Player Housing Refresh

(This diary is a sort of "Part 2" to our previous diary on the Player City Refresh)

New changes coming to existing houses! Our goals were to address some related areas:

1. Align housing lots and storage more consistently,
2. Stop forcing people into "special" houses to have more storage
3. Grant more available storage to everyone

The introduction of the special houses in the game (Sandcrawlers, Tree Houses, etc.) has caused a number of problems for the team. The adjustments to their lot cost and their storage capacity were a sign of these problems. What began as something cool for players to get became a race to replace their current houses with the special houses because they had the best storage to lot ratio. This led to the proliferation of these houses to the point where they were no longer “special.” For some people, they were also immersion-breaking, and even the restrictions on which planets each house could be placed on didn’t solve that problem.

There were also requests for more houses that cost one lot. We heard you on this and kicked around a number of ideas until we arrived at one that we feel will work well.

In the new system, all small houses will be 1 lot. Crafted houses will have an odd number of lots (3 or 5 for medium or large) and special houses will have an even number of lots (2 or 4 for medium or large). This means small houses will be 1 lot, mediums remain at 3 lots, and large houses will stay at 5. The smallest special houses will be 1 lot, the mid-sized special houses will be 2 lots, and some of the larger special houses will become 4 lots.

But wait, what about all my stuff that barely fits in my small house? What happens when the storage on my small house drops to 100 because it’s 1 lot?
We thought of that, too.

With the update, storage capacity for all houses will be 250 items per lot – more storage because there are more cool things in-game to collect. We want people to be able to decorate their houses and still be able to store items in them. This also lines up with the special houses and puts everything back on an even playing field. People won’t have to have one of the special houses specifically for storage. They can get them because they are cool, which was their original intention.

Why More Storage?
Independently of the housing discussion, the Dev Team was looking over how vendors were being utilized and some of the Devs were a bit surprised at the prevalence of vendors being used solely for storage. This was not their intended purpose by any means, but it was a sandbox solution to a sandbox problem (a common refrain the team uses when looking over the ways people play the game). The problem this pointed to was the need for more storage. We finally realized something obvious: “Just increase storage in houses if it’s such a problem.” So that’s what we decided to do, and it fit in nicely with what we had already planned.

What about the special structures I bought?
The special houses that came from theme park rewards or expensive vendor purchases had boosted storage, usually at a rate of 250 storage per lot. Well, that's why we increased the storage for everything else to match that rate, so that those houses aren't losing any storage. However, we know that some players may have earned/purchased these special houses for that storage boost. So, to make up for the loss of value, we'll be granting these legacy house owners a bonus 100-storage boost item for each special house they owned, that they can apply to any of their houses.

Personal Lot Changes​

We know that people have been complaining about having to juggle lots around on their characters to place harvesters or use one of the bigger houses. We heard you on this as well. We will be going to a new system where the total number of lots available are on an account basis and not tied to each character. Your account will get 10 lots for every character you have. What that means is that if you have just 2 characters, your account gets 20 lots. If you have 4 characters, your account gets 40 lots for now. If you want to place a single small house down with each of your 4 characters and then let your crafter put down 36 harvesters, go for it. Mix and match your lots however you want. No more leftover lots that you can’t put to use.

Under the hood, this mechanic involved a massive overhaul to the engine and how lots are calculated, including an entirely new subserver just for managing all account structures. This will also allow us to bring in new exciting features that we are not ready to talk about yet. For players (and also to ease the burden on our CSR staff) another immediate benefit will be that there are no more sync issues between the lot count and the actual structures placed. Our support staff had to deal with hundreds of these types of tickets.

So Jedi will always have those 10 extra lots?
For now, yes the Jedi-owning accounts will be able to use 40 total lots to go with their four character slots. This is something that may change in the future though, and we'll share how we are going about that decision below.

When we were originally designing this system, our plan was to actually just grant all accounts the same number of lots all at once. We realized a couple big problems with this:

1. Because of this new quality of life bonus, players can drop many many harvesters on one character, all at once. This is already going to add a lot of pressure and competition for getting to the most valuable resource drops fast enough. If we were to suddenly grant new accounts/players instant access to this as well, the problem would get even worse, and it could also tempt some people to spin up alternate accounts (despite being very against the rules) just to drop dozens more harvesters on a key spot, hogging it to themselves.
2. Actually picking a number was problematic. We could bump the ~90% of active players that don't have Jedi up to 40 and add a lot of pressure to harvest drops and city space, or we could set it to 20-30 and be taking lots away from people, forcing them to consolidate and potentially lose some houses.

In addition, we are concerned about the advantage that comes with the extra lots on an account, on a game-wide level. We want to learn from mistakes that have happened on other servers that allow for too many characters and the impact that has on cities and harvesters and sprawl. We also don't want players to feel like they need to walk the path of the Jedi just for a fourth character slot and access to more lots. We tried to have this account-lot feature done, or some variant of it, before the original release of Jedi, but didn't accomplish that.

Still, we know that it is very unfair to alter the deal after it's been struck, especially after a series of other Jedi balance and mechanical updates that were not in their favor. So, our plan is as follows:

1. We are going to wait-and-see how this shared account lot feature plays out. We want to see how much this does impact things like resource spawns and city concentrations. How many Jedi accounts end up using all of their lots, and how much of that is on harvesters.
2. If we see signs that this does seem like too strong an advantage, we will announce our intentions ahead of time, and will include a grace window and/or make-up of some kind.
3. Any changes that we do make will not happen until they can be paired with our planned Jedi-focused update (featuring Knights, Inquisitors, and so on).

How can I keep track of all my structures if the lots are not per character?
There will also be tools to manage structures across the whole account more efficiently, however each character will still be the “owner” of the structure and the existing permission system will be left in place. We greatly upgraded the mechanics of the /locateStructure command and there might even be more info one can find if you talk to your local architect about it.

new versus old lots and storage​

*Owners of these houses will qualify for a 100-storage boost item each, if purchased before today, due to their no longer having a "bonus" to storage