I'd like to take an extended break from the game, but...

[Zojha]

I can only make assumptions as only the devs know how the instancing works, but assuming their server hardware is limited when it comes to total instances they can allocate, I can assume the choice of 'neighborhoods' was made to keep the total housing instances on each server down to 36 instances (12 wards * 3 housing areas) vs 2160 instances.

Sounds plausible - until you realize that the interior of the houses has to be allocated as an instance either way, so you're not saving those 2124 instances, you only have 36 more. Moreover, every FC house can have up to 512 more instances inside it - Private chambers. If the amount of instances was an issue, people using that potential would be a veritable nightmare for them.

If they had wanted to save instances, they'd have had to design the exterior of the house to fit with the interior, so that both are in the same instance. Easy to do when one house is one instance, a lot less so when 30 houses make one instance (Subdivisions are a new Instance IIRC).

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Sounds plausible - until you realize that the interior of the houses has to be allocated as an instance either way, so you're not saving those 2124 instances, you only have 36 more. Moreover, every FC house can have up to 512 more instances inside it - Private chambers. If the amount of instances was an issue, people using that potential would be a veritable nightmare for them.

If they had wanted to save instances, they'd have had to design the exterior of the house to fit with the interior, so that both are in the same instance. Easy to do when one house is one instance, a lot less so when 30 houses make one instance (Subdivisions are a new Instance IIRC).

Like I said, it comes to assumptions. Based on zero load times and what I know of dev 'tricks' from the time I've worked as a programmer, I actually think the interior of the houses are 100% loaded in the same instance as the actual neighborhoods, just that the interiors are located far away, beneath the ground, or otherwise inaccessible. There have been plenty of times not just in what I've worked on, but from what I've seen in other games through people using cheat devices or glitches, that objects and stuff that's needed for something specific, but not necessarily needs to be seen by the player until a specific point are often stored beneath the map or out of sight, then the player is simply teleported to a location, or the objects brought into the scene.

In the case of their neighborhoods, I would have put in 30 empty rooms per division far beneath the map, then once the house is accessed, the server would pull all the data regarding objects inside the house to populate it so it'd give the 'illusion' it's instanced. But who knows. I only base it by the nearly zero load times to enter subdivisions and the houses themselves. Either way, It's my guess there's a technical reason behind not doing full instanced housing, and 'immersion' is the 'PR' response.