We really need new Wards in the existing housing areas.

[Flarestar]

All of the new ideas for housing are great, and I'm glad Ishgardian housing will be coming, but we really need new housing wards available for the existing areas. Even on the lower population servers most everything is full except for smalls, and even then except for the tiny servers most or all of those are taken. With server transfers coming up it would be very welcome.

[Numenor1379]

No, we need the auto-demolition timer turned back on. It has been suspended in NA since Oct.

[Dorkarth]

Auto-demolition should still be there. A friend of mine received a mail from SE last week regarding his inactivity online, or doing anything regarding his plot. They would demolish his house if he does not follow the steps (given in the mail). But still I think they should indeed increase the houses available. who knows maybe SE will do that again like a few patches ago..

[Dustytome]

Auto-demolition should still be there. A friend of mine received a mail from SE last week regarding his inactivity online, or doing anything regarding his plot. They would demolish his house if he does not follow the steps (given in the mail). But still I think they should indeed increase the houses available. who knows maybe SE will do that again like a few patches ago..

EU servers were not paused. JP & NA were for some time due to natural disasters and just recently JP's timers were reactivated. At the moment NA servers are still paused. You can view a list of the servers here, any servers listed under Aether or Primal currently do not have active auto-demolition timers.

[InkstainedGwyn]

Auto-demolition should still be there. A friend of mine received a mail from SE last week regarding his inactivity online, or doing anything regarding his plot. They would demolish his house if he does not follow the steps (given in the mail). But still I think they should indeed increase the houses available. who knows maybe SE will do that again like a few patches ago..

Auto demo has been off since October, 2018, on NA servers. As noted there (and as has happened with previous suspensions) they will notify us before they turn it back on. JP's auto demo was reinstated back in January, I believe. EU was not paused.

They've already stated that they don't plan on adding more wards in the forseeable future (other than, of course, on the new servers.) Regardless, new wards aren't the answer to the housing shortage, they'll help ~2k players per server immediately and then once they're full on the handful of servers that fill up, there will just be another request for more. Meanwhile, when Auto Demo is actually a thing, most low-mid pop servers have quite a few empty houses in all zones (I was even finding Larges on our server a few times a week before the halt of auto demo). It may not be the exact house someone wants, but that's what you get for having non-instanced wards with a few "prime" locations - we can't have 15,000 wards because all 15,000 people on a server all want Shirogane 8 or Goblet 19 or Lavender Beds 11, with the rest of each ward empty.

If you want to solve the problem, you need instanced housing or all-sizes of apartments. We'll see if that ever happens, though.

[Edax]

I'm glad Ishgardian housing will be coming

Well this is news to me! Can you provide a link where this has been confirmed?

[Numenor1379]

Well this is news to me! Can you provide a link where this has been confirmed?

It has been implied via the rebuilding of Ishgard. There are no quotes stating it will happen implicitly.

[Losara]

If we use the Doma reconstruction as a comparison it might take 2 patches e.g. 5.2 - 5.4 roughly to complete the Ishgard rebuild. Though realistically Ishgard is a fair bit larger than Doma and would take longer to rebuild.

Once auto-demolish hits the housing situation should stabilize or at least it did the previous time when auto-demolish was turned off and then back on again.

[Vahlnir]

No, we need the auto-demolition timer turned back on. It has been suspended in NA since Oct.

If there was more wards available (or instanced housing) we wouldn't need the auto demolition system at all!

[Jojoya]

If there was more wards available (or instanced housing) we wouldn't need the auto demolition system at all!

Auto-demo will always be a necessity with a ward system. Wards are constantly running so they're a big consumer of server resources. SE needs to make sure that they're actively being used and that means removing houses from inactive players and getting them in the hands of active players to reduce the amount of server resources required.

It's part of why so many players are pushing SE to start using instanced housing instead. Since instanced housing is load on entry instead of constantly running, the demand on server resources is far less.

People need to stop pushing for more wards and start pushing for more instanced housing options that every players can use if they want, and can come back to a year later if they take a break from the game.