Oh Housing! A possible solution for the future.

[NyneAlexander]

I don't know the future. I don't know what Yoshida and the devs have planned to fix this personal housing debacle. What I do know is that based on what they have already done, this model isn't sustainable for more than 2-5% of the active population. So based on what we already know about how housing works my very much band-aid solution is this:

Analyze the population and gil totals per server, and add more wards to the higher pop servers with more wealth.

If a legacy server has 20,000 active accounts, and a non-legacy server has 4000, then give more housing wards to the legacy server.

This will do a few things: It will enable the higher pop servers to have fewer people left out of housing. It will enable you to extract more gil from circulation. It will do more to prevent wards from being ghost towns on small servers. And most of all, it will enable you to purchase the physical servers in the most cost effective manner.

Giving square the benefit of the doubt (lol), they have probably considered this and it can't be done for one reason or another. But on the very slight chance that this option wasn't considered, I wanted to throw it out there.

This system is far from perfect, but I think that adaptive allocation of wards based on population is a much better solution than every world gets the same wards across the board.

[Riepah]

I actually thought that's what they were going to do whenever they announced that they would open more wards in the future based on demand. I've no clue why they decided to slap the same amount of wards on every server.

[Saiyakupo]

This is a good idea!
I also had another idea for people with low amounts of gil in comparison to the rich folk.
Have two types of wards that get released each time: The normal wards they have right now, and the housing-only ones, which have cheaper houses for players-only, but don't allow for chocobo raising and gardening. I know it will make lots of people upset (Don't know how to not make people upset realistically), but if they're cheaper, then you get what you pay for?? I dunno just an idea.

[EdwinLi]

Well I still prefer the Personal Apartment idea a bit more because despite the increase in wards SE will need to compensate for the addition of new players which will add new demand for housing. Then subtract the amount of players that are leaving the game as well.

If there is a growing number of the population when calculating population growth and decline (New players - leaving players) then there may never be enough produced for the Higher population servers.

Also the Personal Apartment idea is designed around a cheaper Personal Housing that would not completely replace Personal Housing since players that want a larger Personal Home will need to go for Personal Housing sicne Personal Apartment is designed to be smaller and more affordable.

Also, if players wanted to make their Personal Apartment larger they will have to pay extra for expansion upgrades but the upgrades will never go beyond the point to being better than Personal Small Housing and if they want a better Gardening they will need to buy a Personal Small House or better since Personal Apartments will only be able to support 2 seeds in the Apartment Farm Pot.

[OdinEon]

Yeah, kinda like section 8 apartments, da ghetto.

[Risvertasashi]

Some MMOs automatically add wards when the existing ones fill up. If we're going to continue with this model, that would be ideal. However, failing that... yeah, I don't see the sense in giving extra wards to servers where they're ghost towns, and not giving more to servers where they sell out in minutes.

[EdwinLi]

Yeah, kinda like section 8 apartments, da ghetto.

Lore Wise the Adventure Guild and Inns run by Adventure Guild have a lot of room so they never run out of Apartment rooms for Adventurers. It wouldn't be a surprise if the Adventure Guild start allowing Adventurers to start buying a Room for their own personal home.

Also, I kind of like the idea of living in a Apartment in Limsa Lominsa and having a high view of the Port.

A Gridania Personal Apartment Balcony view can be a view of the large lake in Gridania or a part of Gridania's Forest players can't enter while Uldah is a high view of Ul'dah City.

[NyneAlexander]

Well I still prefer the Personal Apartment idea a bit more because despite the increase in wards SE will need to compensate for the addition of new players which will add new demand for housing. Then subtract the amount of players that are leaving the game as well.

Dude I love this idea and I hope that they implement something like this. I'd honestly own a mor dhona loft and a personal house if I could. But I think short term, as in 2.4ish, I hope they consider allocating wards/servers based on the actual size of the population and not the number of worlds available. It just makes sense for something like this.