Today, I'll explain how Square Enix can solve the cause of the housing supply issue while keeping the current ward system.

It's one step.

Automatically create a new, empty ward whenever all houses in a residential area are full.

If they did this, there wouldn't be a need for a lottery. There wouldn't be a need for a 45-day timer. There wouldn't be a need for a random housing timer in the FCFS system.

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Now to address the two obvious concerns.

Neighborhoods never work! We need pure instanced housing!

Lord of the Rings Online proves otherwise.

They have an instanced neighborhood system similar to Final Fantasy XIV. Except they have the fix I mentioned.

They do limit their largest houses to kinships only, which are the equivalent of free companies here.

The devs said servers are too expensive!

Square Enix has made record profits the past three years. They can afford servers. Someone's being stingy at the company, likely the penny pinchers.

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Basically, Square Enix needs to solve the cause of the issue, not mitigate the symptoms. They've had six years of trying Band-Aids that don't work. It's time to fix the issue.