What's Your Dream Version of Player Housing?

[MagpiesAreVeryCute]

Howdy All!

Been looking through some top threads and have been seeing a lot of good discussion going on with regards to our player housing woes. And in the process of reading through those threads, it got me thinking about what a perfect version of player housing might look like to me. Without necessarily having to address things like having to work around the existing housing framework, feasibility, or dev cycle (but still staying within the spirit ff14), what would I enjoy as a player if I was given the opportunity to design a housing system? And so, I gave it some thought and had a good time doing so. It was a fun little creative effort, and it made me wonder what cool ideas you all have as well.

So setting aside the sour feelings we might have with our existing housing experience, if you could create a new housing system in ff14 that stayed true to the spirit of the game and its world but was otherwise totally in your hands, what would you create? What types of interactions would you want or expect to see as a result of your new system, what role would the players have within this system, and how do you think it would be tied into the narrative of the world? I'd really like to hear what you all come up with!

To give some ideas to jump off from, here's a super brief outline of what I was thinking of for my dream housing system:

After gaining some amount of renown with a given city state, you would be given the opportunity to establish an FC town. I imagine the quests involved to come in multiple forms, like a 4 person, 8 person, or 24 person dungeon or trial which must be completed with only members of your FC. These would also escalate in difficulty where more members means more danger, but more danger also means more reward (though not to the point of being as difficult as something like a savage trial). Having both done a great service and proving your mettle in whatever crisis you may have helped overcome, the leader or representative of the city state in question gives you the right to establish a town or outpost or compound on the edges of their territory in an instanced zone whose size is reflective of the size of the party that cleared the quest together (which you could re try if your FC gets larger later and you have the people to try a harder tier of the quest).

Then with your new access to this land, you and your FC would name the town or outpost, design its streets, and even populate it with npcs that you assign tasks and maybe even lines of dialogue to say when players pass by. You would essentially have something like a frontier town kind of like Mor Dhona. You could even have the npcs give quests to visiters outside the FC as a way of generating resources you might need for the town. As far as buildings, you could choose for yourselves how to divvy up land, whether you want it to be like one big neighborhood, or shops, or something closer to barracks, or whatever else you like.

I also really like the idea of having FC wide quests where your new town interacts with the city state of origin or other surrounding states that might share a border near your town. And then you could have cutscenes where you get wide shots of your town that is populated with other members of your FC in the background. Maybe you would even create an NPC version of your character that sticks around town and you can set it to say or do things while you are out of the instance. That way it would feel more lively and lived in even when most people are offline.

In any case, I can go on and on but I think that gives a good idea about the direction I'd go with my dream housing. Can't wait to see what y'all come up with :D

[PassinLay]

Howdy All!

Been looking through some top threads and have been seeing a lot of good discussion going on with regards to our player housing woes. And in the process of reading through those threads, it got me thinking about what a perfect version of player housing might look like to me. Without necessarily having to address things like having to work around the existing housing framework, feasibility, or dev cycle (but still staying within the spirit ff14), what would I enjoy as a player if I was given the opportunity to design a housing system? And so, I gave it some thought and had a good time doing so. It was a fun little creative effort, and it made me wonder what cool ideas you all have as well.

So setting aside the sour feelings we might have with our existing housing experience, if you could create a new housing system in ff14 that stayed true to the spirit of the game and its world but was otherwise totally in your hands, what would you create? What types of interactions would you want or expect to see as a result of your new system, what role would the players have within this system, and how do you think it would be tied into the narrative of the world? I'd really like to hear what you all come up with!

To give some ideas to jump off from, here's a super brief outline of what I was thinking of for my dream housing system:

After gaining some amount of renown with a given city state, you would be given the opportunity to establish an FC town. I imagine the quests involved to come in multiple forms, like a 4 person, 8 person, or 24 person dungeon or trial which must be completed with only members of your FC. These would also escalate in difficulty where more members means more danger, but more danger also means more reward (though not to the point of being as difficult as something like a savage trial). Having both done a great service and proving your mettle in whatever crisis you may have helped overcome, the leader or representative of the city state in question gives you the right to establish a town or outpost or compound on the edges of their territory in an instanced zone whose size is reflective of the size of the party that cleared the quest together (which you could re try if your FC gets larger later and you have the people to try a harder tier of the quest)

Very simple idea actually, wards that adapt based on small houses on demand.

A minimum of a small house for everyone, while mediums and larges stay scarce because they are simply a limited ressource and it's fair that it is, absolutely nothing bad with that.

Adapt wards until everyone has at the very least a small, make them auto-create until everyone has one, that's the TLDR.

[Oizen]

Probably just Instanced housing where anyone can have any size of house they want with a decently sized yard independent of their house size, nothing else could ever really scale with the demand. Doing something stupid like "add infinite wards" really just inflates the ammount of unwanted smalls in the game where those plots just sit and gather dust while Mediums and Larges still end up being far to scarce for the demand, which is basically the state of Dynamis.

Wards are dead and boring anyway, and I hate it when people with bad taste move into a ward and use ugly customization so I'd give up my house for a superior instanced house system. Also fuck the artifical scarcity and elitism that come with housing as it is now.

[LittleArrow]

I want housing like ESO. I want 3 tiers of houses, Small, Medium, and Large with a subsection of city houses vs out in the wild housing. Possibly 3-5 of each so 9 to 15 total unique houses including city houses of varying sizes in each of the main cities. I want them to have their own personalized yards / courtyards that can barely be seen from the outside as to keep some immersion. The houses would cost in game gil depending on the size / location / style of the house (maybe a beautiful medium stone fortress on the cliffs of Lominsa that's 500,000k, but a stunning large manor house in Sharlyan for 15mil. There could be a small apartment-esque townhouse in Gridania for 50k, or a small desert oasis mud hut in the deserts by Uldah for 25k).

