Hurray! Finally saved up 6mil for my personal house!

[Tiggy]

Yes, I made some assumption. Some fairly safe ones at that. Like servers being expensive. I assume they are expensive. I do however base this on current industry knowledge that I have. It's a pretty safe assumption that they are indeed expensive. I also assume it will take months to reprogram it for instancing. I base this on the fact I am personaly a programmer and I know how long even "simple" tasks can take. This is hardly a simple task, and while I don't know have innate knowledge of the games architecture I have enough knowledge of the process to know its harder than most people think. (If I had a dollar for everytime someone at work suggested something by saying "well why don't you just..." I'd be doing pretty well) It is possible to make reasonable assumptions and these are reasonable. It's you're inability to make reasonable assumption that is making you such a stickler for "communication." Communication is nothing but appeasement. If they popped up today and said "In six months we are adding 200 wards!" it still wouldn't change anything for 6 months. You still wouldn't have a house. These threads will still exist because people will still be unhappy. Words are cheap and don't mean anything until action is right in front of us. It also ignores the possibility that they are still trying to figure out what they want to do to fix it in the long term while at the same time working on an expansion and releasing patches for the game every 3 months. Them having said nothing so far literally only means that they haven't said anything so far. It isn't an indication they aren't working on solutions and until they have a solution they 100% know will suffice I'd rather they stay quiet about it entirely. That's how you end up with an announcement, and then people angry several months later when details have changed. (I.E. personal housing was supposed to be separate but in the end it wasn't and there was outrage. Had they never said anything about that no one would have known and no outrage would have happened.)

As for server populations yes they are assumptions. However they aren't based on nothing. Specifically you can use this thread that popped up this December that listed the estimated number at 574,440.
http://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/commen...eased_another/
They even list their criteria for figuring it out.

Additionally Squaresoft released some numbers this last month to support the numbers listed above. Here is one article about it here. http://arcadesushi.com/square-enixs-...rs-2015-plans/
An exerpt if you will.

“Three major MMO titles - Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn which began operation last August, Dragon Quest 10, which was launched in August 2012, and Final Fantasy 11, which has entered its thirteenth year of operation-maintain nearly 1,000,000 paying subscribers all together, and have established a solid revenue base,” said Square Enix President and Representative Director Yosuke Matsuda.

So for three games they have nearly 1million subs. So FFXIV having an estimated 574,440 members completely fits within squares own announcement. Especially when I consider that FFXI capped at 500k subs several years back and has seen a steep decline since then. It would have to then be my assumption that FFXIV is clearly the bread winner for Square in the MMO space.
*edit* additional info. Using http://www.ffxiah.com/database as tool to determine active FFXI accounts we get 139,045. This is how many people are making active AH transactions. It should be accurate enough for this instance.
For dragon quest we can use the Wiki page for some guidance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Quest_X According to source 45 for an interview on march 8th they had 300k daily logins. In general the game also sold weakly only reaching a million sales over a year and a half after launch and active sub numbers have likely declined since that article as is common for MMO's as they age. All 3 games combined and 1million seems like a pretty reasonable number given what little data is available to us. Meaning the assumption about FFXIV's sub numbers is probably within the ballpark. 300k + 139045 + 574440 = 1013485. Since I'm already assuming the dragon quest numbers are innacruate and are actually lower that ends up fitting the data rather well.

Also you argue that my numbers are made up. Obviously they are. That's why I use such words as "If" so that its clearly denoted as a what-if situation. A what-if where I said IF that happened then I would be happy. As far as would it make more people happy I posited this question earlier that wasn't responded to.

Can you honestly tell me people wouldn't be overwhelmingly happy in the majority with enhanced access to these features that allowed them to avoid the insane restrictions on housing?

The answer to that should be obvious. People almost always prefer more options.

I'll end it with this. Assumptions aren't necessarily wrong. Especially when they are made using real knowledge of other analogues and with some supporting data. Such assumptions are used every day in many fields to come up with good solutions to problems quickly without perfect data. The world works on such assumptions. There are unreasonable assumptions with no basis in reality and reasonable assumptions based on actual information. I like to this I've been in the later category. It doesn't automatically make what I said wrong either.