Quote Originally Posted by Packetdancer View Post
But in both cases, from the viewpoint of someone walking past (at least in my experience)... every house is empty. You see nothing in the yards, if you peek in a window you see an empty, unfurnished interior. You don't really get that feeling of "neighborhood" because... well, everything's empty. You don't see your neighbors.
That's already a problem with the ward system for most house owners. They don't get to see their neighbors, usually because the neighbors aren't online at the same time or they're doing other content or they're even inside their own house instead of standing outside.

Trying to make the empty plots not look empty is possible. We've already got plenty of examples of that from NPCs scattered across the open world zones that are loading client side and so aren't always in sync for players that enter an area at slightly different times. A friend and I had fun one day trying to chase the carbuncle around Mor Dhona but it was always in a different place for each of us. The Firmament is another example of how we can watch NPCs walk around doing various tasks between different locations, usually on a loop (was common with the NPC workers carrying around stone blocks) but sometimes just appearing/disappearing (the Vath Deftarm who will appear by the entrance, walk to the Skybuilder Board, look at it then walk back to the entrance and disappear if you've got Vath reputation high enough and complete the related Firmament side quest). No reason the same activity couldn't happen if the wards were being used as the gateway to instanced house plots.

There's also the question of whatever happened to that housing technology in development that YoshiP talked about during the EU 2019 Fanfest Q&A that was supposed to simulate exterior activity from within an instance. I find it hard to believe that it was being developed only so the 1% of players with a mansion could use their upper floor balcony door. At this point I'm guessing that maybe it's getting used in Island Sanctuary? Hard to say since we don't have enough info about Island Sanctuary's design yet.

You'd also be far less likely to end up in completely empty wards if hundreds of players were accessing their housing through the same ward instead of just 30. The more players that need to pass through a ward, the greater the chances of having a random encounter with another player and staying to chat.

The only place I would see negatives would be with the RP venues that host hundreds of players both inside and out because the interior player limit is too small to let everyone in at the same time. I honestly don't know how many RP venues are operating on that scale but I doubt it's that many, and the convenience of a few hundred players shouldn't be a reason to provide hundreds of thousands of players a worse housing experience.