They have instanced housing and it's called apartments. The wards exist for a reason, however, and that reason is to inspire a sense of community. No one cares how cool your house is when it exists in a pocket dimension that only you and your close friends know or care about, but being able to see other people's houses as you walk by to your own creates a difficult-to-quantify yet important aspect of community awareness. It's one of the big reasons I've stuck with FFXIV for so long... the fact that they put a lot of effort into little things that really make it feel like you're living in a world instead of just playing a game.

That said... a lot of their caps are pretty ridiculous, and a relic of when the game was much smaller in terms of server population. 12 wards isn't enough, and certainly the cap on apartments makes no sense either. The amount of profit they're churning through in FFXIV is enough to almost entirely fund the development of other games like FFXV, and they promised that now that FFXV is done, that money would be reinvested back into the game that actually earned it. So my question is: why not reinvest it into the game by standing up more housing servers or, perhaps, even just more NA/EU servers in general? And why spit on the FCs that keep the game going by letting individuals overwhelm the housing market to the point that FCs that didn't have a house before Housingpocalypse probably still don't have one now.

And for the love of all that is holy, get rid of the ridiculous 1000 character cap on messages!