New Wards Alone Aren't Going to Solve the Housing Issue

[Septonyte]

Not sure what is the deal over there in Japan. Do they not have access to other MMOs to research design? Are they seriously working in a bubble?

Funny you should ask that. After seeing people refer to LOtRO's housing so much the past few days I read up on its housing system and noticed it is almost a clone except it is cross server and once you buy a house it is shared between all your characters. Hell, the neighborhoods even have 30 houses (30-house subdivision). I don't know why they don't go this route. They could even play test it by using existing wards as test wards to make into cross-server wards.

This would actually solve a few issues IMO:
1) A house for all your characters would solve the reasoning behind most of the "don't limit us" arguments (though not all). It may not destroy the flipping market but...
2) Dynamic wards means there will always be housing because wards are added as old ones fill up, thus destroying the "flipping market".
3) I remember SE talking about cross-server FC's a while back and the problems with only players on one of the servers having house access was a point that was brought up. cross-server housing would solve this for the most part.
4) It would also allow for people to get their "dream plot" and could allow for a "plot reservation system" when the next ward opens and a reserver's number comes up.


Although I would ask they didn't punish those with multiple houses already and allow those players to keep their multiple houses by simply not allowing them to buy more houses.

The only issues I could think of are:
1) Money - SE would probably have to invest in servers similar to the instance servers to make this work. The front-end load would be a lot larger because they would need to have enough servers for the first-day rush although it may not be as bad as I am thinking it would be.
2) It may take time for the behind the scenes stuff such as physical setup of servers, programming, etc. to be done right.
3) The "How" of new ward generation. Hopefully it will be on a city-by-city basis (ex. if Mist fills then it makes a new Mist) instead of a full set basis (the wards in all cities are filled before a new set is generated).