How did we get here?

[Kittypryde]

Yeah, there are quite a few omnicrafters on my server who would drop 500m on a personal mega mansion, and quit a few FCs that could pull it off also. I'd be a really fun goal to have for alot of players, myself included.

I do personally think that apartments should have been available with 1-3 floor upgrade options, to be used for personal housing. Maayyyybeee small cottages also. But, definitely SE dropped the ball by mixing personal houses in the same ward as FC houses.

[Scarlowe]

I do personally think that apartments should have been available with 1-3 floor upgrade options, to be used for personal housing.

^ This, a million times this. I for one would be perfectly happy with an apartment if they weren't limited to one tiny square room. Being able to add an extra floor would help a lot, and adding some kind of terrace or garden where you could have a bit of an exterior and a view would make the whole thing feel a bit less like a "band-aid until you can manage to swing a house". I get why people would prefer the wards with neighbors you can actually physically see and interact with in a more "realistic" way, but apartment-type stuff does work and that's how most MMOs do it these days (sandboxes are a different beast altogether), either through instancing or phasing. And how hard can it be to have options to "upgrade" your apartment to a cottage, house or mansion interior, at the very least?

[Zojha]

Being able to add an extra floor would help a lot, and adding some kind of terrace or garden where you could have a bit of an exterior and a view would make the whole thing feel a bit less like a "band-aid until you can manage to swing a house.

Alas...

Regarding apartments, processes involving plots of land are executed within the zone in which they reside, while the interior of a house on a plot of land has its home within a separate housing server. Due to this, we cannot apply land management (i.e. a terrace) to an apartment, as its processing is the same as a house interior.

https://www.dualshockers.com/final-f...naoki-yoshida/

Watch them be unable to allow for "upgrading" apartments as well for some reason. They'd probably just create a separate apartment house to buy bigger apartments in and of course those would then end up having a far more limited number. And the attached greenhouse would be public, including the rights to just take all the crops, because surely people will behave. Or something >_>

[Scarlowe]

Alas...
https://www.dualshockers.com/final-f...naoki-yoshida/
Watch them be unable to allow for "upgrading" apartments as well for some reason.

I'm not saying add an actual view of the physical ward your apartment is in, more a mock-view backdrop of sorts, and lift the exterior furnishing restriction in that area. It'd just be an "instanced dummy ward". Plenty of other games do that kind of thing, and there is plenty of phasing in the game already, like beast tribe camps and stuff.

Alas, you're probably right that they'd implement it in some toxic way like rework the buildings to have 50 small apartments, 10 medium ones and 3 penthouses or something and get apartment Hunger Games going while they're at it.

[ToasterMan]

TLDR: We got here because some people made bad decisions when designing a product.