Quote Originally Posted by Jynx View Post
They are wasting their time on this "Solution" when they need to put their heads down and come up with a real solution so that housing is available to every single player in the game as long as they have the means to purchase it. As it stands that would be impossible so they need to rework the system for personal housing from the ground up.
This is a necessary component of any solution that maintains housing wards.

The options for keeping housing wards are basically four:

1: Leave it like it is, no one can purchase new houses except on the rare occasion someone comes back, at which point they may--for 10-100x the original maximum price. That is to say, leave it unattainable for most everyone.

2: Create more wards. This is a terrible band aid solution on its own, because SE simply doesn't have the server infrastructure to support infinitely increasing wards, which is necessary without reclamation. MMOs have customer churn--how many 1.0 players are still playing now? How about 2.0 players? 2.3 players? People quit, new people join. Over time, healthy populations gain players faster than they lose them--but all MMOs permanently lose players at a relatively constant rate. As players who have houses leave permanently or semi-permanently and new active players come in, SE needs to make new housing. The old players will never lose theirs so as new players come, SE has to make yet more new housing, etc. etc. forever. Even when FFXIV goes into decline and can no longer maintain sub increases, or even equilibrium, SE would still need to keep making new housing as even dying MMOs have new players. Doing this alone would force SE to, likely, turn off the game for days, if not weeks, while completely redesigning their data systems to support it, as well as constantly spending money adding new servers which would mean lay offs on the development team and the game basically turning into 'The Sims: Final Fantasy' where almost all of the budget is dedicated to keeping up with the demands of housing.

3: Reclamation. This is also a terrible band-aid solution on its own, but better than creating more wards. The problem here is that while the game continues to gain more subs over time, the current housing wards will not be enough (if they even are now--which I'd say probably depends on server, on mine? probably not). However, if subs drop or reach an equilibrium, reclamation will create a steady churn of housing that is roughly analogous to the subscriber churn, allowing everyone to have a house once FFXIV reaches a decaying state--which saves SE a lot of money it can try to use to stop any decay. It will also, potentially, create churn between patches and at other times.

4: Combination of 2 and 3. If you create enough houses for the current subscriber base to be have a fair chance of gaining access to housing while increasing ward numbers and sizes as more people sub AND create a reclamation system, you create a system where you only need to create new wards when the game is increasing its sub numbers--and even then only when those numbers maintain for awhile--instead of doing so infinitely, allowing more money to go to things OTHER than server infrastructure.

Number 4 is the only solution that ACTUALLY works, and putting a reclamation system in first is necessary to begin to gauge how many more wards/homes/whatever are actually needed when they get added.

Which we know are going to be added. We've already been promised wards in Ishgard, at the very least.