Housing ReclamationFollow

The fact of the matter is the housing system in FFXIV is built upon finite resources. You can't realistically expect SE to basically allow the housing wards to become a memorial site for people who no longer play.

I get it that people have gripes about SE's design choices regarding housing, but it is what it is. SE is absolutely doing the right thing by creating a way for abandoned properties to turn over.

And yes, in a P2P game, those who log in and play at least once every three months are definitely more important than those who go longer than three months without logging in.

Again, I think this is a manufactured gripe... most of the complainers don't even play.

Edited, Oct 20th 2015 11:00pm by Thayos

Isn't this where the majesty of P2P solves the resource problem and makes it so no one has to lose anything? Or can we just accept that SE's messed up here and is taking the lazy way out. The "complainers" have to, in turn, pay for it because they have the audacity to not throw SE their coin for a time.

Like it or not, why people leave a game is important to know. If those reasons can be fixed, they most definitely should be. At the same time, you do not create reasons for people NOT to come back. This falls under that category. Housing here is not something someone suddenly just has. It takes time and money, more if talking exclusive furniture pieces. A sense of feng shui, memories, and other personal worth can be further appended to it.

Terrible decision is still terrible.

"This doesn't affect me, why should I care?"

Empathy. Get it. Now.

I'll just point back up to my second post here. I understand fully why people want inactive houses demolished. I'm 100% cool with that happening after a fixed period. What I am not cool with is telling people that because they don't pay their monthly sub at the 45 day interval, their investment is lost. 100% lost if they don't get the 80% refund (nevermind bound furniture costs). Why can not all housing data be saved until the player can replenish it onto an open lot, or even sell if they really want to? Why are there not overflow wards specifically for people who time out? There's more than one way to skin a cat here, but what we have are people actively rejoicing that the work of others is being thrown away because they don't give SE their monthly tithe.

At the same time, this is not reality. Digital resources are not so rigidly locked down. Mathematically, solo housing can only accommodate less than 2% of FFXIV's population. A few houses here and there is going to be a drop in the bucket even if only 5% of those players actually want their own place. This isn't going to be the fix some are hoping for, but at the same time, SE's taken on the frustration of those who disagree with the strongarming. And as I'm going through the OF, this was apparently the "fix" they had in mind a while back, but delayed because they wanted to improve it. Apparently the only thing they changed was adding more time to the process, otherwise ignoring feedback very similar to my own here.

Until these smarky ******** are paying for the subs of others, they have no say in what a person needs or does not need in order to enjoy the game. Whether they play 24 hours a day or once every 6 months is none of their business. Legitimately gained player resources should never be lost due to inactivity. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose of calling these worlds persistent. And for the sake of semantics, why stop there? Let's make all food stuffs rot over time. We should level down because we're not out fighting and keeping in shape. Inns should be taking our gil for every day we stay. These are real life principles being applied, after all. Though, we have understandably forsaken them for the sake of fun.

My take is that their Ward system here simply isn't working.

Let's say there are 25 houses in a Ward. Each house reserves 5mb of data. Since these are non-instanced zones, this is 125mb of data being accessed 24/7 regardless of whether or not any player is nearby to interact with it. This strikes me as a grossly inefficient use of resources, but their path has basically been to clone wards X number of times until finally they said, "Whoa, we're throwing too much money and hardware at this!"

Now, let's look at this from the perspective of the instance model. Your house could still take that same 5mb, but you're obviously going to need a bit more data relative to the location you chose to build on. Let's say that's an additional 3mb, but it also always fixed, can not be edited, and the same 3mb anyone else on the same type of plot would load. Your 8mb would only be active as long as you or someone authorized to be in your house is present. When not in use, the RAM is cleared and someone else's stuff could load. Depending on the time of day, this could actually translate to portions of housing servers being outright idle. Worst case, enough people could theoretically exceed the Ward system's data use if they blitzed the system all at once. But hey, this is what queues are for, right?

Personally, I don't think XI's BC-style pseudo-instancing can work here. For those not in the know, SE basically cloned a bunch of landscapes within the same zone that people can't normally see or interact with until the game puts them there. This is different than Wards in that the Wards are effectively their own unique zones, even if structural clones of another. Then again, maybe they could work some magic with Z-Axis shenanigans.

Overall, I just can't help but feel this a slimy move. Maybe 6 months from now I can be all, "I told you so!" like with raid stuffs. Of course, if this is only Step 1 of a more complicated plan (not including promised Ishgard wards), SE hasn't done a good job of conveying that.

I have empathy but I generally only spend it on human beings suffering genuine human debilitating problems. If, in the real world, someone is about to be evicted from their house, or needs money FOR a house, I'll do everything in my power to help them out.

This is virtual real estate in a video game. The only investment lost is time - spent farming the gil, spent farming the items for furniture.

I don't weep for past homes lost in long since demolished virtual worlds. I lost at least four. I stopped playing Cybertown for about six months - came back, and my instanced apartment had been deleted. It was my fault for leaving it for so long. I shrugged and started over from scratch.

Edit: I should reiterate that I think 45 days is too short and there are legitimate reasons to not be able to play for an extended period of time (notably military deployments overseas.) I think 90 days is the shortest reasonable amount of time, and I was arguing for six months on the OF for a long time. I also was hoping for instanced housing and I'm disappointed that wasn't announced.

