Hear me out: Paid housing

[Jojoya]

Just get instanced housing instead.

edit -

"it's yours until you cancel your entire account"

The point of the housing system and everything around it, like voyages and gardens, is to maintain subscriptions. They dont want one-time purchases, they want your sub. They want you coming back for engagement numbers and profit. The idea of one-time purchase plots would end up with SE paying to keep dead servers online.

I'm a bit confused by what you're intending to say here.

The ward system is already one-time purchase but servers are hardly dead. I doubt very much that there are that many players who maintain a sub solely to avoid losing their house (though certainly there are some). It makes zero sense to be paying real money to keep something in a game you're not playing when there's an option available that doesn't require a sustained subscription.

Are you perhaps talking about the result if demolition was removed from the game so a house would never be taken from a player short of the account getting permanently banned? Because that's part of why SE should switch to a better instanced housing system. Load on entry/close on exit (instanced housing) is more cost effective than always loaded (outdoor portion of ward housing).

With respect to sub retention, that's reliant on overall content longevity and all housing contributes to that. Sometimes I get in the mood to decorate. The time I'm spending on decorating is time I'm not doing other content so once I finish with the decorating, I pick up where I left off with the other stuff.

People want houses not apartments though, though there is barely any difference from, however before adding and giving and more to that, something should be done about the one person FCs, and also grandfathered housing before keeping on adding new stuff, use the resources up that there already is.

Personally I would not mind to pay lots of coin to 3 or 4 room apartments as an addition to having a house though, or have the opportunity to upgrade my current apartment that I got on the side, or FC room for that matter... would be like having an extra get away.

If apartments had same interior size options as houses, many players would happily move from a house to an apartment since they wouldn't have to worry about demolition.

There would still be some demand for houses but that demand would probably drop below available supply.