It doesn’t have to strip anything away though… it can be both/and, not just either/or. :) Wards can stay as they are, and even if they do add instanced, I don’t think they’d ever get rid of the wards, nor would I want them to.
Hard disagree on the “it’s ok everyone doesn’t have a house” though. We’re all paying a sub, we all deserve to have the same housing options available, independent of RNG. Aka: 1 house, 1 apartment, 1 FC room and 1 island. Adding an instanced system is the only way to do that, due to the scarcity of housing per number of players.
And honestly, with instanced, there’s no reason why everyone couldn’t have multiples of those, with a lot more variety and creativity than what we have now.
Personally I already have a ward house I enjoy, plus an FC room, an apartment and my island, all of which are well-loved and frequently decorated and redecorated. But I want more options, and I really want to see more innovation. I want to be able to have a plot in places that currently don’t have housing districts. Maybe they’ll give me my dream spot in Old Sharlayan someday, maybe not. But there’s lots of other places, and styles, of housing that we don’t have, that are totally possible, if only they’d run with some of the suggestions the player base has been making over the years. They don’t have to get rid of their unique ward housing to add other forms of housing to the game.
