Cure the disease, don't treat the symptom

[MariaArvana]

Yes, XIV's servers need upgrading in general since they have the collective power of a room full of hamsters; but an instanced housing system is fundamentally a better system as the instances are only loaded on demand and not kept constantly running.
Also, no one would design a housing system with every one of them active at once.. Doing that would be bad design as well. You design a system like that to be able to handle a few steps above of your average active player base because you are never going to run into a situation where your entire server population is going to be even online at the same time, let alone doing the same activity.

Hey, it happened with raubahn EX, Cid EX, etc to the point they specifically had to buy more server power for the beginning of SHB to prevent the same situation, and they had to do it in the past because the playerbase hit the limit of their housing instances because they undershot the amount of power they needed, hence housing lockout.

Also as I said, the current wards don't perpetually load the inside of homes; they're all instanced only when someone's inside of them. Our current system is 'instanced', the only thing perpetually running is the exterior which is only slightly more taxing than a standard zone due to outside furniture items. If they need to buy more server hardware because their current server power won't be able to handle more than the 5040 interior instances per server, they'd 10000000% need to buy more server power to handle the potentially 20k+ instances some of the big servers like Gilgamesh/Balmung/Mateus would need.

Again, neither me or Valkyrie is arguing instanced vs wards is better; only that this extra server buying is in fact treating the 'disease' that their housing system needs more server power to handle more interior instances. That's all. It's not a ward issue; its a lack of server power issue, regardless of their housing system. This 'symptom' would have popped up even if it was solo instanced.

[Vahlnir]

Again, neither or or Valkyrie is arguing instanced vs wards is better; only that this extra server buying is in fact treating the 'disease' that their housing system needs more server power to handle more interior instances. That's all. It's not a ward issue; its a lack of server power issue, regardless of their housing system.

Yeah, server power is definitely THE issue, but they sort of designed themselves into a corner. Short of a complete overhaul this is the system we have and probably will have for a long time. SE is probably trying to make the best of it. I just don't think the game gets enough funding to give the housing system (or any system really) what it needs more than once or twice a year, so even when new wards and plots are added it is really just too little way too late.