so, I was reading the news this morning and saw that it is Square Enix' cunning plan to implement more housing wards. This is a definite straight forward solution, but I was running some numbers and am questioning how much it's really going to help.

Right now, there are 12 wards with 30 plots each in 4 areas. That's 1,440 plots. So, if SE managed to, for the sake of argument, double the number of wards in all areas, which is quite a feat, that is 2,880 plots.

According to https://ffxivcensus.com/, on my server alone, there are nearly 250,000 active players, assuming that information is correct. Now, let's assume, again for the sake of argument, that a certain number among them are perfectly content with their apartment dwellings or rooming with their FCs, or are newbies and can't afford it, or are just homeless and don't care. Enough for us to reduce that number by half to 125,000. So, for all the effort that Square Enix is going through to do this, doubling the amount of available housing in this scenario is only going to accomodate 2.304% of the total population on my server alone.

I have no doubts that they have the best of intentions. Square Enix empathizes with us, they respect us, but I don't know if this is gonna work. I don't really have any ideas to the contrary, but I'm open to suggestions!