Quote Originally Posted by Dailemont View Post
Checking the thread again and I agree with all of you in the suggestion to rework the system altogether. Perhaps they did not expect housing to become such an essential part of the game? - it does not matter.
Auto-demo is still off, weeks are going by and I cannot imagine the craze and chaos that will unleash when Ishgardian housing drops and MAYBE, MAAAAYBE then they would grace us with turning auto-demo back on. It is ridiculous. Blows my mind - there is no queue congestion anymore, people are finishing EW in their own pace and there is absolutely no reason to keep it on. Oh- only if they are just waiting to muck up the entire housing market when 1.0 drops. Because that's what's going to happen at this rate.
They always resume demolition with a patch maintenance so 6.1 is likely when it will happen.

To be honest, demolition at this point in the game's housing history isn't much help. When it is active, we see maybe 8-10 houses become available per world per week. That's nothing compared to the thousands of players and FCs per world trying to obtain one. The player population has grown far beyond what the ward system can handle. LotRO only got away with its "add a Neighborhood when the existing ones fill" because that game's player base is relatively small and had zero to little growth after a couple of years. FFXIV's player base is much larger and still growing.

Housing isn't an essential part of the game. There's no real disadvantage to a player that foregoes housing ownership. But it is an extremely popular one - and deserving of more developer attention because of that popularity.

As for Ishgard, the chaos that will follow in its wake will be due to the lottery becoming the new method for plot purchase. Players are going to have to adjust to what the lottery really means.