So devs don't understand math.

[Jojoya]

While persisting in wanting to make the housing areas community based, it remains a ghost town because there is a strong inconsistency between what Yoshi-P wants and the ingame players.

I don't think it's so much inconsistency between what the developers and players want. There are some players who love the idea of living in a ward with multiple houses even if they never see another player in the ward.

The real problem is that the way the wards are expected to be populated in theory doesn't work out in practice. Going to throw out some numbers to use as examples - actual situation by ward will vary.

Up until 6.1 (not sure how the numbers have changed since if at all), houses were roughly 70% personal and 30% FC. Let's say the typical FC has 8 unique and active members on average. That gives us approximately 93 players with a reason to be in that ward.

How much time would you expect each of those players to be traveling around in their ward each week as opposed to being inside of their house or doing other content? Most players don't tend to hang around outside of their houses much if at all. It's far more likely to happen at a FC house than at a personal house. Let's say 10 minutes for those with a personal house and 60 minutes for those with a FC house. That's roughly 75 hours spent in the ward each week - out of 168 hours in a week - and spread around throughout the day depending on when each player is able to log into play and whether they want to be hanging out at their house instead of doing other content. It doesn't help that players are able to teleport directly to their house and teleport directly away from their house so there's no foot traffic generated as players are coming and going. There's only foot traffic if the player has reason to go to another part of the ward and the aethernet shards aren't in convenient places for getting there.

Contrast that with real life neighborhoods where a majority of residents will have some variation of a M-F 8-5 schedule so they tend to be going to and from their homes during the same time frames, actually need to drive/ride/walk through their neighborhoods to get to/from their homes, etc. There's usually someone (or many someones) moving around to make it feel populated.

We don't utilize wards the same way neighborhoods are utilized in real life and so we're left with empty, though decorated, spaces. The small number of houses that exists per world is spread between too many different wards for players to get a true neighborhood experience.