When will you really address the housing availability problem?

[Ryel]

Incorrect. If a player is gone for good, the chance of losing a house isn't going to make them come back.

Not entirely true.

Prior to the Housing reclamation system being implemented Yoshida had encouraged players to take breaks between patch cycles if they chose because of the way content is designed.

A player who say took a break during the 8 month period from FCoB release and came back for say... Heavensward launch might genuinely find themselves quickly leaving the game over the loss of a 100mil + investment into the game that vanished into thin air (as you have 30 days to reclaim the cash after the house goes poof) and that's at it's longest.

From 3.0 to 3.1 was a 5 month stretch in which a large number of players took breaks due to the current raid design and general lack of content variety, many of whom came back to check out 3.1, the diadem, and void ark. It's likely however that had the housing reclaim feature been in the game and they had lost not only their property but their gil and furnishings they wouldn't be too keen on re-subbing at all.

This makes it very apparent that the system is an obvious attempt to leverage property and in game investments against a subscription, especially when many free to play MMOs that peak at higher active player counts due to their nature are able to provide adequate server space and infinite holding durations for services like housing, banks, gil etc.

If content comes in 3.5 month cycles at their earliest, then why is there a 45 day reclaim limit on housing for any other reason than to coax a sub?

For some players that's more than enough to consider not coming back to the game when they otherwise would have before.

For others the thought of losing the time / gil invested in obtaining property might be enough for them to shell out 10 bucks every other month just to keep it active.