When will you really address the housing availability problem?

[Gyson]

While the recent news on expanding the current wards and the repeated intention to add housing to Ishgard is good news, the additional news on apartment housing is very disturbing.

To me, that's a sign of Square washing their hands free and clear of the whole housing shortage fiasco once and for all. Because once there's enough apartments available for everyone they'll be able to claim they've resolved the issue, despite the fact that they know only a small percentage of players will actually have an in-game house with a yard that is physically placed in a neighborhood (which I suspect most will prefer to some instanced tiny room in an apartment building).

I really wish rather than wasting development resources on this disappointing "solution" they would invest that effort into making the current type of housing available to everyone.

[Zojha]

I really wish rather than wasting development resources on this disappointing "solution" they would invest that effort into making the current type of housing available to everyone.

Well the solution to current housing is simple: Add wards until everyone has a house, upgrading servers as necessary. Now, a server like Balmung has like what, 25000 players? If one ward has 30 houses, that means 834 wards are necessary total. Less with subdivisions. Discounting people who have more than one house and FCs go extra. Even if we assume a quarter of the playerbase has zero interest in housing whatsoever, that's a truckload.

I have a rough idea why they don't attempt to make current housing available to everyone - it's not feasible.

[Gyson]

Well the solution to current housing is simple: Add wards until everyone has a house, upgrading servers as necessary. Now, a server like Balmung has like what, 25000 players? If one ward has 30 houses, that means 834 wards are necessary total. Less with subdivisions. Discounting people who have more than one house and FCs go extra. Even if we assume a quarter of the playerbase has zero interest in housing whatsoever, that's a truckload.

I have a rough idea why they don't attempt to make current housing available to everyone - it's not feasible.

Tell that to Turbine. From a gameplay perspective they use the exact same structure as FFXIV - 4 regions for player neighborhoods with 30 houses per neighborhood. There's a 250 neighborhood limit per region. That's *30,000* homes compared to FFXIV's 1,440.. and their game is free-to-play, going on 7 years old now, and dealing with *much* older server hardware. Someone should have told them it wasn't feasible.

[Zojha]

Tell that to Turbine.

Does that game/developer have to remove other UI elements in order to make TP bars without numbers possible...?