I must be missing something...

[Neira]

Square Enix almost literally copied a housing system that exists already in a free to play MMO. The F2P MMO can sustain it and offer houses to everyone, but SE can't. It's really hard to give any credit to an argument about technical difficulties when such a fact exists.

[dejiko_san]

Well, there's still a lot of housing on the smaller servers.

The problem is that people are all going to the larger servers but the housing doesn't get any bigger to compensate. This makes a more people fight for houses like what happened on legacy servers.

There should be Ishgard housing eventually so you could give that a shot when they announce it.

[CatfishCassie]

Square Enix almost literally copied a housing system that exists already in a free to play MMO. The F2P MMO can sustain it and offer houses to everyone, but SE can't. It's really hard to give any credit to an argument about technical difficulties when such a fact exists.

Which F2P MMO was that? Every F2P MMO I've played has entirely instanced houses instead of an actual housing zone with all the houses existing in more or less the same place. That's a much easier technical problem to solve, and a much less resource-intensive problem than housing zones, because housing zones run into performance issues (particularly on the still-supported PS3) since it has to load every external item, every structural component, every dye color, etc. for every house in the zone every time someone loads into the zone. Instanced housing just has to load one house for one player at a time. If you have 64 people loading into the housing zone at once, with instanced housing you have to load 64 houses. With Final Fantasy's housing zones, you have to load 1,920 houses... 30 houses per player x 64 players.

The quote in your signature line is interesting... I played Ultima Online, and housing was far more of an issue than it is in Final Fantasy. I remember when their oriental expansion came out... every housing plot was taken within 2 days of launch. There weren't caps on how many houses a single character could own, and there wasn't scaling of housing prices based on the amount of gold in the economy. So in UO, the only way to actually get a house was to get lucky and plop your house down within hours of a new expansion launch, or pay someone hundreds of real-life dollars to vacate their house and give you the plot and hope they didn't just take your money and run.