Island Sanctuary as a housing solution ?

[Catstab]

there are only about 813 FCs with 10+ players.

What kind of cutoff is 10 players? Currently 64,000 houses worldwide belong to FCs too small for you to count.* So all the rest of your math starts from a useless number.

Currently, FC housing makes up roughly 25% of plots. So if you want housing for 10k players, you need about 13,500 houses. So 7200 is a still a far cry short.

Additionally, Endwalker will bring new and returning players and that 10k active players number will explode. So your assessment that only 13,000 houses are needed right now means absolutely nothing this time next year.

*source: https://www.xivhousing.com/free-company-census-2020

[Arielen]

What kind of cutoff is 10 players? Currently 64,000 houses worldwide belong to FCs too small for you to count.* So all the rest of your math starts from a useless number.

Currently, FC housing makes up roughly 25% of plots. So if you want housing for 10k players, you need about 13,500 houses. So 7200 is a still a far cry short.

Additionally, Endwalker will bring new and returning players and that 10k active players number will explode. So your assessment that only 13,000 houses are needed right now means absolutely nothing this time next year.

*source: https://www.xivhousing.com/free-company-census-2020

The cutoff is from the lowest number other than 1 that I could pick on that same site that you linked.

Fair enough on the housing for 10k players based on the fact that FCs only make up 25% of plots, but that'd be 203 plots for FCs in this imaginary scenario of the 813 viable fcs exist, making 7500 plots needed for the 10k players on the server, no? Which, there's going to be 7200 plots in Ishgard, that means there's only a deficit of 500odd plots. Two new wards would be sufficient to cover it. I don't really understand where the "13,500 houses are needed" number comes from.

It's still worth keeping in mind that the number is entirely made up to begin with: 10k actively playing and running around seems quite high considering that Gilg has 14k characters that completed 5.0 in April 2020. And that's implying, of course, that all 10k of those players are interested in, can afford, and meet the requirements for housing. If there's such a big boom of new players, then they probably don't meet the reqs.

tldr I still don't think that it's fair to estimate that most servers will probably be fine.

[Catstab]

that'd be 203 plots for FCs in this imaginary scenario of the 813 viable fcs exist

Possibly. I guess my only issue is that if 25% of housing is FC housing right now, that means at at present, 1,440 FC houses exist per server with 4,320 left for personals. I don't see that 1,440 average dropping at all unless a system is put in place to forcefully divest undersized FCs of houses, and this would be to widespread player objection.

I presume that if another 1,440 are added with Ishgard, FCs will buy some of them and leave players with closer to 1,080 of the houses. So (assuming no further ward expansions) in the Ishgard era, there will be 5,400 - 5,760 houses available for personal use. While not all players wish for housing, I do not anticipate that this will be enough.

If I had to guess, Ishgard will be immediately followed with a 6 ward expansion as Shirogane was. It may even come beforehand. If you recall the August 2020 announcement of 22-24, SE said that they would place as many wards as possible on existing servers, but could not follow with physical server installation due to travel restrictions. I think this means that as restrictions ease, we could see more ward expansions as we did in October 2020 and October 2019. If we did chance to get another 6 wards, that would put the houses per server at 9,000 with Ishgard's onset. Now that might cover everyone except for the largest servers.