WoW's player housing will have no FOMO and private housing wards

[Jeeqbit]

let's say 500,000 neighborhoods/wards of 50 plots in open world since it's infinite. Please walk me through the hardware requirements they'd need and the infinitely growing map and or UI to search through 500,000 wards?

Firstly, each ward is a "server program". To understand what a server program is... type in your windows search bar "cmd" and open the Command Prompt. That's what a server looks like.

Secondly, seeing as I have run game servers before, I can confidently say there isn't usually much overhead... to such a point, you can run multiple of them. In fact, SE does run multiple of them - they run 12 wards on a single physical machine, alongside several other zones and MSQ instances. We know this from their hardware failure reports where they reveal which zones were on that physical machine.

But you know what? Modern hardware is so good in 2025 that they could probably run a lot more server programs than they currently are on the same machine. Unless the server is hogging resources it shouldn't be (wouldn't surprise me, because it's SE), they could probably run hundreds of wards on one machine.

But anyway, SE has all these machines (yes, this is a picture of SE's machines and yes, each one of those cabinets contains hundreds of motherboards):


Based on the recent Ramuh hardware report, they had 36 server programs running on one machine. So to run 500,000 wards, they'd need 2 server programs each (ward server, and private room server), making for a total of 1,000,000 server programs. Thus, they'd need 27,777 physical machines. However:

• The "30,000,000 adventurers" wouldn't all get a house. Many of them are bots or don't get beyond the first quests or are alts.
• Nobody is saying to have unlimited scaling wards. They are saying to have unlimited scaling instances.
• Instances are "freed" when not in use, allowing someone else to use them. This makes it scalable without needing to run 27,777 physical machines. Instead, you'd only need, say, 111 machine to account for up to 2 million active players spreading their activity through the week, leaving only 10% of them using their house at a time. And we don't even seem to have 2 million right now (more like half that) so we'd get away with 55 house instance machines.

Again this is assuming 36 server programs is even their limit and did I forgot to mention that the server programs themselves could just be made to handle even more instances per program, taking advantage of modern hardware and multi-threading.

[VoidsentStatus]

Nobody is saying to have unlimited scaling wards. They are saying to have unlimited scaling instances.

I'm not discussing unlimited scaling instances until WoW says that they're allowing it for personal use. Every sentence I saw was referring to a group requirement that I'm assuming is going to be the equivalent of signing up as an existing FC or getting enough signatures on petition from your friend list or something similar before you get access to that private instance. People were discussing venues and other community events that might come up because of housing, and from a community event/venue owner PoV, they're not going to use private instances because of the mssive headache and likely limitations that would exist. Because you're not in the public open world, that requires funneling all guests through whatever invitation methodology is decided on such as adding by name into a UI or being a friend or something else. Being able to hop from location to location is also extremely annoying when you have permissions to get through. Not to mention if there's a limitation to that invitation method that requires adding and deleting people throughout the night. That crowd is much more likely to use the open world housing option that exists. For the people actually looking to use the equivalent of Island Sanctuary wards, I'm viewing as either closed off immersive roleplay groups and selective FC's because it's only for members and likely their direct friend list for access, but not related parties. Not to mention that that FC can have, let's say 100 members, but only 50 plots that FC can spawn. 50 people still don't have houses, and that's assuming the 50 that do get plots use them for personal use and not FC functionality. The idea I'm pointing at being that even if an FC gets a private ward, there's a high chance people will double up if they're allowed to like on ff14. If they don't have instanced personal housing, I'm pretty sure there's a high chance of them being scuffed with demand because the instanced housing is functionally irrelevant toward taking away demand from public land.

[VeyaAkemi]

I will just say the same I said last time this was brought up: I don't play WoW, I never played WoW, I will never play WoW, this has nothing to do with tribalism, or even any of WoW... staff issues, but rather a very simple if silly one: I think WoW art style is horrid and I need to feel comfortable in my digital skin, but a very simple one: Competition in any market is good.

[Misutoraru]

Yeah, try WoW but will never return, not something I like.
There are many things I like FFXIV more than WoW, but housing really is a very poor implementation. Owned one as some point and eventually give it up. Not worth the sub just to keep the house. In many wards there are no neighbours.
If FC room or apartment have the same function of house, like planting, most of the complain will be gone.
SE prove they could do it just choose not to, hope WoW housing will have some impact and wake up SE

[Absurdity]

Unless the server is hogging resources it shouldn't be (wouldn't surprise me, because it's SE), they could probably run hundreds of wards on one machine.

Considering how bloated their item database system supposedly is (the reason why they have so many issues with expanding the glamour dresser) I would not be surprised if the housing wards and interior instances use way more resources than they really should.