player housing should be available to everyone.

[LineageRazor]

Non-instanced housing is the ideal, obviously - a real, living, breathing city of homes is a lot more impressive and appealing than a house no one but a single player can see, by almost any measure.

However, this only works if the resources are there to support it. It was simply too ambitious for its time. I'm guessing Yoshi P underestimated the costs of the resources needed to support such an idea, which is why housing is limited.

On top of that, housing is STILL instanced - it's just that we have thirty houses in each instance. So, fundamentally, it's already failed to achieve the dream, even if there were enough wards for everyone to have a house.

Really, to properly realize what Yoshi P was striving for, we'd need a single zone with enough housing to accommodate millions of people. A zone like that would be larger than all of the zones currently in the game put together. Maybe someday, technology will advance enough to make something like that reasonable in terms of the costs to maintain it, but we weren't there when ARR was released, and we still aren't there now.

[Jojoya]

On top of that, housing is STILL instanced - it's just that we have thirty houses in each instance. So, fundamentally, it's already failed to achieve the dream, even if there were enough wards for everyone to have a house.

They aren't fully instanced. Only house interiors are instanced. The wards themselves are always "on" even if there are no players in them, unlike instances that are only generated when a player is present.

I still think about the Q&A from the EU FanFest where they talked about new technology they were working on that would allow players to see what's happening in non-instanced areas from an instanced area. If they're successful in creating that, it could really change housing for the better and allow instanced houses while retaining the neighborhood feeling.

[LineageRazor]

They aren't fully instanced. Only house interiors are instanced. The wards themselves are always "on" even if there are no players in them, unlike instances that are only generated when a player is present.

I still think about the Q&A from the EU FanFest where they talked about new technology they were working on that would allow players to see what's happening in non-instanced areas from an instanced area. If they're successful in creating that, it could really change housing for the better and allow instanced houses while retaining the neighborhood feeling.

Each Ward is an instance - that was my point. True "open area housing" would not have wards - just a single, enormous zone with every house in it. Further, and I didn't mention this before, the interiors of the houses should also not be instance. You should be able to just walk right in, look out the window, and see your neighbor's house, as well as any people walking around. (This effect COULD be emulated by the new technology you mention - but the goal I'm speaking of would not require emulation.)

This is an unrealistic goal, right now, but is the theoretical ideal for in-game housing.

For that matter, removing instancing is an ideal for a MMORPG game world as a whole, at least when it comes to open-world areas (dungeons and such are debatable - it's not much fun running a dungeon if you're just tagging along after another group that's cleared everything out already!). You shouldn't need to load into a new instance when you enter a new area. However, this is something FFXIV TRIED to do in its original 1.0 release, and there are very good reasons why they backed off from that for ARR. The technology just isn't there, yet - at least, not in a form that's affordable, and implementable on the majority of players' systems.