There is no talk about anything like this for 2.0, as far as I am aware. In my wildest dreams, again (lol), that Yoshi has this up his sleeve. But in my less wild dreams, this idea can take off (pun intended) with the devs for content for expansion.

Yoshi mentioned in a post somewhere in here. I don't remember the exact bit. It all blurs together now. The general line was on questions if Chocobo's could jump too, and he was describing the difficulty in rendering the movements correctly and how to optimize it properly. Essentially that the code is to damn hard to make look right and not eat up system resources.

But he goes on to mention the desire to eventually make them fly since there is a long history of flying chocobos. He goes a bit further to talk about how water walk would probably come down first, after (or along with) jump.
The challenge facing the team right now is making it look like a real flying bird, and then optimize the code to meet their model for lower graphics requirements. I can only imagine the design would be huge.
Just guessing but look for basic jump/water run in the first expansion, then flight in a second, and airships somewhere in second or third. Each of these are major projects that require new systems to be developed and integrated. I love what SE is doing and I encourage them to keep pushing the envelope.

If there is a game company that can build an MMO world that looks like Pandora, I'd put my money on SE.

[Miku-chikuku]

BUMP FOR GREAT JUSTICE

[MariyaShidou]

I can totally see a flying city, too... and it's name'd be Garlemald. And, again, I don't see airship battles being all that popular unless there was some manner of incentive to it. "Just because" didn't do a thing for Galaxies because everyone wanted to be the pilot and noone wanted to be Mr. Fixit. Literally that was the only incentive to it in Galaxies, the fun of being the person flying the ship.

As I explained before, the system in Allods provide a great deal of incentive, Airship is required to farm for stuff at high levels (gold/gears). There are sort-of randomly generated flying islands that people will need to pilot airships to (and there are flying big ass monsters as well), where people get loot. Also the end-game dungeons can be in those flying islands that your only mean of transport is your own ship. Once you got the loot, you have to fly the ship back to your faction city and while in transit all the loots will be in your ship treasure vault. And since the game is Faction-based FFA open world PvP you can guess what happen when two Airships from opposing factions meet each other with one is full of loot. Back when I played in Beta, airships took a great deal of resource and real life time to build (weeks), quite similar to EVE.

[Andrien]

Allods Online

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVx6M1Jdgm0

Ship serves as sort of Guild House, as you have to keep loot in it during Astral visit. Opposing Guilds can fight you, board you and take your loot. IMO we could use more refine on this and it could works.

That is pretty cool, now I wish we can get FFXIV style airship and ocean battles.

[Madrox]

tht would be neat.. chocobo runnin across water for special quest or storyline access...