gutted

[Callinon]

Ok now show us their server structure, if these have an impact on gameplay outside of housing, if they are client-side or server-side and how susceptible they are to hacking.

You may not know, but most MMOs have housing as a pure vanity thing which works client-side and does not affect gameplay at all (so they don't care about hacking), while others have a very limited presets with no place for personalization, in any case these system can't be applied to ffxiv w/o turning housing into a cheesy vanity system with nothing more than boring presets.

Even if housing affects us all, this is a topic that requires a minimum level of knowledge... don't take this as an offense, i'm not an expert but you seem to know very little about how this kind of systems are managed.

Rift's Dimension system is pretty cool and is definitely server side as it's possible to visit other dimensions. However, he glossed (more like shellacked) over the important bit: Dimensions are all instanced.

FFXIV's housing system is supposed to be communal. That's why the wards instead of just making a Housing instance where your house exists and nothing else. The idea was to create a neighborhood in a natural-feeling setting. Now they've seriously underestimated the demand, which is a major problem as has been thoroughly explored in this and other threads since the system was introduced. And since FFXIV's housing gates other content, the problem is compounded. They had a chance to fix this when they introduced the subdivisions, but opted for a half-measure instead of an actual solution.

That being said, I do think separate wards for personal housing makes a lot of sense, even though you'd still run into the same problem. There needs to be a way for the server to dynamically spawn additional wards after a certain population level has been reached in existing wards. Once again we come back to needing better servers than we apparently have.

Oh btw,

Wards don't take server memory, this would do nothing, separate wards for personal hosing would work.

That doesn't make any sense. Of course the wards require server memory. They are constructs within the game world where interaction is possible. The wards aren't being handled client-side beyond the basic layout of the zone; everything else is populated by the server live.