Solve the cause, not mitigate the symptoms, Square Enix. Keep wards too.

Today, I'll explain how Square Enix can solve the cause of the housing supply issue while keeping the current ward system.

It's one step.

Automatically create a new, empty ward whenever all houses in a residential area are full.

If they did this, there wouldn't be a need for a lottery. There wouldn't be a need for a 45-day timer. There wouldn't be a need for a random housing timer in the FCFS system.

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Now to address the two obvious concerns.

Neighborhoods never work! We need pure instanced housing!

Lord of the Rings Online proves otherwise.

They have an instanced neighborhood system similar to Final Fantasy XIV. Except they have the fix I mentioned.

They do limit their largest houses to kinships only, which are the equivalent of free companies here.

The devs said servers are too expensive!

Square Enix has made record profits the past three years. They can afford servers. Someone's being stingy at the company, likely the penny pinchers.

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Basically, Square Enix needs to solve the cause of the issue, not mitigate the symptoms. They've had six years of trying Band-Aids that don't work. It's time to fix the issue.

I agree with everything but large houses being for FC only.
If someone wants a large as a personal, let them have it. So long as the system creates new wards as needed there would be no issue with people getting the size they want.

I'd be down for larges being FC only and honest I bring up the LOTRO argument a lot when people say oh it can't work or can't be done.. in it's hay day it would auto gen a new ward when one filled and you had to pay monthly gold to keep your house (if you were playing the game it was gold you wouldn't miss. Even as a casual player).

I do think if they put in the fc only larges they would have to up the item limit on apts, fc rooms, smalls and med houses to wave a bit of the backlash from a change like that this late in the system. But that's my thought.. honestly I know a fair few people who get a med or lrg house just so they can make a decent looking small house due to item limit.