So, what now? Lotteries with 150+ bids until... when?

[Silverbane]

The only reason I've personally heard him give is that the like the social aspect of wards and yet they fail in that regard for the majority of house owners.

Japan has a very different culture, so maybe the experience on JP servers is different.

Heh. If I lived in Tokyo, instead of a suburb in the US, just a daytime walk through a neighborhood without hordes of people in it might be a treat.

[One of my enduring memories of Tokyo is my spouse and I taking a walk early on a weekday morning. It was empty and quiet ... until a few minutes before the subways started running, when the commuters filled the street like a Bay of Fundy tidal bore.]

[Sairys]

There's no reason an improved instanced system couldn't exist side by side with wards.

The improved instanced system could even be accessed through the wards just as apartments already are. I think all the housing districts have areas that are unused dead ends. Turn the dead ends into the entrance for "private estates" (would need a better name), which would be the new instanced system. It would give the added benefit of more traffic in the wards as those owning the instanced housing would want to go back into the ward to access marketboards or vendors or the "recreation areas" (like the Brimming Heart or the Shirogane hot springs) on occasion. It would give everyone a house at the same time it improves the "neighborhood" feeling that the wards are supposed to provide but don't.

Sure, but you can also create one instance lobby per district and open up the possibility of all sorts of locations. Sharlayan, the First, the Moon, etc on top of just scenery places like mountain tops and islands all of which could have their own different little recreation area in place of the apartment entrance/lobby. But personally, I think the thing that's going to improve the neighborhood feeling the most is encouraging a system where the people in wards basically all want that.

[GeminiReed]

- Lack of reasons to travel within the ward not to mention the aethernet shards that can take players directly to their destination those rare occasions they do need to means greatly reduced chances of random encounters that lead to socialization.

In all my years RP'ing in various games those chance open world encounters are few and far between and even fewer lead to anything more than a "how ya doin'?" If I was in the mood to socialize I'd go to the known hang out spots.

In a non RP context I may or may not even /wave. Usually not because I'm in the middle of something else. I'm far more likely to throw a few words into a conversation happening in /shout (region) than /say (local)

The problem isn't lack of foot traffic, the problem is lack of reason to be there in the first place.

[Alien_Gamer]

Most of that makes no sense when all housing interiors, whether house, FC private chamber or apartment, are instanced.

Housing is everything inside the wards, not just house interiors. Its easy to see how messy the programming can get to add instanced plots to whats already there and would most likely require a rewrite of how the wards and plots function. Add to that they allocate 3x more server resources to housing wards than they do all of the rest of the PvE maps in the game and I can easily believe they run out of space for additional wards or adding instanced housing to wards themselves.

They're limited by previous design decisions which don't scale well and hardware limitations, both performance and scarcity. Its not an unsolvable problem for them but its not a quick and easy fix either.

[ShantiiElorei]

Question as someone who doesn't track all the dev comments and interviews and stuff and doesn't know if they check these forums, do we know if they're aware there's still a lot of frustration over the housing availability? I would assume/hope they do?

If they're aware it continues to be a frustration for a lot of players and that there's still high demand for better/more housing access, then I am hopeful it is something they are planning to address eventually, and that the lotto/new district was just a temporary band-aid (because a real solution is going to take a lot more time), rather than the devs mistakenly thinking this was a good enough fix and not planning to address it again.

(sorry for the double post, too many characters to put it all in one reply)

[Sairys]

Question as someone who doesn't track all the dev comments and interviews and stuff and doesn't know if they check these forums, do we know if they're aware there's still a lot of frustration over the housing availability? I would assume/hope they do?

If they're aware it continues to be a frustration for a lot of players and that there's still high demand for better/more housing access, then I am hopeful it is something they are planning to address eventually, and that the lotto/new district was just a temporary band-aid (because a real solution is going to take a lot more time), rather than the devs mistakenly thinking this was a good enough fix and not planning to address it again.

(sorry for the double post, too many characters to put it all in one reply)

I'd be surprised if they weren't tracking lottery participation somewhere, seems pretty useful for an idea on demand vs supply compared to people talking about it.

[ShantiiElorei]

I'd be surprised if they weren't tracking lottery participation somewhere, seems pretty useful for an idea on demand vs supply compared to people talking about it.

Hopefully if they are it's giving them a clearer idea of what precisely the demand level is. Hmm, I wonder if that's part of the reason they added it? Both as a temporary measure to try to make it more fair but also maybe as a way to collect actual hard numbers on how much more housing they would need to add to meet player demand? Because that would make a LOT of sense. It was probably difficult to asses before.

[Alien_Gamer]

Question as someone who doesn't track all the dev comments and interviews and stuff and doesn't know if they check these forums, do we know if they're aware there's still a lot of frustration over the housing availability? I would assume/hope they do?

Yoshi has commented a couple times over the years, mostly in live letters, that he's aware of the housing shortage. He's also stated that they prefer the ward system and can't add instanced housing to it. He's given several reasons over the years for why instanced housing isn't possible;
-the social aspect is the most common one
-storage space on the servers
-the way the wards were programmed doesn't really allow for instanced housing
-he prefers wards to instances.

More recently, the global supply chain issues have only complicated any potential changes to any system. If they weren't planning it 4 years ago, its not going to happen any time in the near future. Thats just the reality of the world we're in right now.

None of that's to say instanced housing can't eventually happen but we're unlikely to see it. Personally, I think Yoshi has convinced himself of that they've put so much into wards now, that it would be a waste to abandon it and switch to instanced housing. They'll just keep throwing wards at the problem until demand is met.

[ShantiiElorei]

Yoshi has commented a couple times over the years, mostly in live letters, that he's aware of the housing shortage. He's also stated that they prefer the ward system and can't add instanced housing to it. He's given several reasons over the years for why instanced housing isn't possible;
-the social aspect is the most common one
-storage space on the servers
-the way the wards were programmed doesn't really allow for instanced housing
-he prefers wards to instances.

More recently, the global supply chain issues have only complicated any potential changes to any system. If they weren't planning it 4 years ago, its not going to happen any time in the near future. Thats just the reality of the world we're in right now.

None of that's to say instanced housing can't eventually happen but we're unlikely to see it. Personally, I think Yoshi has convinced himself of that they've put so much into wards now, that it would be a waste to abandon it and switch to instanced housing. They'll just keep throwing wards at the problem until demand is met.

I mean they don't necessarily have to abandon the existing wards. Instanced housing can be a separate, co-existing system, and people can choose which they want to get a house in. So those who like the social aspect can still have that, but those that just want ANY house, even a private instanced one, to decorate and garden with can have one.

But if they plan on continuing to add more wards until demand is met, I'm fine with that too. I just wasn't sure if we had any idea if that's something they actually planned to do, and if it was technically feasible. Presumably there IS some technical limitation there for them to not have done it already (I know there was the issue adding servers due to global hardware shortages the past few years but I'm not sure where that stands now), unless they genuinely thought Ishgard housing would be enough and severely underestimated the number of players who want houses. In which case I hope they realize it was not enough and add more wards or yet another district.

[Setesh45]

Why is everyone spazzing out a month before the Island Sanctuaries get introduced to the game? To my knowledge you'll have a garden and a house in there too, wait and see how it works before spazzing out. O_o