SE have mentioned their stance on how they wanted housing to be difficult to get, as stated in my previous comment. But you probably ignored that like you did the numbers I "pulled out of the air".
I JUST showed you that 80% of the player base had little access to housing over the last 4 years. I don't know how much clearer things can be. Yet you keep coming back with phrases like "There were hundreds of houses available on some NA and EU worlds during 2018 and dozens available on most of the rest." with no proof whatsoever. I'm waiting... Go on.
Were there servers where housing was available? Yes some servers did, Goblin in NA was a good example. But again, I have to insist because it really isn't registering with you, for 80% of the player base, this was not the case. Because 80% of the ff14 population resided on higher population servers. And when you build design policies you build them for the players, NOT the servers. If 80% of players are on higher pop servers you upgrade the features for higher population servers.
Again, lets do another round of this because repetition is key. Yes JP servers do ok with housing, that's because currently HALF of those servers don't even count towards that 80% of players. Since the JP servers are so lowly populated compared to the average server. In fact only tonberry has more active players than the average server, ALL other JP servers have bellow average population. Compare that to say NA that has no servers bellow the average population.
When a game company can't balance content for all players, they should balance content for the top 80% of players affected and SE does just that. Keeping the feature within their tolerance levels for those 80%. Especially since the remaining 20% aren't harmed in any way. They just have easier housing access, which incidentally, can help distribute server load if people migrate because of it, so it's win-win-win.
You can keep going on about your fantasy explanation about SE's intentions while ignoring everything I've posted if you want. But if you want to convince anyone you'll need more than just vague anecdotal mentions of plot availability pulled from god knows where and that represented god knows what portion of the game population.
At least I posted most of my sources.
In fact, to use your words, until you can do better your fantasy isn't true no matter how much you want to think it is.
Maybe we can revisit this after you post a bit of your research on the matter.
PS: I also find it a little amusing that you'll argue against using plot availability vs active characters as a metric because and I quote "There's a large segment of the player population with no interest in owning house". I mean... For one, you have nothing to back this argument up. But in addition to this, the logic of this statement is pretty loopy.
If in 2016 a large percentage of the active population wasn't interested in housing and 50% plot availability allowed everyone to get a house. Then today with 50% plot availability the situation should be roughly the same and we should have enough plots. Aka you shouldn't be complaining about the system.
Or is it that the population of people with no interest in housing is, contrary to what you said, not large. In which case you were wrong to argue against using plot availability vs active characters as a metric?
Conversely, if that portion of players is large today and housing is still a problem (which you say it is) then you acknowledge that it was also a problem 4 years ago, as I've been saying.
Yes? No? Which is it? What's the narrative here?