Quote Originally Posted by Midareyukki View Post
Especially since SE insists that they want the current design for housing so we can establish neighbourhood communities with our neighbours.
When was the last time anybody from Square said anything about this? Google isn't coming up with much besides Yoshi-P apologizing for the lottery disaster with sprinklings of interviews where they talk about making housing (and apartments) more accessible in 2015 and 2017. Seriously if you can point me to any interview or direct communication that insists I'd love to read it. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you're not going to find anything like that in the last 2-3 years.

Quote Originally Posted by Midareyukki View Post
The issue comes with the fact that we already have housing anyway, and I doubt Square will up and revamp the whole thing.
I've said it before, the ward system is too expensive to scale. Scale it to meet the demand on the popular servers and you'll have empty houses everywhere else. Adding wards requires additional hardware. We know this and Square knows this. The cost of the amount of hardware they'd need would fund a decent sized team (8-10) for a few years. Throwing hardware at the problem only solves it until that additional supply is exhausted.

Building a much more flexible housing system that can scale with the server population allows them to put the hardware where its needed. Square knows this.

Riddle me this: For the love of little faery apples why did they put IS on the housing servers of all places? It's not like those servers had any spare capacity.

If IS was truly meant to be standalone why weren't they partitioned into their own cluster? I would like to think that Square's devops folks aren't that naive. Kinda beggars belief when you consider that XIV is reasonably stable compared to broader industry standards (which puts them head and shoulders above most of the gamesdev niche).