When will you really address the housing availability problem?

[Catwho]

In other games people renew their subscriptions just to avoid periodic name wipes.

Heck, Square only guaranteed retaining your FFXI character data for up to 90 days after letting your subscription lapse. You don't think people kept resubscribing just to avoid that? Most people don't really know when they're gone for good and aren't willing to give everything away when they "leave".

At the time large archival storage was expensive. As it became cheaper, they started offloading character data onto permanent backups, and later on they offered a character retrieval service where they'd dig up an old archived character during certain times of the year. I think they rejiggered it a few years ago to be available automatically year round, because permanent character storage got so much cheaper.