Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

sleevedraw

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Lucked out and got a Plot 30, the big mansion next to the bath! Probably the luckiest thing that ever happened to me in game; so psyched!

ffxiv_04172022_200630_542 - Copy.png
 
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Cybsled

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Nice! I had tried for that one too and lost. Probably the best mansion plot in that zone, IMO.
 

GuardianX

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The only downside compared to XIV would be no overworld neighborhoods

What? EQ2 had overworld neighborhoods.

At the beginning it was all in the main cities, later on it was in the various cities, like FFXIV is now but, IMHO more organic since it was all in the places you would naturally be, not some "Neighborhood" similar to LOTRO.
 

Zish

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What? EQ2 had overworld neighborhoods.

At the beginning it was all in the main cities, later on it was in the various cities, like FFXIV is now but, IMHO more organic since it was all in the places you would naturally be, not some "Neighborhood" similar to LOTRO.
Well yeah, I just meant like, customizable stuff on the outside.

"Neighborhoods" in EQ2 were just shared doors to your house. I would argue it's a better system than XIV's, as you would actually meet other people outside. All the house districts I visit in XIV are 100% dead.
 
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Brodhi

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So how did EQ2 get it right back in 2004 and these guys still get it so stupendously wrong now?

Yea and look how successful eq2 is. No one gave a flying fuck about eq2 housing because 1) it wasn't a house, it was an instanced zone no one saw and 2) it was just handed to you.

Actually having neighborhoods is a big deal. (And no, eq2 didn't have housing neighborhoods, it had general apartment buildings with a shared front door to the instances) Actually trying to buy a plot is a big deal. Scarcity drives demand , popularity, and owner satisfaction.

"Oh 20 year old mmo's all had housing why you no do same thing FFXIV. " Shit maybe they understand something here about their player base and making systems that don't just die out.
 

Zish

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Yea and look how successful eq2 is. No one gave a flying fuck about eq2 housing because 1) it wasn't a house, it was an instanced zone no one saw and 2) it was just handed to you.

Actually having neighborhoods is a big deal. (And no, eq2 didn't have housing neighborhoods, it had general apartment buildings with a shared front door to the instances) Actually trying to buy a plot is a big deal. Scarcity drives demand , popularity, and owner satisfaction.

"Oh 20 year old mmo's all had housing why you no do same thing FFXIV. " Shit maybe they understand something here about their player base and making systems that don't just die out.
There is really nothing special about owning a house in XIV. The customization is incredibly lacking. The number of items available and the limit on what you can place is very low. And as I mentioned above, neighborhoods in XIV are barren. Other than the first initial buying up phase of a new ward or someone having an event, they are empty. Maybe if you could pick and choose freely where you could buy a house, neighborhoods would be more active. You know, with people that actually know one another. But it's not like that, because people have to rapidly purchase the first thing available (or rather, now it's 100% RNG).

There is nothing good about the scarcity. Clearly you've missed how a large majority of the playerbase is unhappy with how things currently work. But no, I'm sure that's the right way to go. Piss off your playerbase.
 

...

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you know... FF14 vs EQ2 got me thinking.

In EQ2 various housing elements were in various places of the city. the shit housing was in the racial ghettos. the 'good' housing was closer to the guildhalls and main part of town. (origionally. i think later cities were more normalized).

the housing in EQ2 is just apartment doors, but they're located in various places and 'on the way to the door' you may bump into some one who is on your same tier of game play so to speak. poors live near poors.

BUTin ff14....you can just teliport to your guildhouse, or apartment. walk 8 feet. go in your door. that's why the housing districts are often super baren. everyone just ports to to door, dives in, and does their shit inside.

So while i think that FF's neighborhoods have the capability for neighbors to hang out , outside and see each other. i bet the process of walking to the apartment in EQ2 actually had you bump into more people because i don't seem to remember porting right to the door.

though i think artificial scarcity is retarded. the housing is 'okay' in ff14, but they should have made endless, instanced apartments JUSTLIKEeq2. they should have put multiple complexes in each housing zone or city area, just like EQ2 with a shit apartment. an okay apartment, and a glorious high dollar apartment (something like 1,2,3 rooms). and just make them endless. make them cost gil and free company tokens. bam. best of both worlds. lots of RP/ERP/gpose people JUSTwant a place to decorate and feel cute. they don't need the neighborhood experience. though i'm glad they made districts 1-18 FCdistricts. that was huge in getting a FC house this patch for a lot of people.
 

GuardianX

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Yea and look how successful eq2 is. No one gave a flying fuck about eq2 housing because 1) it wasn't a house, it was an instanced zone no one saw and 2) it was just handed to you.

