The last time housing wards were added to FFXIV was Jan 2023...

[Rin_Sato]

Devs also need to hard limit the ownership of houses to just ONE character per account. The fact that a single player can own an entire ward is ridiculous and has been a major issue for a decade now!

That's not true is it? 8 characters per ward, hard limit of 1 individual residence, and at most 8 free companies (?), so 9?

[Rin_Sato]

The situation is quite unfortunate and stems mostly from the development team not being willing to slightly increase server load and storage requirements, which are more likely than not going to be quite small...

About 70 servers, 5 housing districts, 30 wards each, 60 plots each district with exteriors as well, 180 apartments each district, probably an upper estimate of about 10 private chambers per free company, with about half the plots being free companies?: (70*5*30)*((30*10)+60*2+180) = 6 300 000 "rooms/furnishables" if you want to call them that, lets assume they have 400 item slots each, and each item slot can contain the ItemID, Dye, Signature, PositionX+Y+Z, Rotation, Uses remaining information (active/inactive is 1 bit so lets include that too). Assuming 64 bits for each of the first 8, and just rounding it to 512 bits, that gives us 204 800 bits per "room/furnishable". In total the storage requirement for ALL the estates even with some room to spare could be 161.28 gigabytes, or lower. That's less than what I can store on my *phone*. It's less than what I can store on *every* device I own. I could download every single server's housing information all at once, about 10 times on a single drive.
Anything in the order of gigabytes to a few terabytes really isn't that bad, if the server rarely needed to access the data...

So, it's not storage (on its own). If we instead consider the networking part, sure, they need to store more stuff in memory, but this is a problem that has many solutions and none of them are too difficult for a company as big as square.

[TakoyakiLala]

TBF, they have more than 1 account to buy an entire ward and are probably paying subs for each one, so SE doesn't care at all.

That...is probably, unfortunately.

That's not true is it? 8 characters per ward, hard limit of 1 individual residence, and at most 8 free companies (?), so 9?

Hard limit on a singular character per account; One individual house and one free company house. It would technically be two, but would go a long way in curbing greedy individuals from taking entire wards.

[Rin_Sato]

this is a problem that has many solutions and none of them are too difficult for a company as big as square.

One possible solution without insight into how any of their systems currently work would be: If they really wanted to be extraordinarily stingy about it they could simply have a client store the information, write a checksum that's unlikely to have collisions (this is easy) for the state of the ward, and then only send the checksum and if the client's data matches the server, it doesn't ever even have to load the ward into memory, and I think this type of solution, maybe done more granularly would mitigate any server load that might be incurred by having more wards, outside of when they are initially added as well as the extra overhead of having to allow more players to connect to ward instances.

You might wonder "but is it safe to trust a client like that?" but the client isn't being trusted anymore with this solution, than it already is. I've seen way too many bots just flying around with no care in the world so clearly that is already handled client-sided and trusted by the server. The only thing that would matter here is the player's position, which if it is desynced intentionally by the player, honestly who cares. They are being checksum checked, worst case send the client a packet to redownload the ward or plot depending on implementation only on the first desync. If the player *has* done anything to alter it with third party tools, there already is nothing they could do about it outside of reporting them to a GM, not that it would really matter that much imo.

It's pretty annoying that they just don't seem to want to increase the amount of wards...

I'm sure if they open-sourced enough portions of their codebase, the community would fix it for them lmao...

[Hallarem]

Heard the housing slots for items start at 10 000 in WoW. Meanwhile its what? 400 in mansions?
Housing wards, housing items? Is it really just a lack of resources or lack of skill and want from Square Enix?

[Themarvin]

They are not used up yet.

[Daralii]

More like bad news
this thing should be gone forever with actual fixes to the housing system, holding your home hostage for your sub is a terrible business practice

They wouldn't have a way to keep people subbed during the months-long content lulls every patch without that hostage. You're expected to play other games but keep paying Square.

[LilaIronman]

Its only been 2 years?
Jesus christ, game has nothing going on it feels like its been 10

[Fatch38]

someday ppl will realize that adding more wards is litterally slapping a band-aid to cure a cancer

[Divinemights]

Made on purpose so people keep their subscription on.
Expanding the number of residential sectors is something fairly easy to do.
They just won't do it and theres only one good reason. The BS about limited storage is fake.

Why are you still here?
Demolition for NA has been paused for more than 6 months and no news of SE intends to restart timer