We need a statement from the developers

[Tridus]

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.

The communities work exactly the same if there's 24 wards instead of 12, except that doubles the amount of people who can get a house. Scaling outward like that is something that modern server clusters do really, really easily. The problem is SE's mentality.

[CatfishCassie]

The communities work exactly the same if there's 24 wards instead of 12, except that doubles the amount of people who can get a house. Scaling outward like that is something that modern server clusters do really, really easily. The problem is SE's mentality.

I'm not arguing with you at all... even with SE controlling their own server cluster, the resources they'd spend opening up a new ward would be paid back in a week's worth of subscriptions from the people in that ward. My desktop could hold all the resources required for every housing ward on the server... it's not like we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here. I mean... *maybe* SE is like the only 10-million-plus user network on the planet that hasn't moved to a cloud architecture yet, in which case *maybe* it requires more than a weekend's worth of rearchitecturing to make that happen. But for anyone else, it's as easy as changing a single UI window and spinning up some new VMs.