Fix housing by getting rid of the huge wards in favor for smaller player built wards.

The problem IMHO is the Wards...

The houses themselves are not "that" messed up (altho the severe limitations of item count do suck big time), and houses already are instanced anyways.

But unfortunately to keep "lively neighbourhoods" that people like so much they need to keep the wards loaded in server memory and processing all the time, so each ward is equivalent to an open world area all the time running and using resources, wether people are there or not.

Just doing some quick math. Thats 8 wards and 8 subdivisions per city to a total 16 wards per city, thats 48 "open world ward areas" per server some of which seldom get used...

And thats where the resources are wasted! 48 wards times 64 servers and you can start seeing how 3072 wards can start taxing those servers...

Because each ward is an instance process that needs to be executed, having weather, and birds flying over, npcs, active mapping of players and what not.

With the current system in order to make more plots they have to make more wards, more wards means opening up more "open world ward areas" and thats where SE grinds to a halt coz they're not sure all the houses will be occupied in all the servers all the time, in effect wasting their precious resources...

Add 2 more wards to the servers and thats 128 more wards needed to accomodate in the whole server farm!

If SE is to be believed and they just reached the 5 million subscription watermark, in order to satisfy housing demand we'd need around 166,666 wards (30 houses each)...

That kind of growth is wasteful and unsustainable... So they'll never meet the demand of 1 player 1 house that way.

So the solution is clear, they should blow the whole HUGE ward thing outta the water!

Now before you cry foul read me out...

SE can keep the old (wasteful) wards they have if people want to stay in them but for newer players a new ward version should be implemented.

New "virtual wards"

Nothing new under the sun here, most MMOs are trying this strategy. Housing can be kept as is (with all their sad limitations), and we can keep the cozy neighbourhood feel if done right.

SE just need to make it that houses are assigned to a smaller "virtual ward" upon the player getting a house permit.

Virtual wards are collections of up to 5 houses (or whatever small random number you want).

They all share a common ward area (the ward hub) that can have an aetherite crystal, a marketboard and a summoner bell and thats it... All the NPCs (caretakers and such) can be kept near the big aetheryte crystals in major cities.

In those "virtual wards" all plots should be the same size to avoid mapping variations. But the size of the house you put in it will be the thing that changes depending on your pocket size, you can have a small house in your plot and grow it to a large mansion when you get the money, coz the plot will be big enough to handle it).

And the individuality of the neighbourhood will be granted by what people put on their front yards.

You can have restaurant wards, or weapon shop wards, or suburbia wards. It all depends on what the players wanna do there.

But I wanna live next to my friends!

You can either stay in that randomly assigned ward OR then select who to make a ward a new with, just as you select who are your friends.

You wanna live together with a friend then you send a neighbour request to your friend, if he agrees you're both assigned to a new "virtual ward". Another friends wants to join the first two, he sends you a neighbour request, and the other two need to accept, if they do then the guy gets bound in that "virtual ward" too.

Just the same as in parties, if you don't want someone in your neighbourhood you submit a kick vote, the members of the virtual ward vote and he gets kicked (back into a random assigned new home virtual ward).

That way the players can be creating their smaller neighbourhoods. And be more engaged on what happens in them.

How will I visit the wards?

If you wanna visit a friend's house you go to the aetheryte select virtual ward and dial their "virtual ward number" and get whisked away. Popular wards will get spread by word of mouth amongs players, people may be inclined to visit the food courts on ward 345, or the weaponshops of 666. Or the big badass mansions of the top tier FC's on ward 10000.

How will this be better than the old wards we have?

Its the same concept as going into a dungeon, you get a dungeon instanced for you and your party, the instance exists until you all exit the dungeon and then it gets scraped from server memory vacating the space for the next dungeon. Same thing but with housing virtual wards.

The magic is that the "virtual wards" have to be programmed it in a way that when the "virtual ward" is empty (5 houses empty and the common ward area empty) the server tears that instance down and its just kept neatly tucked away in disk storage till someone decides to teleport back into their house or common area, and then the "virtual ward" can be spun back to life for the duration of their stay (and yeah offline players mean they're not in the house, thus don't count as being in the ward).

The smaller the wards the easier it will be to be spun back to life on an instance and to quiesce back to disk on demand.

What if I go away for extended periods of time?

Thus unused houses of unsubscribed players just stay stored in disk, if all five houses in the ward are never visited the ward is never activated and it doesn't waste anything more than stale disk space and there's no complaining of precious resources being wasted by players who moved on... And when players resub again (if they ever) their stuff is where they left it.

And if you're in a dead ward you can always move away to a better ward actively isolating those virtual ward clusters of unused houses that can stay undisturbed for long without consuming resources.

But most important... its a warding system that is scalable to meet player demands.

That way nobody looses their house, we can all have a frigging house finally and we get to choose our neighbours. Its a win-win-win.

There you have it, either file it under "yet another housing solution proposal" if you like, or build upon it if you want. And hopefully SE will steer housing in the right direction for us all.