Suggestion: Do not allow multiple service accounts all own houses.

[Jojoya]

I'm fairly sure the houses are unused if they have practically 0 furnishing and the characters have literally been level 1 for over a year lol. But anyway, if a yard causes others to have to go into awkward camera angles to use the Marketboard/Retainer bell, then yes, it is most definitely is other peoples business. I very clearly said that I completely understand they aren't breaking any rule technically, and never said they're doing any loopholes. I'm only saying that it's dumb and shouldn't really be a thing. And pretty scumbaggy to boot.

If they're level 1, then it's a FC house. The owner is probably operating airships and submersibles if the house appears to otherwise be unused.

SE has no way to know if John Doe in New York City is also John Doe from New York City. There are a lot of John Does in New York City and some of them are probably father and son living under the same roof. As a result, SE would have no way to enforce any per person rules. The best they can do is per service account.

I think the upcoming server shuffle will really help alleviate the housing shortage.

If you're on Balmung, you're not likely to be able to get a house anytime soon. But, you'll soon get a free transfer. You can use that to go live on another Crystal server, such as Malboro, where's a good amount of housing currently available. Then you can use World Visit to do all your adventuring on Balmung.

It's not a perfect solution, but you'd at least be able to buy a house and continue playing with your friends.

And if enough people do this, there'll be less demand for housing on Balmung, making it a bit easier for those who stay there to get a house at some future point.

Also, with the demand for housing spread out more evenly across all servers, we'll be more likely to see more wards added. They don't want to add more wards right now because demand for housing is so much greater on the most heavily populated servers that adding a few new wards wouldn't make enough of an impact there to be worthwhile, and the servers that already have a lot of vacant lots would just get more of them. But, spread enough of that demand out to where the supply is, get the neighborhoods on all servers more evenly filled, and adding new wards more frequently will become much more feasible.

I think that's a little on the optimistic side. SE has already stated they are working to find a way to prioritize players attempting to return to their home worlds if that world has a queue due to congestion. That's going to make anyone on Balmung who wants to continue to play with friends on Balmung think twice about transferring off world just to get a house.

There's also uncertainty over just how much housing will be available on the lower pop worlds once the data center reorganization happens. We had 665 houses available back in October before SE suspended the demo timer. In November it dropped to 532, December it was down to 400 and there were only 257 when I checked yesterday. At that rate Coeurl will be out of houses by mid March, before the data center reorganization even happens.

Who's going to transfer solely to buy a house if their chance at getting a house will be no better than it is on their current world? The reorganization really won't do much to spread out the demand because there won't be enough still available by then. The only way it might impact it would be for SE to resume the demo timer 8 weeks in advance of the reorganization so every thing that might demo will do so before the free transfer period opens.