I want the instance housing to be fully customizable with furniture on an x, y, z axis so I can build what I want. I also want to have control over publicly showing the house vs friends only vs private.

I do not mind microtransaction housing that doesn't go over 20$ tops, but limited to 1 house in each tier and fully furnished with the best furniture, and comparable to the in game housing not leagues better.

I basically want exactly what ESO did in XIV. XIV's housing is the worst housing I've seen of any MMO I've played that includes housing; even a dated game like LotR does it better and that one includes a neighborhood system like XIV.

I no longer believe Yoshi at all in their attempts to excuse away how limited housing is with "we don't have the resources." That's a lie. There are games that came out 15yrs prior with a fraction of the staff or budget that has done it better.

The housing system in XIV is a scam to keep players from cancelling their subs for fear of losing their house and never getting another one. It's a joke and I'm sick of defending Yoshi, this game, and this developer for the scummy behavior they've blatently exposed over the past few years.

[Anarnee]

I think every character should have access to a house and they should be allowed any size, even if they just allowed us to choose the size inside of the house would be nice!

I also think all items should be allowed to be placed indoors and outdoors. It's stupid how many outdoor items they put in seasonal quests that lots of people can never use. Let me make a photo studio outside with stage walls etc and let me have my retainers indoors out of the rain.

Would also be nice if they let us place items on the Z axis and for controller players, to be able switch to the rotate items option without switching to KB & M.

[ZenoDiogenes]

What's Your Dream Version of Player Housing?

Whatever version that allows me to farm gil in my fc workshop without having to own a house.
Or the one that allows me to rent out my house for ppl who actually care.

[Hallarem]

Housing that everyone can have as a baseline, and that doesn't require you to pay your subfee as rent. It wouldn't be as insulting if it wasn't for the classic "If you don't like it, go play other games" Dude, Yoshi P, your company charges a monthly fee for this game, have some integrity.

[Infindox]

My personal dream version would keep the wards as is but allow everyone to "expand" their house to what they want. Make it a gil sink if they want, just give the option. Allow house owners to have the tenants but use the room thing that FCs have so they can make their own space. Then allow THOSE rooms to be expanded with a gil cost if they want. (Also make a room for the owner and all the rooms automatically act as an inn with glamour dresser).
Also I think someone else said this but when a ward gets full, another one gets made .

[SalamanderIX]

Dream version? Alright here's what it looks like.

As well as the towns we have now, they can add all of the hub cities. One for Old Sharlayan, another for "Shadowbringers city", another for Tuliyollal. Anywhere else could be cool, some of the various regions or cities like Gyr Abania, Dravania, Garlemald, Orthard, Solution Nine... there's a lot of places that have potential. I'd love to see quests and storylines, and more lore for the various places we've been in the world already, and what's more perfect than housing for it? It worked for Ishgard and would be just great if more places for that treatment.

Wards should be added regularly as needed to keep up with demand, basically this amounts to something like instanced housing without actually having instances, I like the neighborhood thing so just more and more Wards. I doubt we'd need more than 100 wards, but if we did, let's go to 200 wards, 9999 wards. However much is needed...

Next, could be a little controversial, but I'd tie houses to user accounts rather than Characters. You'd be able to own a certain number of houses per service account based on how long you've been around. Let's say you start with 1, and you can get all the way to something like 8, with a maximum 2 per server. You would be able to freely move your characters or houses as you pleased, have alts on the same server without having to worry about it so much. This does mean those few people with 100 free company houses to farm submarine gil will get screwed, but I don't exactly think they've exactly been healthy for our housing system... or economy.

The next thing would have to do with scaling. This would require an extensive reworking but, If all plots just were equal rather than being Small, Medium, or Large. This would involve remaking every housing ward map to fit it, but essentially. You buy the plot and then the House size permits would be where you spend gil, and those permits would go up in price to match it. You could start with a Small and go up as you could afford it, or start with a Large. Also different house shapes would be possible, allowing you to design the interiors from a grid yourself, or pick from the premade ones. This is dream version right? So yeah.. A Small that's just one huge floor, a mansion with a proper second floor.. maybe a mansion that's 5 small floors, a medium with a basement and a sub basement, and it's all shaped like donuts, whatever interior you'd like.

Lastly.. Actually we should have instanced housing, that being the thing people thought the Island Sanctuary would be. Having played around with the housing System in Phantasy Star Online 2, designing exterior housing can be really incredible. This would involve new tools for building terraign, and outdoor structures- but imagining the kind of places we could come up with, I'm sure we'd make some amazing spaces. These would be seperate from the normal housing system and every character could have one of them.

[Jojoya]

RIFT Dimensions.

- Choice of dozens of locations of various sizes
- ability to have more than one location per character
- items limits based on location size with ability to upgrade (locations with a base 500 item limit could upgrade to 2500, or 3000 for locations limited to guilds)
- choice of pre-made houses with pre-made layouts or build your own from scratch using choice of walls, windows, floors, roofing, etc.
- no division of items types (want a creek running through your bedroom and a sofa in the garden? go for it)
- full item placement and rotation on all axis anywhere within the location boundaries (no need to resort to third party mods for pinpoint placement)
- full control over lighting anyone in the location including color tones
- control over time of day
- robust search feature that allowed you to look for other player housing open to public viewing from anywhere in the open world instead of having to Aetheryte crawl, search results based on keywords and/or Likes
- ability to share housing with alts and multiple other players
- ability to create blacklists and whitelists
- assign housing permissions based on player group type or individual player

The Dimensions system + FFXIV art style and locations = AAA housing system.