Housing salt

[Zfz]

If they really care about building a neighbourhood and maintaining activitiy in the housing wards, they should have made it so that every month or so your plot is moved to a ward instance with similar activity. So people who spend a lot of time in their plot will eventually find that their neighbours have became also people who love to spend time in the ward. In a sense, "new neighbours moved in" or "we're moving to a more popular ward" kind of thing.

People who buy the plot just for farming or to resell and neglect their houses will soon find their plot moved into the dead wards, together with all the other plots that are neglected.

You would end up with lower number wards being the most active, and higher number wards mostly just farmland.

With this kind of system, it would be easy to auto-create new wards and auto-delete empty wards, making housing a resource that is automatically scaled, just like how dungeon instances are created dynamically, except housing wards are non-volatile.

In fact, it is even possible to go for a static system and preallocate housing wards so that the number of total plots match the number of active service accounts on the server. If you are "active", such as reaching level cap on at least one job and having an active sub, then you are guaranteed to be able to get a plot, except you may have no say in what size or location it is, but there will be a plot allocated due to you playing on that server actively.