Quote Originally Posted by freakingmayhem View Post
I'm no game developer, but my opinion of an extremely customer-friendly way of doing this would be if, when your housing is auto-demolished, your entire estate's items and configuration are stored indefinitely, to be placed in a new location in the future when you decide you want housing again.
The issue with this is, looking at it from a database perspective, storing demolished homes' inventories with placement data and such intact would take exactly as much storage as the original house itself. The game is designed to only have so many houses. If they could expand that significantly, they'd add more wards instead. If they could find a way to tie that much data to the character instead of to the plot of land itself as is currently the case, they would likely look into an instanced housing solution with no demolition instead. These homes would possibly only be available if the owner is online, because visiting one would query the character data instead of the plot data.

In the system we have now, they have got to clear out that stored data eventually, because it creates an "extra" house's worth of data, as if you'd relocated to plot 61. And it's not feasible right now for that plot number to go up infinitely as former homeowners quit forever over the course of another decade.

It's difficult to explain if you don't know all the little angles a dev has to think about this from, so I hope this makes sense.

I say this not to tell you "no, this can't happen" but to help you think about where the problems lie and work out the kinks. Tying the furnishing and placement data to the character instead of the plot would be an enormous step toward a better system and would allow for things like infinite-time storage like you suggest.