What you think...

[Searban]

Yes, it does seem very shot-sighted of the developers if this is the case.
As for alternative solutions - what are they? Unless wiping the whole thing and starting from scratch is an option, I can't see how housing will ever be available for all.

The one solution that gets tossed around most often is to leave wards as they are and develop instanced housing alongside it, based on the already existing apartments system. The only problem is that we don't really know how much would that help with the servers capacity issue. An issue which, on its own, leaves me a bit perplexed because in more than a decade of playing various MMOs I've never seen a triple-A game this plagued by that particular problem.

It is possible to make a ward system with much higher number of wards. See for example LOTRO which has a similar housing system with various neighbourhoods ( = wards) each with a number of houses in them. Difference is that they have a much larger number of wards. Not infinite, but near enough in practice. Main difference is likely that there each ward is treated as an instance, which might lower server load.

Oh, I know perfectly well that wards can work well enough in practice. All that I was pointing out is that FFXIV devs seem to be unable to make them work, judging by how much time have passed since housing was first introduced into this game.

Yesterday i wrote something on my blog related to housing, so free to check if you want. It comes from a perspective of a player who was disappointed more than once and not only in FF.

TLDR for people who don't want to waste their time: it's the usual rambling that boils down to the old times were better and muh right to feel special in a video game.

[Tridus]

The one solution that gets tossed around most often is to leave wards as they are and develop instanced housing alongside it, based on the already existing apartments system. The only problem is that we don't really know how much would that help with the servers capacity issue. An issue which, on its own, leaves me a bit perplexed because in more than a decade of playing various MMOs I've never seen a triple-A game this plagued by that particular problem.

YoshiP himself has mused about "large apartments", or condos as I like to call them. Their main advantage is that they're fully instanced. There's a key difference:
- Apartments (and housing interiors) are fully instanced. They're only "live" on the server when someone is using them, and when they're empty they can be shut down and removed from RAM entirely. If your server has a capacity of (made up numbers) 2000 characters logged in at once and a total character pool of 25,000, you only need active capacity for 2000 instanced houses. You could give everyone four houses to be silly, and you STILL only need active capacity for 2000 houses. And that's assuming your entire concurrent login pool are all inside houses. In reality you just need room for instances and don't care a ton if they're apartments or dungeons. This lets you efficiently allocate server resources based on what players are doing, and nets you higher active player capacity for a given set of hardware. Instancing is popular for precisely this reason.

You just need persistent storage (aka: disk/data store) for the data belonging to all the ones that aren't active, and persistent storage is the cheapest thing to acquire more of on the back end.

- Wards (and housing exteriors, as they're in the wards) are treated as zones. That is, they're always active. Ward 6 is always running, even if nobody is in it. That means it's always consuming server RAM and likely a bit of CPU. Adding more wards means consuming more RAM, all the time, no matter if anyone is using it or not. So in this case, more houses means more resource cost, all the time, no matter what people are doing. You can't deallocate this and devote it to dungeons instead the way you can with the instanced housing interiors, it's an ongoing resource cost you have to live with forever.

For various reasons that have a lot to do with poor decisions made in 1.0, server budget is a real problem for this game. They're always tight on capacity. Thus, jacking the ward count up to 50 to make the problem go away carries major costs and they don't want to do it. Apartments don't carry the same costs, but again going back to design decisions (this time in 2.0), apartments weren't built to be resizable or to have exterior furnishing/gardening access. So they're currently inferior to houses. Given their current limitations, it makes more sense for them to devote the development budget to making apartments better than it does to pile on tons of wards, because once the bigger apartments exist they will not have to have that large ongoing cost to give every character access to one the way that adding enough wards to do so would, especially on a server like Balmug.

While other games have done this, that ship has largely sailed here. It would be hugely expensive to rework the whole thing now and I doubt we'd ever see it happen. Hence restrictions like 1 house per account, whereas apartments are much more of a free for all. I wouldn't be surprised to see apartment improvements in the future, either. It's the more scaleable of the two systems.