Player Housing: WoW vs FF14

Community General Discussion
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Last expansions , Devs don’t do the same number of raids and dungeons compared to other expansions and we don’t even have player housing, there’s already a lot of art resources that could be used, the Development part isn’t a big issue.

There’s some “core base of die hard wow players” that don’t think about the implications, if there’s housing with new cosmetics, there will be more people that come back to the game for the new thing, more players for their core, more gold for their boost and they can use that for mythic race…etc

If any system takes multiple raid, dungeons…etc there´s a big issue of developers in the wow system which i don´t think so since they implemented Torghast and the whole new DF flying mechanic.

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122

Dude, you nailed it.
A+

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Honestly I hope we don’t get FF14 housing, or ESO housing for that matter, but rather more like Wildstar had, where it’s a ‘free build’ pocket dimension sort of thing where you can do all sorts of stuff, but it’s only an existant instance while you are in it

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More. WoW got dethroned lol.

But on topic: It’s because the FFXIV team is actually good top to bottom. Their initial release back in the day was unpleasing to the playerbase so they completely redid the game. You will never see Activizard do that and they’ve proven that by putting out several terrible expansions.

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i am on board. i really am. i just cant wrap my head around how they will pull this off without completely obliterating something else in the process.

as long as there is no achievements, pets, mounts, titles and so on tied to it, where hard core players and hard core collectors can 100% avoid it. and there is no loss of valuable content, then i say sure go for it. but this is not how it will go down.

here is how it is going to go down. blizzard implements player housing after 2-4 years of developer grinding at a cost of valuable core content. the players that want this will be happy… yay!. they will log in and complain “hey, this is not what we asked for” and “this sucks” and “FF14 housing is sooo much better” and they will come to the forums complaining about how crappy player housing is.

then the rest of us, players like myself will be in game smashing my head into a wall doing your “great” player housing because there is achievements, pets, mounts, titles, cosmetics and so on tied to it.

yea thanks but no thanks.

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126

Finally I can make a shadoweave awning, or felweave. Because I still have these things in my reagent bank because I’m too lazy to sell them.

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Vishamani used Future Sight!
It’s super effective!!

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solution would be to sell it on the shop as a module to the game and hire a whole new team to run the project. that way no current devs would have to split their attention and it could get the kind of intense attention it would need to fully integrate it into such a huge game world.

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FF started with housing, probably a lot of time went into development and testing years ago.

Wow didn’t and would have to catch up unless they only include basic stuff, aka the garrison, and players would probably expect too much.

Plus development at the time felt it more important to keep players in the world, not hiding.

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It takes a very long time to do the content in one zone. I’m still in heavensward with 1000 hours played

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Plain and simple, it comes down to leadership.

XIV doesn’t have WoW’s budget, but they have a strong leadership group in YoshiP, Ishikawa, Koji, Oda etc etc… and all the while, they train the new folks well and get them involved in the design (Kate taking over for Koji, for example, so seamlessly we didn’t noticed for almost 2 expacs).

The general infrastructure of WoW even has some advantages over XIV. The 1.0 spaghetti code is still much more of a detriment than what WoW has been running on; Blizz did some real good engine and system updates around Cata (and beyond).

While XIV 2.0 was made to have player housing from the outset, I bet Blizz could figure this out given ample time and resources to the project.

If you want to know the process for how ARR and HW were made (and how it continues to this day) part 2 and 3 of the XIV noclip documentary has YoshiP explaining the ins and outs of it.

WoW needs a proper director/producer with vision and dedication to the game, first and foremost, not the MAUs or investors. The latter will reap the benefits of the former, but this needs to be conveyed and proven to them.

This kind of talent, while rare, is not a singularity- YoshiP is impressive but nowhere near the only person who can pull this kind of thing off.

Just my two cents.

ALSO:
re: the update cadence… it’s fine. We got MSQ, a whole new PVP mode, a new alliance raid, new daily quests (battle), new weeklies (crafting/gathering), adventure plates (silly, but fun) and a bunch of other stuff… such as DSR… it was fine patch, and we know we get another dump of content every 4 months.

If people are bored and complaining about it, they likely burned through the content fast, don’t like Crystalline Conflict, no-life’d everything to 90 (this is me) and either don’t care about Savage or Ultimate… or say they do but actually don’t just to complain.

