Quote Originally Posted by CatfishCassie View Post
They have instanced housing and it's called apartments. The wards exist for a reason, however, and that reason is to inspire a sense of community. No one cares how cool your house is when it exists in a pocket dimension that only you and your close friends know or care about, but being able to see other people's houses as you walk by to your own creates a difficult-to-quantify yet important aspect of community awareness. It's one of the big reasons I've stuck with FFXIV for so long... the fact that they put a lot of effort into little things that really make it feel like you're living in a world instead of just playing a game.
The communities work exactly the same if there's 24 wards instead of 12, except that doubles the amount of people who can get a house. Scaling outward like that is something that modern server clusters do really, really easily. The problem is SE's mentality.