Instanced housing is worth considering for FFXIV

[Johners]

It's pretty obvious the housing system in this game isn't scalable for the size of the modern player base and adding more wards in the current system probably isn't a wise idea. Every ward you add is just another area that'll remain empty unless there's an RP event/location there. I've walked around pretty much every ward on Lich, the home world on Light DC, and they're dead with very few plots even looking noticeably different.

With that in mind, why not have instanced housing? I appreciate the RP and social elements for the few wards/plots that have these within them but beyond that, they're a ghost town. Not to mention Island Sanctuary is coming which I'm going to assume will just be a housing plot you can eventually upgrade to large contained within its own bubble.

Now, I don't want "lazy" instanced housing in which all existing plots are combined into one giant ward that you then enter each plot individually. There's room to make it much immersive while sacrificing the ability to walk through 24 unique wards per district per server.

Right now the five districts are all contained within big cities but there's room to put smaller housing locations in the towns and settlements around the entire FFXIV map. You could even place more apartment buildings with this also (and an extra addition would be larger penthouse-sized apartments).

Why just live in The Mists or The Goblet (lol) when you can have an apartment in Costa del Sol or a small house in the Azim Steppe? Each town could have an apartment building at least along side an assortment of small/medium plots. There would be room for larger housing areas in the big cities such as Old Sharlayan alongside this to still have the traditional areas.

Design wide, instanced housing would allow for more realistic placement of the housing plots and apartment buildings into the normal game world. Again, I do appreciate the lost "immersion" his would entail but seeing as most wards are empty on Lich, I'd rather have housing buildings/plots be in the main game world with generic appearances on the outside.

[NanaWiloh]

This has been brought more times then anyone can count. The hurdle is the devs are very firm footed about sticking with the ward system.

[Thoosa]

Because it’s a stable sub revenue stream?

[Divinemights]

If you don't have a decorated Private Chamber or Apartment to begin with, you don't care about Housing
There is no real point to bring up this "instanced housing" when FF14 already have two types of it

[Risvertasashi]

If you don't have a decorated Private Chamber or Apartment to begin with, you don't care about Housing
There is no real point to bring up this "instanced housing" when FF14 already have two types of it

Apartments run out on large servers. As there's no auto demolition system for them. But even so, Apartments aren't really "housing" for people that want a... well, a house.

We can only hope that perhaps island sanctuary will serve as proper instanced housing. Because, yeah, SE just ain't budging on the ward system and they don't seem to be capable of copying the MMO that automatically adds wards as more capacity is needed.

[Divinemights]

Apartments run out on large servers. As there's no auto demolition system for them. But even so, Apartments aren't really "housing" for people that want a... well, a house.

We can only hope that perhaps island sanctuary will serve as proper instanced housing. Because, yeah, SE just ain't budging on the ward system and they don't seem to be capable of copying the MMO that automatically adds wards as more capacity is needed.

If this is about Balmung again, you do realize the problem is on those who refuse to leave a known overcrowded server?
Leviathan is 2nd largest server and we still have plenty apartment left.
Island sanctuary is not a player housing and i am not sure where did people get that idea from

[LaylaTsarra]

Apartments run out on large servers.

There are over 70 servers and Balmung is the only one with an apartment issue at the moment. One can hope that will be fixed with 6.1 and not by adding apartments to only Ishgard.

[Johners]

If you don't have a decorated Private Chamber or Apartment to begin with, you don't care about Housing
There is no real point to bring up this "instanced housing" when FF14 already have two types of it

I dislike the notion that I don't care about housing because I'd rather have an actual housing plot over a glorified homeless person's box that is an FC room or apartment. There's plenty of apartments available on Lich and I have room number 1 in my FC but they're really damn boring.

Aside from apartments not having auto demolition, they're instanced housing like the housing wards should already be IMHO. Most wards I've been too are dead and any RP events are entirely contained within a plot which you could still do with instanced housing plots. It's a bunch of empty zones whereas it could be one zone per ward and then 100 instances of each housing plot. Add auto demolition to it all and job done, enough housing for everyone.

[LaylaTsarra]

SE had the perfect opportunity to introduce Instanced Housing but didn't. I think the best one could hope for at this point is an upgrade to apartments by making them multiple rooms and larger but for some reason that even though mentioned they would look at around 4.2 went nowhere.

[Risvertasashi]

If this is about Balmung again, you do realize the problem is on those who refuse to leave a known overcrowded server?
Leviathan is 2nd largest server and we still have plenty apartment left.
Island sanctuary is not a player housing and i am not sure where did people get that idea from

I'm going to guess that you're the sort of person that, before cross-server play features were available, blamed people for not going to dead servers to get housing? Inadequate system design is on SE. Players don't have the power to fix that.

As for island sanctuary, unless you're a dev masquerading as a player, no one knows what it is exactly. But it's been compared to Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. For which both games, a customizable living space is a very prominent part of. So, it's not so unlikely it could serve as a form of housing. Whether it will or not is anyone's guess, though, because again, the mechanics/gameplay of it haven't really been revealed at all - save to very vaguely compare it to other games.

There are over 70 servers and Balmung is the only one with an apartment issue at the moment. One can hope that will be fixed with 6.1 and not by adding apartments to only Ishgard.

A non-expanding supply with no form of replenishment means it will eventually affect others as well. Though adding Ishgard should stave it off for a bit. It's nonetheless nonsustainable.