Why the housing system makes people quit and possibly not come back

[Kuroka]

It's funny how people tend to complain about their neighbors more than anything ("grrr, he made a paissa home!")

tbf thats on SE and how the wards are arranged and how some newer skins just go over the top. I got the Large house at shirogane's top right corner, wheres a small right in front of it with the MB in front of that. Sweet view, but once i had other neighbors there that used the forge skin which really ruined it... just as that castle wall would. And there are some ppl that just love to troll and place large pillars etc all over it lol

[Kaurhz]

Auto-scaling wards isn't the most pragmatic solution, as the problem is as much a player problem as it is a game problem.

You will have people waiting weeks or months waiting to take up very specific houses, and won't purchase any others and then subsequently complain about the lack of housing. Like, most servers always have houses in circulation.. So at that point you have either players holding hostage a new ward being created, or you end up with a situation where you've got houses being selectively taken from wards, e.g., medium plots, large plots, or just generally plots that players see as prime estate, with the rest of the ward being a wasteland.

To put it into perspective, the plots adjacent to the FC house on my main character has not had a single bid since the inception of that ward. Comparatively, the large estates will always consistently have bids on the first possible bid cycle for that plot, same with the small beachfront plots.

[Arzalis]

Location is certainly a factor, as I've heard plenty of horror stories about people trying to get plots in Mist and Shirogane where everyone seems to want one there, meanwhile you couldn't pay people to take plots in The Goblet or Empyreum apparently.

Likewise, it's pretty obvious that most people don't want smalls (especially the FC ones), and would seemingly choose no house or having to "settle" for one they didn't actually want.

One of the issues with the smaller house sizes is the lack of item space. They could probably solve a lot of demand if they made it so you can upgrade the interior to the larger sizes, while keeping the same exterior. Take it a step further and let people upgrade apartments to a larger size too. I genuinely think that would solve a lot of the demand, though it doesn't do a lot to help servers that don't even have any free apartments.

That said the current system will never be enough. Instanced housing is the only way to make sure everyone can get something. Everything else is a band-aid on a gaping wound.

[Jojoya]

WoW had 2 forms of instanced housing, one in Pandaria (the farm) and one in Warlord of Draenor. No one cares about these instances anymore.

Those weren't instanced housing. They were phased quest hubs for content specific to their respective expansions. The Garrison didn't even give you your own bed to sleep in. WoW has always been extremely good at adding content that no one cares about once a new expansion is released. Even with the overhaul done for the new expansion, I doubt that has changed.

If they had been instanced housing, players absolutely would still care about them just as players in other MMOs with instanced housing continue to care about theirs. Genuine player housing is evergreen content because new expansions don't change what makes player housing desirable.

LotRO housing is a ghost town because it sucks. Same ward style design this game has (ie you'd never see another players because there weren't enough houses in a Neighborhood to get regular player traffic, very limited number of item slots, items could only be placed on the correct type of hook and those hooks were in set (and frequently stupid) locations.

Players already act differently here because the decorating options are far, far better than what LotRO offered.

Island Sanctuary is bad because it's not housing. It's a mammet sweatshop we're allowed to decorate. We can't touch the one structure in the place that represents a home other than to switch between pre-sets.

I'd be very happy to have my little slice of Eorzea in an instance as long as I could customize it to be what I want and not have to worry about the aesthetic tastes of others clashing with it.

Tonberry might have 650 open plots. Crystal + Primal + Aether worlds combined don't. What little becomes available each lottery period on those data centers immediately gets snapped up.

Tonberry might be the most populated JP world at the moment but it still doesn't come close to the lowest pop NA world that isn't on Dynamis. Even Seraph, the highest population Dynamis world (but still lower than all worlds on the other NA data centers) has over 22,000 active characters that are level 71 or higher. Tonberry only has 15,500.

You don't have a housing problem because you don't have a population problem. NA has a population problem and that negatively impacts housing availability.

A good instanced housing system would remove most of the availability problems caused by population.

[CamuiKushi]

It's 100% predatory and honestly I feel like an idiot for letting it shackle me to the game for as long as I've let it.