Plots everywhere demolished and open!

[Seraphor]

I think the issue I ran into with housing is that the idea was people would buy up buildings and decorate them to form districts, but in the actual game there's little incentive to walk around the districts themselves, so it turns into a luxury instanced thing that loses meaning pretty fast.

I hate bringing up shroud of the avatar, but the one idea they did have that was pretty solid was having the towns and cities have the housing plots in them. People basically would still go through the towns and pass by homes owned by actual players in the course of playing the game day to day, unlike what FFXIV has where we got a new hub city each patch and are constantly moving farther and farther away from home so to speak. The obvious issue with this is that the size of cities would be enormous and constantly sprawling out further and further much like real life cities.

The central hub of Uldah would be like the heart of Chicago, and houses would flood out from all districts completely covering the country side all the way to the port in Western Thanalan. Then housing demolishment would result in vacant districts that would became derelicts. If they had done zoning and other aspects differently, this could have been pretty interesting having to deal with monster infestations when plots got abandoned, and home owners needed to constantly battle off these creatures from damaging the walls or climbing into the homes via walls.

Imagine right now, with all those homes being abandoned, just how much chaos there would be if the few remaining owners had to start calling people in to try and keep the monsters from destroying half their living spaces. Soon you'd have all the players moving their homes together into clusters, with the smaller homes around the bigger ones like buffer zones...

Edit: Actually, we need this. Like, having to buy new furnishings from monsters ruining houses would probably add more motion to the crafting market. Plus it causes a more natural destruction of a limited number of houses...

I'm hoping this is what they do with Ishgard housing.
They've placed some crafter/gatherer NPC's in there, and there's even a building that looks suspiciously like a public (non-FC) workshop.
If these are retained in the actual wards themselves, it could be a living housing ward.
They would of course need to roll it out to the other four locations as well if they did this, but I can imagine them taking their time to do so.