Instanced Housing

[Frizze]

Maybe I don't know...open your eyes. They wanted the neighborhood feel bit it tanked when they grandfathered in people's extras then allowed the alt loophole to continue.

Not to mention the bot owned houses plus player houses empty only being kept as a status symbol by people who don't even play.

You are hard pressed to find a ward that's got any activity outside the odd live fc or venues. May as well have instanced. Would be no different then what it is now

You arent wrong that the "neighborhood feel" idea has tanked, but you are miss-attributing the cause. True grandfathered houses never accounted for even 1% of the total number of houses in game(and the number has only gone down in the 5 years since that choice was made), and the last census i saw put "shell FCs"(i believe their definition was less then 4 members) between 3 and 5 percent. And while ive never seen a meaningful effort to quantify "player houses empty only being kept as a status symbol by people who don't even play", im prepared to write that off too. The reason theres no "neighborhood feel" is that youve taken the houses and spread them out too far. Ul Dah, Gridania, Limsa, Kugane and Ishgard each have 30 different wards, and people in the subdivision dont see people in the main division unless they use the aethernet to switch over(and vice versa). Do the math, and that means that the houses we have are currently divided over 300 different locations per server. Thats too spread out for any area to feel busy unless theres a specific reason(venue, etc) to be there.