Housing - SE This WILL Help!

[MageBlack]

MMORPG.de: A lot of players complain about the housing situation. They want to buy a house, but it is impossible to find free plots on some worlds. Are there any plans to improve the situation?

NY: Yes, we are working on it, and there are three phases. The first step is working on abandoned houses, so there’s no owner, or player there actually. The second step is to make it available to players that they can move house. There is no system in game yet that can help you to change the house, so we want to help and support this in the game. With these two steps we will be able to have some empty plots. Then we want to see if we have to open up an Ishgard plot or add more plot to the existing areas. That is the third step. We want to be careful here and judge the situation first. We are working on step 1 and 2 already. There will be some updates, probably in patches 3.1 to 3.15, around this time.

Source

I mentioned this in my thread about Housing. You can find lots of details and great suggestions here. Please feel free to add to the conversation and see what others have suggested. You have touched on another of the failings in what could have been an excellent piece of content.

[Alberel]

Accounts are also FINITE, they use space, out there, somewhere, inventory spaces, item IDs, profile settings, etc, etc, etc. So, lets delete all 6 months unplayed accounts.

NO.

The fact is that SE needs to upgrade servers and learn to code. Hurting players by making them lose their stuff if they become absent is just nonsense, and actually, a very bad overall policy cause it means the end of any chance of said players to return to the game, so, no, that unjustified terribly thought fantasy of you people won`t happen.

All MMORPGs out there can do housing right when we talk about accesibility and being able to support the whole player base potentially. The excuse for SE (and this has become the scapegoat for almost all of this game problems) of the server issues has been used enough. Its time for a real solution, no inverted clone wards. Hurting players to not solve a problem is bad. Even unactive players that could potentially always return.

For example, if i leave, and i know my plot was fred and now someone else is using it, thats it, gg SE, and i would never return to the game. So thankfully, SE is smart enough to see that this is NOT a solution.

This is a false equivalence. The limitation on wards is nothing to do with the amount of data it takes up in the database. There is effectively infinite storage space for accounts because they take up only a small amount of room and they are stored in a database on a separate server. When a player goes inactive their account data is not being loaded into the live world server since they're not accessing the game. It's also very likely they have an archiving system that archives accounts that have been inactive for prolonged periods of time so as to improve access speeds for the accounts that are currently active (I know FFXI used to do this). The inactive account is, therefore, not getting in anyone's way and not slowing anything down.

The housing wards are persistant areas. This means they are always loaded into the server at all times. This is why SE cannot easily add new wards since it requires them to expand the actual physical world servers to be able to hold the data for each new ward. When an inactive player has a house in a persistant area they are essentially wasting space on the world server since their house is being loaded to the server even though the player is inactive. In addition to this other players cannot access that plot for themselves because it's being squatted by a selfish inactive player who has no use for it.

Expanding the database for accounts is cheap to do and they take up little space. Expanding the capacity for housing is expensive since every new ward added is like adding a new zone in an expansion. I hope you see the difference and why your argument holds no merit.