Turn Housing Demolition on

[Stormpeaks]

Two words:

Instanced Housing

That is the only way to fix it, but unfortunately SE likes the outdated, and dead feeling, neighbourhoods that we currently have. 99% of the time I'm in the housing wards I'm lucky to come across one or two other people, and even then, they are either AFK or teleporting away. This, of course, doesn't include during the lottery purchase/claim periods, since there will almost always be more people going to the empty plots than there will be any other time.

This is not a solution, instanced housing is terrible. And it would put even more pressure on their already "crumbling" servers anytime there is anything out of the ordinary and a lot of people log in

[Jojoya]

You'd think they could at least, say, only pause it on the EU servers, and not the NA/JP ones.

As others have said, it's not just the war in Eastern Europe. JP had a major earthquake in March that destroyed a lot of major factories and disrupted supply chains for other businesses. That's caused a loss of income for a lot of families.

You're also assuming that people only play on the data centers closest to their homes. Plenty of EU players play on the NA and JP data centers. Plenty of JP players play on the NA and likely EU data centers.

This is not a solution, instanced housing is terrible. And it would put even more pressure on their already "crumbling" servers anytime there is anything out of the ordinary and a lot of people log in

Instanced housing is not terrible when done right.

Also, if their "crumbling servers" were in such bad shape we wouldn't be getting Island Sanctuary in 6.2. It may not be housing but we know it's a personal area with farming activities and some player customization through placement of buildings. If the crumbling servers can handle that, then they probably could handle an updated version of instanced housing considering the resources already being used for existing apartments could be folded into the updated system.

But what I'm curious about is this: had the auto-demolish already been reinstated pre-war, would SE really have paused it again? I honestly don't think so.

Yes, they would have because of the JP earthquake.

[TwistedTea]

This is not a solution, instanced housing is terrible. And it would put even more pressure on their already "crumbling" servers anytime there is anything out of the ordinary and a lot of people log in

Limited ward housing is a terrible system which consumes more server resources than fully instanced housing. The exterior of houses/wards are always loaded.

Adding more ward only increases the consumption of server resources

There's a reason why other major MMO with housing choose to go the fully instanced route; to avoid FFXIV's limited ward housing and all its associated problems.

There would be no reason for things like auto-demolition to exist, if every player had a fully instanced house.

SE has had nearly 10 years with this housing experiment. It's time for SE to acknowledge that limited ward housing is a colossal failure, in terms of access for the majority of players.

[Nixxy]

instanced housing is terrible

Instanced housing is great! WildStar had the best housing ever. Everybody got a skyplot and you could build whatever your little heart desired.