Plots everywhere demolished and open!

[Shougun]

Yes and no.

Everybody got an exterior plot with a good amount of room. Various dwellings could be added to provide interiors. If you were careful there were few, if any restrictions on where you could put stuff. The entry portal being a notable bone of contention. Adopting these two features alone would improve the XIV housing experience enormously.

IMO, Wildstar's housing should have been considered barely adequate instead of the Gold Standard MMO housing enthusiasts seem to consider it. Like many things in WS the community was able to work around some of the worst shortcomings of the interface thanks to their add-on API. Think of this: It was barely better than Bioware's NWN toolset and that was 10+ years old by the time WS released.

While it was completely instanced I've had significant better social interactions in both quality and quantity in WS than XIV's ward system. That's more the fault of XIV's awful chat interface and the lack of addons that allowed the RP community to replace WS's stock chat with one more suitable for RP.

To be fair, or unfair? carrying on your yes and no comment lol, I have some really great memories of WoW's interface. Some features I still greatly miss and I'm like dang FFXIV why can't you---.. and then I remember that 98% of the reason why WoW's UI was so good for me was that it was modded to oblivion and back. XD

I think the comparison isn't quite perfect but you could say WoW gave the infrastructure (underlying potential features) for the community to go hogwild, so similarly Wildstar did that too (so I think it's worth saying they should get some credit, but perhaps not the typical kind you'd think of). The amount of power and creative control in Wildstar takes HUGE, MASSIVE, whacks at FFXIV- absolutely no comparison, miles and miles and miles better. But yeah maybe some weird quirks that the community had to get around lol. Certain games have done more or less, I just like the general whole package as a great piece to example (skydrop, weather, land, house, z axis, scale, massive amount of objects both inside and outside of your house- both of those limits mind you, for players that don't know what we're talking about, is much larger than FFXIV's, allowed players to join house power to create substantially larger full power community zones for things like basically in game cities, etc). ESO, another system a few people have mentioned- so I'm refrencing it, for example caps out at like 700 for the biggest house (and if you're subbed), but they have their own neat feature in that you can own all of the houses (so you could own like 42+ houses).

So Wildstar sitting at 1000+, ESO with the ability to own multiple 300+ houses, and then there is FFXIV where they can barely handle adding more limited quantity 400 item houses. .. . /playing my violin lol. Thankfully the entire game isn't just one feature.

To FFXIV credit, at least on the UI, a lot of stuff is much better out of the gate. I don't need to troubleshoot any of my UI and "it just works". Not sure how much credit I want to give to housing though since the glitches you have to do and repeat objects because scale and z axis control are not a thing.. FFXIV community has a lot of hurdles to deal with too (meanwhile getting way less power than Wildstar, and many other mmos). Objects in FFXIV are quite pretty, but .. you know.. the whole game is lol, that's about where I want to give credit for FFXIV (on the topic of housing at least, other parts FFXIV has done very well).

I think the social interaction part I want to add though is just proof though that instanced systems are not the death of social events, which is sometimes the counter argument people have to them. Like if you have that system then social interaction becomes the grave (which is often funny to read since the areas I go to are already dead or very nearly, lol). Certainly for both systems there are things that can be done to improve interactions, like if you had an instanced system it would be important to have a search able house board so you can find that cafe or whatever. May even have a weekly challenge log for some of the easiest tokens of your life, just because SE can (like venture tokens, to fit the theme, or perhaps MGP, or it could relate back into some other house feature, visit these houses get a bonus to your garden, or something). As an aside though while I think FFXIV's current wards are just about if not more dead than any sort of instanced system, with rare exceptions usually based on very specific types of people, I would say if FFXIV had kept housing FC only that then it would probably be much more social by the nature of lots of people (but that ship is long gone).