3 L-sized patches of land

[Shougun]

If it does work that way, then down the line you're going to start seeing instances with just 3 L-sized houses and nothing else. What about the other sized spots? I'm curious if they also must fill up first before the new instance is created.

I was worried about this too :/

Or another pattern (All M houses full). @Anyone: Never played LOTR what happened in that case?

[Mjollnir]

I was worried about this too :/

Or another pattern (All M houses full). @Anyone: Never played LOTR what happened in that case?

Housing instances are generally used for storage and trophies; it's rare you'll meet anyone there for your personal house, however the Kinship (ie FC) houses are a bit busier.

In LotRO, there are 16 standard, 7 deluxe and 4 kinship houses per instance. When the game was more popular, all of the deluxe houses would sell out first and spawn a new instance. Just checked online now and there isn't really anyone with a deluxe house. There are a decent number of standard houses. Most zones have three to four Kinship houses in. There are about two-hundred named instances (must have been someone's fun job coming up with all those unique names), but that's for one 'nation' as it were. Presumably, the other three nations have a similar population.

An important point is that you can't 'buy' a property, you can only rent it, so you have a weekly upkeep to pay (gil sink - I don't like this, but hey). Irregular players can easily afford a standard house. Regular players can afford their own Kinship house (if they have a Kinship that meets the pre-reqs). I don't think for an instant that there are 2,400 active kinships on a random EU LotRO server (more like 24..?), so I'm presuming that individuals pay for the huge space to display personal trophies and increase their storage capability. If you fail to keep good on the upkeep, your kit goes into an escrow NPC and you lose your particular house.

So it sounds like the FFXIV housing instance idea will be like this, but with purchase and not rent.

The thing i wonder about is how they will handle players who have a house and then quit playing.

It would suck to buy a plot and house and then a couple months down the line be all alone in a ghost neighborhood.

I see your point, but I doubt people will be spending too much time in their own gardens. Even if I logged on to do some gardening, crafting and chocobo raising for an hour every day, I'd still be off gathering, levelling, exploring, hunting for the majority of my play time. If I wanted to hang out with the general populace, I'd still hit the city.

All I mean is, if you have fifty (pulled that number out of my ass as a high estimate) people with property in your instance, the likelihood you'd be there at the same time as them is quite low, let alone being in sight of them to wave hi, or generally make it feel like the neighbourhood is 'alive'.

The point that I'm laboriously getting to is that, even at the game's peak, housing instances may well seem like ghost towns anyway due purely to the amount of time a given player would hang out in them.