When will you really address the housing availability problem?

[Gyson]

Are you kidding? The game was released with that current years technology in mind for processing and resources... Why would it not be an excuse? We may not know the exact numbers but its fairly obvious that a 7 year old game is going to require less resources. Pretty artwork sounds like your taking a strawman stance, its not about "pretty artwork" its about how much memory and resources the "pretty artwork" takes. More graphical games take heftier processing, otherwise we would never have to upgrade video cards, processors, or even ram for that matter, lord knows what the server hardware changes involve. This argument is pointless at any rate.

You seem to be under the (mistaken) impression that the graphical fidelity of a game has an impact on server performance. It doesn't. Do you not understand that all of the visuals are handled client-side? In the case of housing zones, the server is only managing information like which properties are owned, who owns them, the list of objects in those properties, the position and orientation of those objects, etc.

Better/newer or worse/older "art" does not impact performance on the server - whether those objects are made up of 10 polygons or 10 million polygons is irrelevant to the server. It simply relays the information to your client that specific objects are "here" and then it's up to your computer to process that information and render those objects on your screen. Likewise, increasing the number of housing zones matters not to your client, because it's only processing information for your current zone, not all the zones that exist. More housing wards will not impact performance on your home system.

When the developers are talking about server limitations in regards to housing, they are likely referring to the resources required to track all that (non-graphical) data. Those 1440 homes that occupy 60 properties spread across 8 wards in 3 housing districts all have to be tracked, and apparently adding any additional (non-graphical) information will strain the system (much in the same way that tracking more item storage for characters will apparently strain the system).

When you compare that to fact that LoTRO can store information for 30,000 homes that occupy 30 properties spread across 250 wards in 4 housing districts.. well, it's clear the developers over at Turbine did a *much* better job at managing all that information despite the fact that they were dealing with *much* older server hardware.