Alternative solving the housing crysis: Sanctuary AND wards

[Shistar]

Interesting ideas, Kytrin, I like many of these!

It would have all the same perks as a house without the wards or neighborhoods.

What worries me is that there is a clear "hierarchy" in the housing system, as in smalls are better than apartments, (offers a higher number of amenities/amenities that apartments can't provide), mediums better than smalls, larges better than mediums. If you popped your idea right in, where would it sit? What place does it have in the game, besides our dream version of housing? What do we do with the remaining housing, and everyone living there?
Because right now it sounds better than a large but without the amount of effort needed to win one, considering they're limited. The hierarchy will soon be weakened to apartment >>>>>> ANY plot with some limitations (garden, location, placement) due TARDIS housing, but it doesn't remove it entirely.
Either we're considering your idea costs exhorbitants amounts of gil, prevents you from having a ward plot, or something has to give. So here are my extra two cents!

I would propose instanced housing within the city-states themselves. Maybe somewhere near the various market districts for convenience to market boards. To get to one, you would talk to an NPC or a door similar to how you do apartments now. Your own would give you the option to go to your house, and to visit a friend or do a little sightseeing I'm sure we could arrange some kind of system to search for specific houses/names rather than flipping through endless tabs.

Brilliant. Maybe an unused area a small walk away would be even better, with the intent of encouraging players to walk around town and see/get seen by others, thus encouraging this sense of community in a way? After all, isn't why many players sit in Limsa, watching people go by?

The instanced area would, by default, be themed on the city-state you purchased from, but there could be all manner of customization available. Perhaps you can change themes to other city-states (or even custom themes similar to housing skins) if you wanted to imagine an easter oasis in the desert for example. Or maybe you could specify if you wanted an urban style house where you have the equivalent of a penthouse suite with a rooftop garden rather than a traditional house and yard.

You could even set the thing up with various amenities like purchasing a pool to swim in or a seasonal theme (snow, autumn leaves, etc.) or have various styles of floor-plans. There would be space for gardening and outdoor furnishings. Basically whatever we can imagine could be done.

You almost had me there, but you lost me at the yard. I don't think you should have a yard unless you live in a plot, since you already have your Island Sanctuary to do outdoor decoration in. Although gardening may not be as lucrative as it used to be, by allowing a yard you either have to block them out from plot gardening or think of something else to not leave ward plots in the dust.

As for everything else, yes, 100%! Provided plots can get their own version of this, apartments too. Especially apartments, that currently can't even change their interior style like plots can't. I find it only fair, honestly.

The space itself would be roomy enough to hold the equivalent of up to a large house depending on how much you want to invest into it, [...]

So, we're assuming this prevents you from buying a ward plot? What if I want to move to a ward after buying your idea? Do I have to demolish, does my interior get transferred...? Can we go back to the original after being in a ward, or did I lose my spot now and would have to re-invest in the original idea if I wanna move out of the ward? Or can I then hog a house in a ward and also have another large in my pocket dimension by the markets? In what position does this leave the original apartments? Don't get me wrong, I like the idea, but something isn't adding up.

[...] and it would be easy enough to arrange it with a gorgeous view of whichever city-state you selected that shows NPC residents walking around doing their thing (I vaguely recall them mentioning once that it would be very hard to set up real-time views for instanced houses because of players, but I doubt anyone would complain too much about a view with NPCs moving around...).

I would love this. Even better if, affected by the day and night cycle, there's different kinds of NPCs going about their lives. This would be an insane draw for apartments specifically.

As for auto-demolition... I would propose instead that they expand ALL auto-demo timers to six months or even a year and apply them equally to everything, including apartments. Six months or a year would give a lot more flexibility for those times when life happens without completely removing the timer and thus making CPU-kun cry brokenly in a corner over all the information it needed to process. I would even suggest a way to, in-game, arrange for a hiatus if you know you're going to be gone for an extended period of time for any reason. [...]

I have to disagree on the autodemolition, mainly for one reason: 6 months to a year is an extremely long time. While it would benefit those who already have a home, what of those waiting for a plot to be vacant? How long do you expect them to wait? Even if they can get our idea of housing in the meantime, do you really expect them to wait for at least 6 months to have the opportunity to move to a ward if they wished? People would start tweaking.

However, I really like the hiatus idea, but there should be a draw-back of some sort, like having you on a shorter leash for a time to prove you're not just arranging hiatus after hiatus to keep your house forever. Because we all know people would do that and unsub for extended periods of time while blocking active players from engaging with the content. We already know how this went, just look at old threads before autodemolition was a thing.
Here's my ideas:

• After a hiatus period, the feature goes on cooldown for either a fixed amount of time or however long your hiatus was when it was requested. If you came back early, the CD will apply for the original amount of time to prevent abuse.
• A hiatus should have a maximum amount of time equal to a patch cycle at most. I believe this is plenty of time for most situations and prevents houses being frozen in time for extended periods of time, and most people would typically return every patch, so it is not as bad as it sounds like at first.

[...] It could put your data in a separate list that doesn't get loaded until either your hiatus period runs out and the house is demolished or you log back in and enter your house.

Would this prevent people from visiting you? If you went on hiatus but your house was open for visiting originally, I assume you mean it would be taken off the list of houses available to visit by others, including your tenants? I am assuming here that none of this applies to FC housing, because otherwise it would lead to abuse like placing the house in stasis and preventing members from leaving because they can't empty out their rooms.
I understand the space of this list is not infinite and gets regularly cleaned out as people's hiatuses run out, but game devs have to consider extreme possibilites like, say, the majority of players going on hiatus at once. This is not necessarily our business to worry about, I know, but I like to consider these things when talking about ideas to see if they would even be possible to begin with. If CPU-kun is already getting bloodshot eyes as it was said, how would it be able to handle an infinite amount of houses, suddenly all going on hiatus or worse, coming back from one all at once?