Suggestion: House Finder

[Hasrat]

And how are you supposed to show off and have neighbors on an overpopulated server without a housing supply?

Proposed idea, preventing players from transferring to full servers, would mean maybe servers like Jenova wouldn't be so low-pop, and eventually you'd be more satisfied. That problem isn't going to magically fix itself.

[DirtyPeanut]

I'm sure it's technically very challenging to do, but if they can make housing wards to be data center specific instead of world specific, that would solve a lot of problem. You won't have empty wards on slow servers. Lots more supplies of plots for high pop servers, and a chance to mingle with other players on other worlds even!

They'd need to do some work to prevent cross-world trading.

[Thortok2000]

Players are already blocked from transferring to full servers. I had to wait a couple weeks before Balmung was open long enough for me to transfer to it.

The problem is that not enough people play the game to fill multiple servers.

"No, you can't play with other people, it's too crowded, go start your own crowd somewhere else" is not the answer. People will just quit the game rather than play on dead servers. Pretty sure people already do. And then there's even less people playing. And it spirals from there.

Imagine telling a kid that there's 50 people inside the house but there's 2 people outside the house and no, they're not allowed inside to play, they have to go play with the two people outside, they can build their own house. How do you think that kid's going to react? He's not going to want to build a house at all, he'll probably just leave. Now there's 1 less kid outside the house and it's an even worse problem.

Pretty sure that's how we got to this point in the first place. People congregated to where the fun was and everywhere else died off.

[CuteWhisper]

Again, I want neighbors. I want to show off my house to other people even when I'm not online.

How am I supposed to do that on a dead server with an extremely low population?

People play an MMO because of those first two M's, and especially the first one. Massively multiplayer.

I played on Jenova before moving to Balmung, and it felt dead, especially while leveling. If I even saw a single person pass when not in a city, it was a special occasion. That's not the kind of server I want to be on.

Again wards could be for Free Company so you still can show off your FC house, and people that really just want their own house could have it instanced because honestly right now, my ward is almost empty yet no houses available! I have a nice mog house but I did it because I wanted it not to just show it off. At this point, Id rather have it instanced and keep wards for free companies.

[Thortok2000]

While I would accept this compromise if technical limitations are truly an issue, I don't understand why it's even an issue.

Just create more wards, or better yet, a system where wards automatically generate when the previous wards fill up. It's that easy.

I'm also not seeing the difference between 'wards' and 'instancing' from a technical standpoint. Wards ARE instances.

What you're really suggesting is a smaller, individual 'ward' size, down to a single house, which A you have the solve the problem of how do you show off the house and share it with people (does it work like personal rooms in an FC? visitors just pick you from a menu?) and B is it really that much of a difference?

Frankly speaking, a ward probably takes up less space on the server than 60 individual instances would. So technically wards are already better than privatized instances anyway.

Character limit is too restrictive btw. -.-