Housing is ruining the game

IF QUEST COMPLETED THEN GOTO DISABLED PC INSTANCE is not that different programming than IF QUEST COMPLETED PC SAYS THANK YOU BUT I NEED TO STAY HERE FOR REASONS....anyone that has programmed in the Skyrim Construction Set knows how to do this. The game already uses the same technology in Solace Bridge to show you different states of the scene, it is the exact same phasing ESO uses to show you the town burnt down and people died. The technology already exists in SOTA and is already in use, it is not at all difficult. You never see the still burning buildings when you go back to Solace bridge, you go back and see the everything is burnt down. So don't say it is too hard to program and not worth doing when they already do this!

You do realize they are already doing work to sort you into instances? You just do not realize it, but if you logged into steam or gave your facebook, they are going to use social engineering to figure out who you might or could be friends with or people you grouped with before and place you in same instances. Doing that using quest logic is actually easier than sorting using social engineering - and is absolutely something that has been done before in ESO, it is a known technique called instance phasing. You can either say like ESO did initially, sorry no grouping as you are in different phase and made different choices, or like ESO is now going to do with One Tramiel you just let people group up if they request to do so even though it may be in a parallel world with different choices than they made. Just like the Quantum Leap or Sliders TV shows used to do.


SOTA just cannot do it with player housing towns because of a database restriction bugged out making duplicated decorations. That just requires player compromises of making housing instanced, so that it can remain dynamic then making the merchants static so they can stay in the town instance. The very same compromise they had to make to get basements into the game.

Instanced housing in this case does not mean sharing housing instances across multiple people, it means exactly the same thing as your basement is. You just go thru a door and load your basement and disconnect from the town instance. It is still the only version of that house, nobody else lives there, property still has value. It is exactly the same thing as the wagon or balloon taking you to another town, or the large city gates taking you to a divided section of town. It absolutely has nothing to do with new technology.

 

Once the engine is more optimized I would not be surprised to see town sieges leak into city proper. We can have battling NPCs happen w/o player housing actually being destroyed in the process. (once the game can handle it anyway)

 

I'm pretty sure they have to get the basic tech/system working. Then they can go back and polish it with story logic.

 

When do you think they will do that? They have known they wanted to write a story with consequences with years, like Ultima and UO it was in the pitched design of the game. This included town raids and NPC death. Then they realized housing was a lucrative funding model, but they did not write housing in a way that was compatible with a consequential story. Their database is not capable of splitting a scene with housing into multiple instance states.

The point of an alpha is to develop the tech the story can be written upon. The story is already written and in the polish phase, we are well past the point of developing alpha tech. Restructuring the database is not only not on any upcoming monthly release, nor quarterly roadmap, it is not even discussed for future episodes.

What we have is what we have. They have known about this issue for years, and have been working around it - a gate seige instead of a town raid, arsonists that remain on guard, mothers not joining their lost child, etc.

Which is why I am proposing the solution is for players to make hard compromises to get the desired features with the tech we already have.

The game already supports instance states as long as there is no housing in the instance. Obvious solution there is gate the houses into instances, the compromise already made for basements and larger cities and nested towns, thus the NPC portion of town can be consequentially different for everyone.

The game already supports sync housing and decorations across instances without state, so the solution there is also obvious - implement seiges and raids as sync instances where everyone is either forced to group together, or the common result is recorded - if most seige instances are lost then the town remains closed until the invaders leave. The result of the raid is that of all the players and not that of an instance, it still has consequences but they are the same for everyone.