Because that's the only solution that will assure that for every character there is a house available to them. All of these other solutions are just band-aids.
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Who is this OP? Maybe I've been away from the forums too much. Was there some big drama over this or something?
When SE advertises "housing" with pictures of houses they set the expectations themselves. Defining if apartments are housing or not is fine, but it misses the point.
Apartments are incredibly small and don't offer the same benefits of S, M or L houses; you know, like the pictures in the advertisements.
Demand for houses seems pretty high if you look at the number of bids. Having a system that encourages players to make small FCs so they can participate in housing as advertised is eating up the lots they seem to intend for what is, in their minds, FCs full of players who can take advantage of housing as a group.
It just seems like bad decisions. For a relatively new player, not seeing any SE forum posts about housing (except a sticky one from many years ago?!?) is making me think ignoring popular issues will not do them any favors.
Encouraging players to give feedback here is also silly. SE does not interact with the forum community and the trolls are rampant (see OP) and just serve to rub salt into other's wounds.
I think you are overstating the benefit by just a little bit. There is still a huge shortfall in supply for housing. Sure, this closes the loophole a little bit on shell FCs (assuming they didn't already grab what they wanted in the last few lottery cycles).
Not complaining though - it is a step in the right direction. SE said they'd address the ward FC-to-personal balance at a future time. And it looks like they are. That's great. Just let it be in perspective. This by no means results in "everyone who wants a house getting a house." The last few weeks has been "anyone that wants an FC house can get an FC house assuming they game the system."
I don't remember this person from the threads where I said they would adjust wards soon, after seeing how a few rounds went. -shrug- :D
I see this every time and again, this is not instanced housing; there is a limited amount of apartments that *can* run out; it's no different than houses in that regard; if apartments are instanced, so are normal houses.
That said, a true 1:1 correspondence is something I doubt will happen, unless something in island sanctuary shows that they are at least working on it.
It uh... Was very obvious what they were gonna do with the fc/personal split.
Simply logic! Does a fish think it's amazing coz it can swim? Probably, as seen here :D
Apartments are still limited in number. In true instanced housing, every character has their own individual place.
EQII gave all characters an inn room and part of the initial starting quests involved accessing that inn room and you even got some basic furniture. You could keep that room and also purchase other instanced housing. So you could have multiple places. There were buildings with doors with different addresses. Everyone for a given address accessed their particular instance from that door so everyone wasn't crowding around one location. You could control access. You could even sell on the market board from your housing. And there was even an outdoor possible in the form of courtyard type areas. There was no limitation on how many people could have their instance at a given address. This is the type of thing that's meant by true instanced housing.
They're already part of the way there with apartments. They just need to figure out the last few steps and whatever it would take behind the scenes to implement them.