I’m honestly done with the current patch content for the moment. I’ll log in a few times a week to run some old raids for fun and that’s fine. XIV isn’t a job.

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It seems that your problem is not the housing but that you have 0% confidence that Blizzard is able to do it correctly, and I don’t blame you for it. :thinking:

The question is what does Blizzard want? get there reputation back? retrieve players? be recognized for quality? be a niche game? be a game with variety? etc etc.

The path they are going to take depends on those answers, and I can tell you that if they want to recover players and be a game where multiple types of players want to be, housing is one of the things they need.

Now if they want to focus on they niche of competitive gamers, hardcore, die hard wow players, etc. they can focus on the endgame and power mechanics, no one will blame them. People who don’t like it will eventually leave the game and WoW will live with a smaller* but faithfully dedicated group of niche gamers.

*Clarification, with “smaller” I do not mean that there will be few people, simply that there will be less than now because there are still people playing waiting for a change, when it is clear that there will be no more people will leave.

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It is a issue of cultural differences and interests, for SE the FF franchise is their baby, the failure of ff14 1.0 was such that they risked losing their reputation and ruining the entire franchise, in the end they decided to play for monetary loss in order to save their reputation and franchise. In Japan, reputation is important, even to the point of being a source of social stress.

In the USA, shareholders are interested in profit, not reputation, since in the USA no one who does large-scale business is usually so seriously committed to a business, if the company ends up bankrupt but they receive their profit, that’s fine, they will simply look for other company.

Just watch how the W3 Reforged ended, a project with clearly monetary interests but 0 respect for a legendary franchise and game. Presenting a mobile Diablo as they are main in a conference where 99% of the players are from PC, also speaks volumes about the importance of the monetary factor over reputation.

Activision Blizzard in any moment have stop to think about the damage to the reputation.

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134

In its peak of players, a peak that no other mmo has even got close to it, it didn’t have housing and I can’t understand how that would translate to needing more diversity, housing included. Hell, Wrath was nowhere as diverse as it is now!

On one hand, you guys cry foul about systems and with the other, you want more.

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When it comes to player housing, Blizzard has not implemented it because it’s something they want to do ‘right’. And housing is indeed a system that needs to be done right. Because a good housing system will not only bring players to your game, but it will also keep players playing your game as they do content to earn the cosmetics that you make available etc etc.

I honestly think the FFXIV housing is predatory in how its designed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s got a lot going for it. But if you want a house, a real house and not an apartment, you’re locked into playing the game. You can never quit. Because unlike other MMOs that have housing systems like ESO, SWTOR, RIFT etc, where you can quit for months if not years and come back to find your house just as you left it. In FFXIV if you don’t log in for 45 days, your house is demolished and the land that it’s on is put back on the market.

So you can’t even take 2 whole months off the game once you’ve invested into owning an actual house. 1 month and a half, that’s your limit.

And the thing is, this is an automated system that Square Enix can turn off if they want to, because they’ve done it before. What they should do is expand the amount of housing spaces available and completely remove the demolition timer. They won’t do that though, because they know that as long as they keep that system in place, anyone that owns a house will keep playing because they have no choice unless they want to lose their time/gil investment.

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Hell it’s not even enough to be subbed or even play, you HAVE to have entered your house within 45 days or it’s just gone.

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Great, so Blizzard just has to take into account the housing system flaws in other MMOs and do something better, basically what it was doing since the mid-2000s and early 2010s, right?

To this day there is only 1 reason why the housing of ff14 is better than that of WoW, and that is because FF14 has housing and WoW does not. :man_shrugging:

When both have housing we could re-discuss which is better :joy:

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All of this is spot on, but I think the ultimate root of it is that the producer of FFXIV played (and still plays) WoW and other games, and looked at how Blizzard does things and said “We can do it better,” and consistently lives up to it.

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139

That’s doubling next patch. And could easily redouble in a future patch. Also 14’s gear looks a lot cleaner.

Not to mention there’s a lot more class-neutral gear in 14, meaning all classes can use it, whereas WoW has what… the Christmas stuff (when the event is active) and store hats among a handful of others?

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140

Oh wow, that’s even worse…