But I don't think nothing should be done. I'm tired of the abandoned eye sores on either side of my house.

Edited, Oct 21st 2015 7:36am by Catwho

I think a lot of this would be easier to swallow if housing wasn't so bloody expensive (especially on servers like Balmung). I know people say just sell off the house if you think you'll be gone for awhile, but it's technically "illegal" to do so as you have 0 backing if the deal goes south.

Maybe if SE introduced a proper way to sell off your house, then sure. As it stands though, it not 100% safe and people can get screwed. Even 90 days really isn't that long when you think about it, 3 months? I've essentially been inactive in game since late July, so that's almost 3 months and I could of easily cancelled my sub. There's been nothing added since and 3.1 won't hit until what, November? I know the expansion fubard the entire cycle of updates since they put so much work into it, but that's almost 4 months of nothing and it will happen again with another expansion release. Heck, it could happen again without an expansion.

120 days would probably be the most reasonable and would always fall within a patch release to have a reason to re-sub. I'm in the fortunate position to keep paying while I don't play, but that's not the case for everyone. Sure you could argue "priorities" if you're tight on cash, but if FF is a priority, then so be it. Not to mention, we're getting screwed in Canada right now with our dollar being so low (and I'm sure the Brits with their pound/month sub would say the same thing). I've gone from paying about 25$/3 month cycle to 37$, that's frackin huge. I'm all for housing getting destroyed with some inactivity, but in a game that cycles like it does, 3 months is not enough time.

This was an infinitely predictable problem during the design of the housing system. There's just no possibility that a designer with any sense at all didn't figure out that after a while you'd end up with a bunch of abandoned properties all over your uninstanced housing wards.

I do think that freeing up abandoned lots is a good idea. But you can't just bulldoze it and say "you have 45 days to pick up your cube." The idea of an overflow ward where properties like this can go until their owners return is a good one. Once the owner returns they can get a message that tells them what happened and offers them the chance to relocate their property to an available lot somewhere else as a complete unit. None of this nonsense about destroying furniture or private rooms or airships (dear lord...). Just pick the entire thing up and plop it down somewhere else when the owner comes back to the game. Limited server resources simply doesn't fly here either since an overflow ward wouldn't have people in it, nobody needs to access this except as units in a database when a house is either stored or retrieved. Even if a single house, very generously, really takes up 25mb of space you could still pretty much fit the entire housing system on a decent portable hard drive.

Limited space was an infinitely predictable problem. Abandoned property was an infinitely predictable problem. The solution is not to punish people who unsub from the game for a while. The solution is to accommodate them and make it as seamless as possible for them to come back to the game and not feel like they'd been robbed in the night while they were gone.

So many things wrong with some of these replies, I'm just going to let this rage fire smolder for a bit before I jump back in.

In the meantime, guys and gals, do try to remember that this is a video game. And if you are going to try to lecture me about empathy, then I hope you are as compassionatte toward humankind in things that actually matter.

Perspective. Get it. Please.

Edited, Oct 21st 2015 7:51am by Thayos

Indeed - That's why I personally say it's good they get rid of the inactive players stuff and still say it should have been the original 30 days, but 90 days is more than generous and I see on my FC (which had some of the most passionate people about ARR in it too) haven't logged in for over 192 - 223 days, so when people are really gone, they're definitely gone. Since it really is just a video game, but you definitely can't question that some things they're doing with XIV shouldn't be so in this day and age, and you certainly can't even come close to trying to blame the PS3 when XI's PS2 design has done quite a fair bit more and has surprisingly deep systems even when they look basic in appearance.

That's why they simply should have just given us a more modern mog house..similar to how PSO2's personal room is..where the only need to pay is to get A LOT of expansions on it. And that's a F2P Sega MMO.

F2P.
Sega.
MMORPG.

There's a problem when that sounds better than a P2P Square Enix MMORPG.

Exactly.

Just because one idea is bad doesn't mean every idea that follows is bad. I think SE's solution is good and fair, considering we can't realistically expect them to rebuild the housing wards from scratch -- especially if this fix satisfies the need of actual players while also creating an ongoing supply of new plots coming open. It's actually a pretty good solution to a bad issue. In fact, this change could potentially fix most of what's wrong with the housing system. Too bad this policy couldn't have been in place from the start.

But empathy? Really?

Folks have FOUR MONTHS to decide whether FFXIV is "important" enough in their virtual lives to plunk down $10/$15 (yay for Legacy status) and keep their fake houses.

"Ugh, I'm so mad that I can't keep a house in this game that I can't even stand to play four times per year!"

Seriously, this doesn't deserve empathy.



That's an odd, jaded way of saying that FFXIV is optimized for a more casual/midcore approach. That's exactly what some of us were trying to explain to you in the other thread about why the devs don't focus more on hardcore raids. That's not the kind of game this is.

Edited, Oct 21st 2015 9:50am by Thayos

Edited, Oct 21st 2015 10:28am by Thayos

That quote is from two years ago. It was true when he said it and for a long time afterwards. Just because the situation has changed two years down the line doesn't mean he lied.