Quote Originally Posted by Jandor View Post
The wards are empty because they let individual players in, when it was FC only it was much busier.

At the end of the day, there is only so much time a single person can spend online, and they're only going to spend a fraction of that time at their house. End result is you never really see anyone.
No, that's just revisionism. The whole reason why they allow Private Housing in the first place because when it was FC's only, it was even more underutilized. Not only Ward were a ghost town, they were ghost town with empty lots, now at least they have something built.

To answer the OP, it's because the way SE's original envision of housing is kinda go against the common practice of MMO. In MMO people need to see other players, that's why every single MMO need to have some kind of central hub so players can see each other. I'm not talking about interaction, they just have to "see" so it doesn't feel empty or a like a SP. This is even more critical for a game like FF14 with very few open world activities (most are instances). The reason Limsa is popular is not just because the MB is right there, but because the plaza also have a nice set up like a park/stage for people to socialize. Now, let's say it's possible to add something unique to housing and encourage people to hangout the house more ... what do you think will happens? Think about how many wards are on a servers, and how big each ward is. Even if you assume every single player belong to a house, even if you assume the server is full, and even if every players log in at the same time ... if you divide the population into all of those ward ... trust me, they'll still feel no less death as they are now.