Why is this not the solution?

[Nepentha]

Hooboy there is so much to unpack here.

Aside from the fact that apartments are, functionally, still not as useful as having a house (as there are mechanics gated behind an FC house); a lot of apartments were snapped up by people who owned FC plots and private plots already. People want rooms, they want apartments, but they can't because most of them are taken up by greedy people who already have FC's, private plots and apartments and want more and more and more.

People using available resources are not the problem. They limited it to 1 personal house per account, and gave us apartments for alts, funsies, people who didn't want to be in FCs (or their FC didn't have housing). Apartments weren't meant to be a finite resource in the first place. We were assured when they were made available that if SE needed to, they could just add more easily, unlike adding new housing wards.

So let's dispense with referring to people who have apartments as greedy, please and thank you.

Snip for length about instanced housing.

Actually, I agree with you on this front. I wish SE would finally give up on the idea of neighborhood style housing wards. There is no way they can acquire enough hardware to meet the demand players have for it, especially as the game grows. I wouldn't demolish the neighborhoods though. Let them remain, a premium housing remnant of the old way of doing things. If you really /have/ to have one of them then you wait for one to demo and hope you win the lotto for that plot.

But then implement instanced housing. Every character gets their own private plot. (Or each server you get a plot you can share with the rest of the characters you have on that server. Whichever.) Let people pay for upgrading their instanced plot. You get a box sized apartment once you hit lvl 50 and the appropriate rank with your Grand Company. Upgrade it to a small house size for 3 million. Medium space? Pay 20 million for that. On and on. Put premium interior changes in the cash shop, or things you can only get from dungeons and quests or achievements or PvP or whatever. If one isn't bound by the neighborhood, let them experiment.

Make FC halls or headquarters, all instanced. Players can choose to hitch their instanced plots to it so you can go directly to someone's instanced home from the door inside the FC hall.

Make premium areas you can buy an instanced plot in. Live in the Sea of Clouds if you want, or in the sands of Ala Mhigo or the Crystarium even. Make them even more expensive if you want. 50 million to live in Idyllshire or something. Charge to transfer plots to another region.

I dunno, I'm shooting from the hip here at some of the things they might be able to do with instanced housing. And don't put a demo timer on them. That would make them even more of a perk. You can log out and take a break from the game (as Yoshi-P has said he'd prefer people to do) and not have to fret they'll lose their home and all the love and hard work they put into it to a demo timer.

Come on, SE, you /can/ and /should/ do better by your players than this.