Hahaha, 20+ entries on small plots already

[Jojoya]

Depends if that person meant "Demand at the instant" or not.



Take Balmung as an example. 17 personal plots free, a total of 1,963 bidders. So that's enough housing to fill 0.8% of the demand, today.

Other stats for Balmung:

Taking 19-24 over all personal wards, is 1783 homes are full, with the 1,963 people wanting to move in to the 17 left.

Taking 1-24 over all wards, then we have 6,708 people (and FCs) with houses and 3,426 people (and FCs) wanting to move into the 492 left.

It's really not a good idea for players to try to separate unmet demand from met demand. It distorts the overall picture of the state of housing because the supply in the met demand will slowly become available to fill unmet demand through relinquishing and demolition (once that resumes) and ward designations switch between FC and personal. Some of what players are considering unmet demand is actually met demand (current owners trying to relocate). And there are available plots still on every world that would be filling part of the unmet demand but aren't because they're currently reserved for FCs.

We also don't know how many players aren't participating in the system even though they would like to have a house but feel like they can't get one so they don't bother even though participating in the lottery is zero risk.

(and since we've seen it before, calling it now, we're bound to see requests along the lines of "there's so many empty wards on the new servers, why not just apply those to my world?")

That's been an ongoing thing for years. Every time there's available supply on some worlds while others are full, requests start coming into to redistribute wards between worlds. A couple of other MMOs using a ward style system add more wards (or whatever their local term is) to a server when occupancy reaches a certain percentage in that server's existing wards without impacting other servers. Unfortinately, SE's system doesn't seem to be able to accommodate that.