Quote Originally Posted by KayRadley View Post
As I read on another thread, the idea of neighborhood wards instead of instanced housing like other MMOs came about because Square didn't have much faith in 2.0's release, going off of 1.0's poor reception and tiny playerbase. This wound up biting them in the butt when 2.0 took off and became a potential WoW-killer, but now they have hundreds of thousands of potential homeowners, and not enough plots to accommodate.
It sort of worked in the beginning, it was just made with different intent than what players have come to expect and demand from it. It was viewed as more of a luxury than a need, with exorbitant plot prices out of most people's reach. Plots of all sizes remained unsold and available week after week (most worlds) while people saved diligently. If you wanted house access you just joined one of the FCs that owned one and that's housing working as intended. A little fluff side thing.

The high volume of complaints started when personal housing was added to the game later on, sharing the same wards as FCs rather than being built on a new separate system as had previously been indicated. Now just owning an instanced private room inside an FC estate wasn't enough for people and they coveted their own land, but the old neighborhood ward system couldn't support such demand.

I think it's not just big growth of the playerbase that took s-e by surprise but also the percentage of those players who NEED personal plots rather than players just seeing it as an option alongside FC rooms, apartments, tenancy sharing plots, inn rooms. They might've begun with something more scalable if they had that hindsight.