That infographic needs to be fixed. It's not 10 small houses per zone, it's 20.
Other than that, yeah, pretty damn sad.
Playing Devil's Advocate for a second: Note that some of the capacity issues could be due to having to send housing exterior data to every individual player in a ward, which is an exponentially increasing load with every single house that gets its exterior decorated. Every variable gets sent to ten, twenty, fifty, etc. other players every time they load in and every time a change occurs.
That being said... wow, that is a really poor excuse of a system if it can't handle that low amount of load. Everquest 2 was already mentioned, but there's no exterior decorating there so it's not really a great counterpoint. AION, on the other hand, has even larger housing zones and the housing interiors are NOT instanced (you can literally walk into the front door of any publically open house), meaning every object and their positions are sent to players constantly as they move throughout the zone, which is a far larger server workload than anything FFXIV has demonstrated thus far. Why Aion can handle it and FFXIV cannot is a complete mystery to me.
Speaking of Aion, the upkeep system and the townhouse rooms that everybody gets are far better implementations than what we got in FFXIV, as is the fact that they don't section off gameplay-affecting features like gardening and chocobo raising behind house ownership, so only RPers, interior decorators, and people just looking to own something actually buy houses. Gardening in particular was a really boneheaded move as looooaaads of players are getting in on housing just to make bank from it.
After such an uproar, I really wonder what their next move is gonna be. They're pretty much required to do something to appease the playerbase besides simply ineffectually doubling what is an unreasonably tiny number of wards.
Other than that, yeah, pretty damn sad.
Playing Devil's Advocate for a second: Note that some of the capacity issues could be due to having to send housing exterior data to every individual player in a ward, which is an exponentially increasing load with every single house that gets its exterior decorated. Every variable gets sent to ten, twenty, fifty, etc. other players every time they load in and every time a change occurs.
That being said... wow, that is a really poor excuse of a system if it can't handle that low amount of load. Everquest 2 was already mentioned, but there's no exterior decorating there so it's not really a great counterpoint. AION, on the other hand, has even larger housing zones and the housing interiors are NOT instanced (you can literally walk into the front door of any publically open house), meaning every object and their positions are sent to players constantly as they move throughout the zone, which is a far larger server workload than anything FFXIV has demonstrated thus far. Why Aion can handle it and FFXIV cannot is a complete mystery to me.
Speaking of Aion, the upkeep system and the townhouse rooms that everybody gets are far better implementations than what we got in FFXIV, as is the fact that they don't section off gameplay-affecting features like gardening and chocobo raising behind house ownership, so only RPers, interior decorators, and people just looking to own something actually buy houses. Gardening in particular was a really boneheaded move as looooaaads of players are getting in on housing just to make bank from it.
After such an uproar, I really wonder what their next move is gonna be. They're pretty much required to do something to appease the playerbase besides simply ineffectually doubling what is an unreasonably tiny number of wards.
