New Ward Housing Distribution

[Canadane]

imo there should be more FC specific housing than personal.
One FC house can provide for hundreds of players. It also keeps the neighbourhood alive. You'll see people playing around in a FC house much more often than you see someone at their personal house, from what I've noticed.

[Jojoya]

No. Splitting the wards will (hopefully) help. I doubt by very much, but anything is better than the status quo. Punishing FC groups with a smaller % because personal owners are greedy is unfair to the FCs. (Note. I am a Personal owner. I can say we're greedy.)

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

SE could probably figure out what percentage should be set aside for FCs based on past purchases, especially during periods when a personal purchase moratorium was implemented on new wards. There were still a fair number of empty houses in the 5.1 wards when the personal moratorium was lifted on most worlds, even with all the personal houses relocated into those wards during the moratorium. It took the lifting of the moratorium for them to finally fill.

Certainly it's frustrating for a FC not to be able to get a house when they're ready to buy but the demand for FC houses doesn't seem to be as strong as some think. Most of the demand is for personal.

The big problem with setting percentages for ward types is the need isn't going to be consistent world to world, and they're likely going to have to designate the same wards as FC on every world. What will be too many FC wards on one world won't be close to enough on others.

imo there should be more FC specific housing than personal.
One FC house can provide for hundreds of players. It also keeps the neighbourhood alive. You'll see people playing around in a FC house much more often than you see someone at their personal house, from what I've noticed.

Let's be realistic about how FC housing works out in practice. You mean one FC house provides housing content for the leader and a couple of the officers while the FC members only get to visit it. They don't get to decorate. They don't get to garden. They don't get to do things in the workshop.

Members hanging out at the FC house doesn't keep the neighborhood alive. It keeps the house alive because they're at the house, not running around the neighborhood.

What keeps a neighborhood alive is the need to be in it in the first place then the need pass through the neighborhood to reach other places in the area. Those needs are almost non-existent with the wards. The only content in the wards is the housing. Need to get to your house? You teleport directly there, no need to pass through the "neighborhood". Summoning bell? Already in the house, you don't need to pass through the neighborhood. Marketboard? With each ward/subdivision having 6 MBs for 30 houses plus a 7th at the apartment building (which is sometimes closer to some houses), you're not passing through the "neighborhood" to reach the MB. It's usually just one house away if not directly outside your house. Vendors? You're going to use the Aethernet to teleport to them on the rare occasions you need to buy something then teleport directly back to your house, no need to pass through the neighborhood.

I just cruised through the ward with my personal house. Six of the houses are owned by FC with two of those FCs being fairly large. Ran into exactly one other player - a wanderer who seemed to be visiting one of those 2 big FC houses (didn't see any of the actual FC members around). Then I went to the ward with my FC house. There are 8 FCs in that ward with 3 of them fairly large. Saw no one around at all. This is NA prime time right now, if FCs help make neighborhoods active I should have been seeing other players cruising around, right? Except they aren't because their members online are actually in the places where there's content to be done, not hanging out at the FC house.

When I go on my random housing tours, it's extremely rare I'll run into more than one or two players in a ward unless one of the RP venues is open for business. Even then, players are rarely hanging around outside the venue, they're going straight into it. The idea that FCs make wards feel like active populated places is more of a dream than a reality.