Quote Originally Posted by HarukiFujiko View Post
4. Make it like how apartments work, once wards 19-24 are filled, 25 shows up, once 25 fills, 26 shows up. Auto add new wards once other ones fill.
This isn\\\\'t possible because unlike the inside of apartments, which are instanced, housing wards themselves are not. ALL housing areas are "on" at all times. Everything you see in a housing ward is always up even if not a single player is logged in and playing inside the ward.

This is why it takes up so much more server space and how Yoshi-P gets that neighborhood feel he wants to impose on everyone. This is why you can\\\\'t just have it set to automatically create new wards when others fill up. Even if they set it so that if even one plot is open in a housing area\\\\'s ward another ward can\\\\'t auto generate until that plot is taken there would be enough areas where all plots are filled and the system auto generates more. Then we\\\\'re talking crashes and all kinds of problems I\\\\'m sure the spaghetti code of this game doesn\\\\'t help with.

And this is why the neighborhood/wards system is inadequate. It takes them a long time to get more wards because they have to find and allocate server space to accommodate it and they didn\\\\'t secure the servers needed for this before shortages became a thing. And before anyone says "but they have money to their at this problem" Yoshi-P agreed with this sentiment and he tried to do that and still couldn\\\\'t acquire more servers. He mentioned this in a LL near our before the beginning of 6.0. He tried to spend more money than the servers were worth to "skip the line" so to speak and get them faster and couldn\\\\'t. So yeah, the shortages ARE a problem, but only because Yoshi-P and the dev team like the neighborhood feel and don\\\\'t care that the majority of the player base would prefer instanced housing.

End of the day that\\\\'s the true fix for housing. Everyone could get a house if we all had the option to buy an instanced one. I\\\\'m a proponent of a hybrid model. Leave the existing housing areas as they are, add more wards when server space allows, but give everyone instanced housing as an option too. If people want to bid on a non-instanced plot if one is available? Awesome. If not, let them have an instanced one.

I also want to see instanced housing that is upgradeable. Let people have their medium or large instanced house if they get enough Gil to upgrade to one rather than everyone fighting desperately for the pittance of mediums and large each current ward has. Same for apartments. Give us the option to upgrade size with the potential for larger apartments to have a legitimate option for gardening such as an instanced courtyard. Even if it only ever showed for something like a single large garden bed like what a small house can have it would be all you would need for most people who want housing to stick to their apartment instead.