Actually having neighborhoods is a big deal. (And no, eq2 didn't have housing neighborhoods, it had general apartment buildings with a shared front door to the instances) Actually trying to buy a plot is a big deal. Scarcity drives demand , popularity, and owner satisfaction.

"Oh 20 year old mmo's all had housing why you no do same thing FFXIV. " Shit maybe they understand something here about their player base and making systems that don't just die out.

Wat...

Literally FFXIV devs have said for years that their biggest complaint regarding housing is scarcity.

Hence why they added apartments.

Hence why they are adding Islands.

All to solve a problem of, how do you add something without breaking "Immersion" while retaining community? A solution that basically all other MMOs have come up with aside from LOTRO, which is {sarcasm} AMAZINGLY successful {/sarcasm} and follows the same housing system that FFXIV does!

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On your points, you understand that FFXIV "Houses" are "instances" and function similar to EQ2, RIGHT?

1650383497397.png


Followed by a brief loading screen. You are in a "Phased" portion of the zone. You really think that off the map they have 30 individual houses out of player sight that each individual house teleports to or perhaps you literally think you teleport to the other side of a "wall" (the door) into the house?

That is not how these things work.

Everquest 2 did things differently because, if they didn't have you zone, every zone that had player housing would also have to keep a copy of that layout in that zones structure file. The way EQ did housing you could essentially have whatever house you wanted attached to whatever door you wanted because your house was a zone in-of itself.

FFXIV does things a similar way but only SPECIFIC zones have housing and those specific zones have specific housing types. This means a similar system to EQ2 is happening but since you don't zone, and instead are teleported within the zone. All the housing structure defaults are kept in the housing district zones and, most likely, projected textures or some derivative are used for different layouts.

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Second, houses in EQ2, originally, were not "Handed to you", you rented them after "buying" them. I could say that houses in FFXIV are "Handed to you" since they essentially cost nothing if you move out.

Neither is a correct statement.

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All this mentality does is cause issues, bad games can have good systems and good games can have terrible systems. Just because a game is popular doesn't mean it isn't plagued by shitty systems.
 
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GuardianX

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you know... FF14 vs EQ2 got me thinking.

In EQ2 various housing elements were in various places of the city. the shit housing was in the racial ghettos. the 'good' housing was closer to the guildhalls and main part of town. (origionally. i think later cities were more normalized).

the housing in EQ2 is just apartment doors, but they're located in various places and 'on the way to the door' you may bump into some one who is on your same tier of game play so to speak. poors live near poors.

BUTin ff14....you can just teliport to your guildhouse, or apartment. walk 8 feet. go in your door. that's why the housing districts are often super baren. everyone just ports to to door, dives in, and does their shit inside.

So while i think that FF's neighborhoods have the capability for neighbors to hang out , outside and see each other. i bet the process of walking to the apartment in EQ2 actually had you bump into more people because i don't seem to remember porting right to the door.

though i think artificial scarcity is retarded. the housing is 'okay' in ff14, but they should have made endless, instanced apartments JUSTLIKEeq2. they should have put multiple complexes in each housing zone or city area, just like EQ2 with a shit apartment. an okay apartment, and a glorious high dollar apartment (something like 1,2,3 rooms). and just make them endless. make them cost gil and free company tokens. bam. best of both worlds. lots of RP/ERP/gpose people JUSTwant a place to decorate and feel cute. they don't need the neighborhood experience. though i'm glad they made districts 1-18 FCdistricts. that was huge in getting a FC house this patch for a lot of people.

I hate "Teleport into" functionality, it KILLS community engagement. I loved the door system that EQ2 used though. I think eventually it got out of hand with islands and what not but honestly, by that point they were just trying things.

The reality is that in FFXIV there are so many options to do away with the "Housing Districts" in an organic manner.

Your inn room? Now an apartment. You can place whatever you want around the room and change whatever you want. The only issue with this idea is that once you allow player interaction within a location, all follow up inn-rooms have to be homogeneous or you run into issues of scaling if there are 30 different inn-rooms that the player can interact with and need to be saved, server side.

Around cities there are already a bunch of doors that lead to absolutely nothing or are blocked off...start making use of them as options for player housing. The "Drawback" of this is that major cities become more busy as more players use them as community points.

Only smooth-brains care or really even think that it should matter that "door A" teleports you to a mansion vs "door B".
 

...

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I agree. a random door in uldah could go into a private court (instanced housing) which has a courtyard and housing unit. another could go to a slum with a depressing exterior and small (normal apartment room)living space.

I'm not even joking, a lot of players would get a kick out of living in the hood vs the ritzy place. options would be killer.
 
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GuardianX

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I agree. a random door in uldah could go into a private court (instanced housing) which has a courtyard and housing unit. another could go to a slum with a depressing exterior and small (normal apartment room)living space.

