Pretty sure a search would have turned up a hundred threads or more about this....

This comes up all the time. They say it causes performance issue. Likely from early PS4s and "barely meets min requirements" PCs. PCs aren't such a big deal but Sony and Microsoft will require them to fix anything that makes the game unstable, even if its user error. And they couldnt possibility allow PC users to have things that consoles aren't capable of because they would never hear the end of the complaining about how "unfair" it is. It's totally fair that i have to play this game at a PS4 level on a $2000 gaming rig though.

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Anotherone773 wrote: »

It's totally fair that i have to play this game at a PS4 level on a $2000 gaming rig though.

There are developer job openings at ZOS if you have better ideas on how to implement a higher furnishing capacity in homes, @Anotherone773.

Until then, here's the communication from ZOS the OP should read:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/512076/february-2020-furnishing-limit-status-update#latest

@Taleof2Cities

There are developer job openings at ZOS

I already greatly exceed the income of even a well paid game dev and their managers. You have to be pretty high up in the company to get solutions implemented. It wont be the dev team members. They will come up with solutions, send it up the chain with how long it would take. Management makes a decisions and either says do it, change it, or leave it for now. Something like that.

you have better ideas on how to implement a higher furnishing capacity in homes,

I do and they already know the solutions to these and i have already read that thread when it came out. They aren't stupid. It is just not profitable for them to do so at the moment. Solutions are:
1) Stop supporting low end hardware like PS4 and low end pcs. Reason why they won't yet: They have to support an entire (console)generation rather than just the latest models of that generation. Which means we are still stuck with ancient ps4 tech until they decide to stop supporting the entire generation.

2) Support PC and consoles differently. Reason why they won't: The more versions of a patch and/or the more different the patches are, the more labor. Its more cost effective to just reduce everyone to the lowest common supported hardware. In this case a base model PS4 and make few changes for other platforms if any.

3) Allow everyone to make their own choices. This is the best solution for everyone right now. When you reach a safe limit you get a popup saying your housing has reached the (current) safe limit and it may make your client unstable, do you want to proceed? You would also get this warning before porting into a house that exceeds the safe limit. There would also be a function that allows you to undo the items placed in reverse order from outside the house( character screen maybe) so that you can make it stable again without being in the house.

Reason why they won't yet: Two reasons. One, cost money to add that feature in. Two, there is going to be that inevitable " It's not fair!" group from people who are upset because people with better hardware get to do stuff they cant. They do this all the time already because they think they can PVP in a 100 player ball group on their hardware and then blame the company when they exceed the limits of their hardware.

The best solution is... to do nothing and let people complain daily about housing as they continue to try to sell us gargantuan homes we cant even decorate. Eventually, in the next couple of years they will phase out support for older generations when the amount of players that play on those generations hit a low percent of the player base and then finally... finally they will do something about it.

Until then the rest of the games population is going to have to suffer until enough people decide to cross over.

Edited so some points make better sense.

It’s performance and not tied to the consoles but rather strain on the servers. Remember that when you load in a player home you’re also loading in possibly 1000+ assets that can be animated, readily moved, interacted with, and impact one another. These range from simple tables and platforms to lighting and moving. ITS A LOT.

Now add to that the servers have to load these up for any player at any time, keep track of all this data, etc and it become impressive that we already get the amount of spots we have.

Adding more is always requested but it would collapse the servers. And “new servers” isn’t a solution because I guarantee that they already get upgraded on a regular basis. I mean who could possibly think the game is running on the same exact hardware from 8 years ago? It’s just a matter of the data overload that would need to be solved with advances in data management.

Anotherone773 wrote: »

Eedat wrote: »

I would literally pay for more furniture slots. A lot of the bigger homes have to be left pretty empty because you simply cant put enough furniture in them

They could make bank of people willing to play crowns for more stuff more slots and a "furniture bag"

trackdemon5512 wrote: »

It’s performance and not tied to the consoles but rather strain on the servers. Remember that when you load in a player home you’re also loading in possibly 1000+ assets that can be animated, readily moved, interacted with, and impact one another. These range from simple tables and platforms to lighting and moving. ITS A LOT.

No its client side. The servers are constantly upgraded and higher demand are placed on them because of more players. In the last year alone the population on Steam has increased almost 50% year over year. Right now there are 28.6k players online on Steam that is 9k more than the peak of last December.

Even if it was server side they would just upgrade server. The amount of money they would make off selling furnishing slot upgrades and crown houses would more than pay for server upgrades. It is Sony and Microsoft that is going to be the big roadblock on this. And ZOS doesn't think it is worth the headache right now.

I should note that servers are not really servers. They are actually more like data farms/centers just on a bit smaller scale. There will be an environmentally controlled room typically in the basement because its easier to cool underground that will have rows of racks. Each rack will have multiple blade servers in it. Each blade is configured to handle a specific task. Some blades are for nothing but storage, others for processing. Some blades will run the login/auth system, some will handle the games database, some will handle player inventories, guild banks, etc, etc.

They upgrade servers by adding more blades and the system allows for almost infinite scalability with some data centers now reaching over 1 million sq (21 american football or 13 soccer fields of space.) . Also they are about to become part of MS which is opening the 6th largest data center on the planet in 2021. Having MS as a parent will grant ZOS access to the MS data centers.

Microsoft will likely not give them any servers. You still have to rent servers and moving from the current locations to Microsoft locations is problematic due to the data involved. The calculations for housing are really intensive. Unlike open zones items aren’t grouped and solidified as single objects to minimize strain on the systems.

The game systems can run out of memory but still handle a lot. Dealing with the servers is more of the issue. Remember the servers stash all homes for all players. That’s a ton of data and only increases with every home added. IMO the current housing limits are fine. Items just need to be coded better to take up more space.

trackdemon5512 wrote: »

Microsoft will likely not give them any servers. You still have to rent servers and moving from the current locations to Microsoft locations is problematic due to the data involved. The calculations for housing are really intensive. Unlike open zones items aren’t grouped and solidified as single objects to minimize strain on the systems.

It would depend on how the contracts are set up. For as much as MS paid for zenimax i could see server space in the new farm as part of the deal.

trackdemon5512 wrote: »

The game systems can run out of memory but still handle a lot. Dealing with the servers is more of the issue. Remember the servers stash all homes for all players. That’s a ton of data and only increases with every home added. IMO the current housing limits are fine. Items just need to be coded better to take up more space.

That is incorrect because:
1) Load on the servers is increasing constantly which shoots this theory down
2) They keep trying to sell me houses which shoots this theory down.
3) The data file for a house will literally be a list of item IDs and their coordinates in a zone ID( that being the house ID with your player ID tacked on). All the assets are stored on the client. All the asset models are stored on a database server, server side. There is not a copy of my snow globe sitting on the server with a bunch of other copies of the same house all taking up space on a server. That would be super inefficient. There will be a data file... we will say a text file no bigger than a phone pic file. that contains all the assets and their location. It will be something like this:

playerid:anotherone773-3829
houseid:sngb073
itemid:
Item001 [-34,492,19]
Item002 [94,291,13]
So on and so forth.

Then my client will read this data file and load that house and place assets when i load into it. That is done on my machine not on the server.