Quote Originally Posted by Claviusnex View Post
The issue still goes back to the design not being able to handle dynamics in demand. Wards are a static implementation. This results in a large imbalance of system resources across servers with the high population not having enough housing and medium and small having an excess of housing. This will never be resolved with the existing housing system.
I agree the root problem with our housing system is it's lack of dynamics. It's not even a matter of whether housing is in shared wards or individual instances, as SE has displayed the same problem in both.

For a shared ward example, LOTRO has a very similar style of shared wards (called neighborhoods in that game's terminology). It works there far better than here not only because they support a lot more wards than FFXIV does, but also because it's server-specific, with automated dynamic allocation. When all houses of a given size in a given location are taken (across all neighborhoods at that location), a new neighborhood is spawned with its whole collection of houses for players to fill. (It hasn't been completely without problems, since there's a maximum number of neighborhoods that system can create, and their highest population server reached its initial maximum, and was stuck there for a while until the developers raised the max. But that was nowhere near the problems FFXIV has had with a fixed —and very limited— number of wards on every server, regardless of population.)

Even when SE added individually instanced apartments, they still didn't make it dynamic. They put in apartment buildings that should support I think it was 255 apartments each, but with initially 90 of them unlocked for use. This was supposedly just to get people to spread out across different wards, with the other apartments to be unlocked as they were needed. But "as needed" turned out not, after all, to mean as that particular server needed them. Balmung ran out of apartments while most other servers still had only a tiny proportion of them taken, and apparently SE was unable to unlock more of the (already created) apartments on Balmung unless they unlocked them on all servers, most of which didn't need any more.

If SE can't even manage unlocking available apartment instances on a per-server basis, I'm not sure anymore what's going to fix their system. High population servers need more housing than low population servers, and as long as SE insists on it being the same amount everywhere, the only possibilities are high-pop housing shortages and/or low-pop under-utilization. As they also seem to be (probably correctly) viewing under-utilization as wasted resources and money, they're consistently leaning towards housing shortages instead. Until SE figures out how to make server specific dynamic allocation work, we're going to be stuck with these issues.