The Housing Black Pill. Truth Hurts. /Housing Salt General/

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Originally Posted by Drakengarde

The ward system was in essence perfectly fine up until Stormblood as houses were for FC only. When people wanted personal plots that is when things became chaotic. When square developed the housing system it did not have in mind for personal owned plots and only fc but this changed for stormblood and thus the housing crisis. The only way they can keep the housing ward system sustainable is A. Release more wards over time or B. release more worlds. The will not make housing instance, I and many others know this so those who keep suggesting it give it up will not happen they are deadset on the way it currently is and will not change it. As some people mentioned if truly want a house make an alt make a fc and try and win a plot on a new world.

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The ability to purchase a house for personal use was added in patch 2.38, not in Stormblood.

SE was somewhat foolish to think there would less demand for personal houses than there would be for FC houses. They should have planned for personal from the start.

We know they prefer the wards, but that was also before the player base had the massive growth we've seen in the past couple of years. No matter their original preference, the system isn't sustainable with a player base this size and that may move them to change design.

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Originally Posted by SanadaX

The solution isn't to spread the player base.

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No, but it's a related issue.

There's no question that population imbalances create a problem for SE.
Hardware doesn't provide a practical solution to that problem: it's economic suicide to scale all the server resources so that they can handle the over-populated worlds well, and also suicide to have different hardware for highly-populated worlds and less-populated worlds. It's far cheaper, for reasons anyone who understands data center operations can tell you, to just keep replicating the server hardware and add new worlds on the new servers.

Unfortunately, population clumping is a natural result of the social nature of MMO games. High population worlds have more and more diverse activities, it's easier to find people who want to do what you want to do.

But letting it run wild leads to much player unhappiness - vacant worlds where single-player is close to the only option, and over-populated words where game play is slow and limited -- like trying to get into Costa del Sol was for a brief period last night on Faerie.

The most draconian solution to population clumping is hard caps on instantaneous world population and on native world population. But that creates player unhappiness as well, especially when new players want to play with friends who are already playing. And new players need more TLC than players who are already heavily invested in the game.

So instead, you can employ Prof. Cass Sunstein's "nudge theory," and create incentives that would tend to spread the population out. Limiting a valued but non-essential component of the game, like housing, provides just such an incentive. By the very nature of a nudge, it won't get everyone to move to less-populated worlds. But some people will, and that's enough.
Especially since SE does not have to do any additional investment to provide the "nudge."

Unlimited instanced housing, on the other hand, works against spreading the population.
Accordingly, we should expect that, in whatever form it takes:

Unlimited instanced housing will never be as good
(i.e., as valued by most players interested in housing)

as the ward houses we have now. Because it would be bad for the game if it was.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

The ability to purchase a house for personal use was added in patch 2.38, not in Stormblood.

SE was somewhat foolish to think there would less demand for personal houses than there would be for FC houses. They should have planned for personal from the start.

We know they prefer the wards, but that was also before the player base had the massive growth we've seen in the past couple of years. No matter their original preference, the system isn't sustainable with a player base this size and that may move them to change design.

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Thanks for the correction. But yes it was an oversight on their part for not taking people wanting personal housing. And at this point they can just keep doing what they are and making island sanctuary more impressive as time goes on