This is getting silly, just create instanced housing already...

[Ignacius]

Cut-up servers are probably a big problem anyway, but that's a harder and more complex fix. They can DEFINITELY pull off instanced housing. As mentioned previously, Wildstar provides, for free (in a now F2P game) instanced housing which is superior to FFXIV's in almost ever way. Range of experiences on it, the item count, the ways you can position those items, the flexibility of those items, the list goes on. SquareEnix is absolutely capable of doing this and I am perfectly happy to pay for it, with real money if it's worth it.

At present, their biggest hangup is their reliance on the ward system (and given the option, many would prefer instanced). It will take some work, but Square needs to do it. It's always a bad idea to make your own success a bludgeon to new incoming players. That's why jacking up the price and being strict about availability isn't a good solution; the people that affects most are the people you're trying to attract to grow the game.

[ColorOfSakura]

Cut-up servers are probably a big problem anyway, but that's a harder and more complex fix. They can DEFINITELY pull off instanced housing. As mentioned previously, Wildstar provides, for free (in a now F2P game) instanced housing which is superior to FFXIV's in almost ever way. Range of experiences on it, the item count, the ways you can position those items, the flexibility of those items, the list goes on. SquareEnix is absolutely capable of doing this and I am perfectly happy to pay for it, with real money if it's worth it.

And the rest of Wildstar is barren and basically devoid of content. Their housing system is basically the ONLY draw that game has because the rest of the game is absolutely terrible.

The apartment system the dev team is implementing is basically instanced housing so I don't know why everyone is bitching about that anyway. A vast majority of the playerbase has said that "Moghouses" from FFXI would satisfy them. Well, that's what the apartments are. So I don't get how this doesn't solve the complaint to begin with. If your complaint is "well we don't get yards" - then too bad? I've always been of the opinion that the housing plots in the wards should have remained Free Company exclusive and that personal housing should have either been done instanced through an apartment system or through FC Private Chambers. Them opening the housing wards to private buyers is what has caused such a massive crunch on the housing market each time they expand it. If it'd stayed FCs only, then there'd be open houses and people wouldn't be abusing their system. (Which I admit is rather poorly put together.)

[worldofneil]

If it'd stayed FCs only, then there'd be open houses and people wouldn't be abusing their system. (Which I admit is rather poorly put together.)

They would though, people already level up multiple characters (each with their own FC) so they can get multiple FC houses and give each the same short tag (so they can brag about it?). I used to think that was a lot of hassle, but I've since realised it's really not since you only need to level *1* character to 50 (to initially buy each house). After that the FC is "transferred" to a level 1 alt and then that person would leave and start a new FC to rank that up to rank 6 and repeat.

Sure getting rank 6 takes some effort, but for someone who actively plays, that's happening in the background with a lot of things they do and I'm sure there's things you can do to accelerate it (focus on company hand ins or GC levequests perhaps?). If you have a few people in the same group who do this then it'd be even faster to level them up (although then obviously it's not a single person owning the houses, but an FC owning multiple houses if that makes any difference?).

I do appreciate what you're saying, but when a system lets people do something, you can bet people will do it, especially since it's not against any rules. SE let's us have 8 separate characters per server on the normal account and if they only wanted us to be a single character, they'd only let us have 1 per account.