New Housing Scam: Beware.

[Sweeeet]

I completely agree that more housing is needed. I love the fact that housing isn’t individually instanced (wards are, houses aren’t). I played ESO for a hot minute while waiting for 6.2 and the instanced housing is lonely and pathetic. However, there is just no reason for SE to not create more wards in each district. These are imaged on virtual servers and implementing more wards isn’t a a daunting task and could be done rather easily. Does it take more server space? Yes! BUT they have far more subs now than they did 3 years ago and what have we gotten since then? Same amount of wards as all others for the release of Empyrium and people are still fighting to get a house. It just simply doesn’t make sense. I’ve not even heard them hint at expanding wards… radio silence. As history dictates, even if they mentioned tomorrow a planned expansion of wards… we’d still be looking at a 2+ year wait.
Let people buy a house! For the love of The Twelve, please??

[worldofneil]

However, there is just no reason for SE to not create more wards in each district. These are imaged on virtual servers and implementing more wards isn’t a a daunting task and could be done rather easily.

I agree that adding more wards would be ideal, but unfortunately it's not as easy as you're suggesting. Each ward is a zone that is active and running all the time* and on any one server that means there are always 240 housing zones running, which is considerably more all the other zones combined.

Even though the wards are all 5 basic designs, they're all different because of customisation of houses and gardens so although they might look the same, from a technical viewpoint they're all separate.

We're up to 77 worlds now so that's 18,480 zones that are running all the time, just for housing. Even if they just added 6 more wards (12 with subdivisions) that's 60 more zones to run per server and 4,620 more zones over all the worlds.

Now I don't know how many wards they can run per server, but they've said in the past about optimising the servers to fit more wards on so clearly they're at the current capacity or close to it. Could they put in more hardware? Probably. Do they want to? Probably not. It's not just the initial cost of the hardware/installation, but ongoing cost of maintaining and even things like electricity usage will factor in.

Unfortunately the reality is that they'll drip feed in extra wards over a period of years because they know that whatever they put in will never be enough, but that they still have to make some effort.

*Even if they shut the zones down when not in use, there's likely at least some people going in and out of them regularly that the performance hit for continually starting up/shutting down is worse than just leaving it running,