Time on House removal/reclaming is way to short! (private houseing)

[Niwashi]

Each house eats up a ton of space. You can't simply just make more wards unless you have the resources for it. SE could easily dumb down housing (remove building design, limit locations for furniture, limit rotations, etc.) like what Turbine did with LotRO and allow thousands of wards, but it would stifle creativity and the feeling of ownership.

Turbine went with hooks where you could place furnishings because of the client side graphics engine they were using to display those items. (Also because they were a lot pickier about avoiding clipping than SE is, so wanted to make sure you couldn't put things too close to each other. I'm not entirely sure why they were so picky about that when they have clipping issues elsewhere, though.)

As for the extra space free placement takes as compared to such a system, there's probably a couple bytes for each of the X,Y,Z coordinates and another byte for the orientation. That's seven bytes per item for positioning compared to one byte for which hook it's placed on in LOTRO. An extra six bytes per item, multiplied by the maximum 100, 150, or 200 items per estate, multiplied by the 20 small 7 medium and 3 large estates per ward, comes out to a free placement system costing (at most with every house filled to capacity) a little under 22 kilobytes extra per ward as compared to a hook system. That's certainly not what's stopping them from adding a thousand or so wards like LOTRO has.

And yes, there's some other customization that FFXIV's housing offers which LOTRO's doesn't, but LOTRO's housing offers item storage which FFXIV's doesn't, so if anything I'd bet on LOTRO's being the one to have a greater amount of data per estate than FFXIV.