Why FFXIV’s Housing System Is Failing Its Players, and Why It Must Change

[Rolks]

What Square Enix Must Do

I don't think you realize the server capacity required to store instant housing for EVERY player and FC in the game. The whole reason we have limited numbers of wards is because SE does not currently have the server capacity to handle more. It's not about programming 1s and 0s, it's about hardware capacity to handle that much data. Let's do some math. There are 60 plots per ward, 30 wards per area, 5 areas per server. That's 9,000 plots per server. There are roughly 8 servers on a data center (more on JP servers, less on EU and Oceania servers). That's roughly 72k plots per data center. There are 4 NA, 1 Oceania, 2 EU, and 4 JP data centers. That's roughly 792,000 plots. SE is currently straining their server capacity to hold all of the games zones and the housing plots. It was a monumental undertaking that took an upgrade and expansion of their servers to just add the Ishgard housing zones. At the same time, they set up a whole new data center in Oceania and an additional US data center in Dynamis to try and alleviate the issue.

A quick google search tells me there are 70M subscribers to FFXIV, with almost 400k players daily. Which means there is more than enough housing capacity to cover the daily user player base and their FCs as long as there is sufficient turnover of supply. But you want to get rid of the auto-demolition. So that is not sufficient. To address your concerns, we need to allot instant housing for the entire subscription base. The server capacity required to give instant housing to all 70M subscribers is astronomical, and well beyond what even the multi-million dollar company that is SE can handle.

Again, I sympathize and agree that more housing is needed. However, the practicality of the matter is, it is just not possible. But as a person that waited almost six months to get my first house, and over a year and a half to upgrade to a medium, I cannot agree at all with your calls to do away with or extend the auto-demolition timer.