Quote Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor View Post
Instanced housing operates on the basis house plotting only load if an active character were in the location. Otherwise, they remain compressed data, severely limiting strain on the servers. Comparatively, current wards function akin to City-States. All eighteen remain active indefinitely, and must render each of the thirty plots and their maximum potential limits. Unlike the former, this constant activity places considerably more strain on the servers.
Instanced housing transfers the memory pressure to I/O pressure, because the server has to fetch data from disk, decompress it, and then send it out - which means instanced vs wards boils down to trading off some memory pressure on the server for additional I/O pressure with data retrieval.

When looking at a single person, it's pretty obvious that the instance housing wins, but when you start looking at having a thousand or so people, having a ward already in memory and staying there while the server is up completely removes the I/O operations from the equation because that happened during server boot - so the disk/DB I/O can be spent on things like what the players are doing, and other things to improve that experience.

It's all a tradeoff, and this is where instanced housing falls apart, and it's why the wards are actually the better solution for mass players.

But, if you really don't want to continue with the technical discussion, I can stop right here because I really don't want to lose more people (or worse) have the few people that have declared me to be wrong start also accusing me of technical babble because my technical ability is so far above theirs it's not even funny.