Quote Originally Posted by Ixon View Post
The whole housing situation CAN be better, but you know what helps? Being realistic with and understanding with the current and future state of the game to work towards a solution that makes players happy, and is feasible by the dev team. Anyone can spout "this should be this because I said so and I don't care what it takes", but you get a lot farther by working with the current flow than swimming against. "How dare SE make virtual neighborhoods in an MMO in an effort to cultivate communities, and how dare they not nail it right on the first try and lay an unchanging foundation to last over a decade" gimme a break. Now if they NEVER addressed it and NEVER made strides to make it better, then I'd be in your boat. Though as far as I can tell, they've addressed it, many times, and have made strides to improve it, many times.
What's realistic can be seen via what other games are doing with their housing. Those games don't seem to have a problem with instanced housing to the point they allow each character to own multiple housing locations as desired.

Wards don't cultivate communities unless players are present in the wards on a regular basis. Unfortunately this is not happening because in the end the majority of players are here to play the other content in the game, not sit outside a house hoping that one of the other 29 owners in the ward might just happen to be online and might just happen to be in the ward instead of doing other content and might just happen to decide to be walking around the right part of the ward instead of sitting at their own house.

Communities can and do form around the RP venues but I suspect for most worlds there are far fewer RP venues active on a daily basis (or even weekly) than the 192 wards/subdivisions we currently have (or the 240 we will have once Ishgard opens).

It's really a shame because wards could have been the best of both worlds - instanced housing within a community neighborhood. Think about apartment buildings - a common area that act as a portal to the individual instanced apartments. Now expand that to the houses in the wards, with each plot placard a portal to the instanced plots that could be within. Players would see each other coming and going, and even be more likely to stay within the ward to talk to those they see instead of quietly disappearing into their house where they may as well not even exist.

I would be interested in knowing what you think they've done over the years to make the ward system better because I'm not seeing it. Demolition, purchase timers, lotteries - those all mitigate flaws in supply design. They don't create a better experience. I'm still in a ward subdivision that has 29 other owners and no matter how often I'm going to a marketboard or the vendors to buy something, it's extremely rare that I run into another player. I can sit in my yard crafting for hours (which I did while working on Expert achievements last expansion) and never see another player passing by.

Where is the community when there's no one around?