Island Sanctuary as a housing solution ?

[Arielen]

Unofficial census had Gilgamesh at 24k last summer. Player populations do rise and fall over the course of an expansion.

Your math is bad if you think 7200 houses will be enough for 14k players and all the FCs looking for a house, not to mention that the player population will have exploded upwards again by the time Ishgard housing is opened next year thanks to the release of the new expansion.

Not sure why you're bringing up the two worlds with the lowest population in the game. That does nothing to help the highest population worlds. Why should NA players be shortchanged when SE controls the number of worlds per data center and thus the number of houses available to players in those data centers?

Add in enough worlds to NA so we've got the same average populations as the JP data centers and we'd be okay. I don't see SE increasing the number of NA worlds from 24 to 40. Do you?

Set the ward system up so it expands dynamically by need per world and we'd be okay. Considering SE has already said they can't do that, I don't see that happening either.

That's 14k characters all-time that have finished 5.0, not that have finished 5.0 and are playing right now. The number of subbed players can be presumed to be much lower than that. According to this, there are only about 813 FCs with 10+ players (sorry, couldn't narrow it down to 4, it's either 1 or 10 lol) with rank 6 or above on Gilgamesh. So if we assume there are 10k people currently subbed and playing on Gilg and that every single one of those FCs is active, yes, that's a house for every FC and a house for 60% of the playerbase once Ishgard comes in. I'd say that's pretty reasonable.

The next issue with housing will probably not be a lack of housing availability, but lack of medium and large homes. And that, there's very little to do for: they probably can't make houses 'upgradeable' to the next size up and adding new wards doesn't change the ratio of smalls vs mediums and larges.

That being said, we do need like 3ish more worlds per American and EU DC anyway. In terms of housing crisis, 8k 'active players' on the smallest servers in the game lead to an excess of housing: so few people there want it that larges get devalued. While this can be attributed to a variety of factors such as baby server with slow market and broke ass players, a lot of people also move there for housing.

Edit:

Those 14k characters include duplicates per account. So that's 14k characters, not 14k individual players.

More edits:

The 24k you cited cannot be possible. Reason being that I'm speaking to the devs of FFXIVCensus on twitter right now, and the current number dates back to April 2020. There have been no updates since. One of the other devs mentioned that they could scan for the minion obtained with the completion of 5.3, but there's no date of estimate for that yet. This is the relevant twitter thread for FFXIVCensus dev responses.