Automatic Housing Demolition - A Suggesstion, a Compromise. Let's talk about it.

[polyphonica]

3. You already stated it makes it more attractive to come back. There are also more complex benefits, such as not having your players hate you.

There's also the fact they can save face every time someone brings this back up.

I don't think they're all that worried about "saving face" from that old quote, because it was also players who asked for a reclamation system to be put in place to have some way to use all the abandoned plots. The circumstances changed and that caused them to change their mind. Of course that means circumstances can change again.

Really, so long as it remains a scarce resource, it's going to be problematic in one way or another. If they were going to spend time on this type of cold storage system anyway, might as well just allow you to instance the house from that cold storage somehow and be done with it. They already have a partial solution for instanced gardening with the flower pots, so the remaining problem is really just the chocobo stable.

I don't really care if housing servers are shut down for a year, two years, or more to get this fixed. SE needs to do something about the housing problem, and I don't think many people will be opposed to shutting down housing for a while to get this fixed - as long as they get to keep their houses when all is said and done.

I don't think there'd really be any need to shut anything down even if they were going to make some changes like that (it could be done in parallel), but it's still a big cost to do it, and it's not necessarily the case that demand is going to just keep on growing forever. It'd probably require some pretty major re-architecture to have dynamic scaling (since it'd probably involve spinning up new virtual servers, automatic provisioning, etc. -- this was a game designed before the "cloud").