I'm not even joking, a lot of players would get a kick out of living in the hood vs the ritzy place. options would be killer.

With the level of RP mods I see available...Oh I fully understand.
 

Xerge

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ESO takes it home. Addons adding special effects and creating a larger connected community. Accessibility is huge with housing and eso spoiled me on it. Housing should be real locales in the game world, housing should be accessible like teleporting to a friends' house from friend list, and housing should have information available to addon makers to expand the housing gameplay. Its one of those features that greatly benefits from player influence and I think has largely gone untapped imo.

Housing in ff14 is probably the more disappointing feature, I owned one and got excited on the idea of being a part of a community, and turns out every neighourhood is boring and barren. hard pass and I face palm at the developers decisions with it.
 

Secrets

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ESO takes it home. Addons adding special effects and creating a larger connected community. Accessibility is huge with housing and eso spoiled me on it. Housing should be real locales in the game world, housing should be accessible like teleporting to a friends' house from friend list, and housing should have information available to addon makers to expand the housing gameplay. Its one of those features that greatly benefits from player influence and I think has largely gone untapped imo.
I just picked up ESO on sale. Haven't played it yet, but the selling point for me was horizontal progression and options, as opposed to FF14's 'play it our way or go home' gameplay - which is good in its own right, mind you. I think ESO/FF14 being the top contenders for the genre might be a reality soon.
 
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GuardianX

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I just picked up ESO on sale. Haven't played it yet, but the selling point for me was horizontal progression and options, as opposed to FF14's 'play it our way or go home' gameplay - which is good in its own right, mind you. I think ESO/FF14 being the top contenders for the genre might be a reality soon.

At least til Riot's MMO comes out. That MMO is gunna take over the market if it doesn't suck.

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ESO is a decent game last I played it but OH MAN their launch. I have 0 faith in a couple things with them, they won't price gouge the fuck out of things and expansion content won't be a buggy fuck up for a bit (in a "Good way" that encourages peopel to buy the Expansion so they can farm the bugs before they are fixed).

For being a non-isometric ARPG type MMO it does pretty well on combat and dungeons. I don't know about their raids much after their first "Timed" raid of sorts that released years ago. I was pretty turned off from it all after experiencing that "End game content".

There are some, IMHO, pretty major things that you either like or hate.There isn't an auction house, last I played at least, the way it works is you are allowed to be in several guilds. Usually, when people want to sell, they join a merchant type guild that has a guild merchant that sells things near one of several locations. If you don't join a merchant guild, if you want to sell to a player, you scream your goods in various cities similar to EQ1. I don't deal with that bullshit so I vendored everything I got.

Their bug squashing blows, there are some bugs (and exploits) that have been around since beta of the game such as, confirmed last I played, a major bug when joining a dungeon queue that causes you to wait in queue and then get in a dungeon only to be ported out of the dungeon and kicked from the queue. This has been a bug sicne release and, as far as I recall, has to do with some option visually being selected but not ACTUALLY being selected in the queue window. If you queue for a dungeon, toggle things around before you queue.
 

Chris

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Just killed Endsinger Extreme, was really fun mastering each mechanic, I'm kinda sad there's no savage version of the Alliance Raid actually.
 

Sylas

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Never fucked around with housing in any of these games, but FF14's artificial scarcity with instanced fucking neighborhoods/wards are stupid. I'm betting it's more of a technical limitation with their homegrown server code than any gameplay reason. In SWTOR I have an imp and republic house because it's a free teleport to a spot with a legacy storage crate to access my credits when I start a new character. but I think BDO + New World is probably the best representation from what i've seen and actually used.

New World houses exist in the towns and are instanced, with the top housing score player's house being the one that is displayed to the server. Of course new world the towns are tiny as fuck little shanty towns and there is only a handful of player houses in each one, like 3-5 houses maybe each town?

BDO has massive towns and cities almost every single building in those cities, if they aren't already an NPC building, are available as player housing. And they are all instanced. It also ranked the top scores for each house but, at least last I played, you couldn't modify the outside of the house so being #1 had no effect on what other players saw as they were walking through the cities.

Guild halls however were non-instanced and auctioned/lotto'd etc so that took care of the scarcity piece. Rather than individual houses being scarce and thus relying on pure RNG to issue them out, guilds would silent bid each week to claim ownership so groups of players could pool resources and overbid on it.
 
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GuardianX

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Come on man, don't spread misinformation like that. That was a bug, years ago. Wtf

lets see, last time I played it was a bug:

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(My steam play time isn't accurate, I added it to my steam account after playing for a white and then quitting)

Man I'm not saying this to create drama on it, the game is entertaining but it has issues as do all games. I still suggest that people give it a go especially when you can get it cheap as heck: