It's interesting to me that people want to argue for one of two incredibly shitty housing systems. I won my first plot via furiously placard-clicking, and recently upgraded to a Medium plot via the recent lottery. I can say with confidence that both are, frankly, abysmal.


Placard-clicking gives the advantage of thinning out the pool of potential house-seekers, as only those who are willing (and more crucially, able) to spend hours clicking at a placard (or more likely, enable a script on their machine to click for them) will be competing with you. Lottery respects your time, but because it does so, the pool of players you're competing with drastically increase. Neither of these systems are a meaningfully satisfactory solution to a problem that is, at its core, right down to the design of housing in FF14.

There are three house sizes -- Large, Medium, Small. In a system like this, where there are superior and inferior plots, the only way to have players invest in the lower-value plots is to create artificial scarcity, where only a select few players can have a house at all. After all, it won't do to have wards and wards with hundreds of empty Smalls and Mediums, as if wards are infinite, most players will only shoot for the Large plots. Not all players, mind -- some will prefer smaller plots in more desirable locations on the ground of vanity -- but most will shoot for a Large on the grounds of it having more decoration space, and a higher allowance of gardening plots.

Many people have proposed instanced housing as a solution to this problem, but I've yet to see anyone satisfactorily explain how outdoor decorative items, a core feature of the housing system, would work in a system like that. I'm not saying it's impossible -- simply that it's not as easy as "just introduce instanced housing". In any case, how would the current system of Smalls, Mediums, and Larges transfer over to instanced housing? Could you have any size you want? Would the system replace the current neighbourhood system, or exist concurrently? If you could have an relatively equivalent Large-sized instanced house, what would be the point of going for Smalls or Mediums in a neighbourhood? These are all questions that SE would need to reckon with to solve this issue.

Their approach to the current situation, while ultimately still shitty, is one that makes sense. Continue to gradually add wards until they no longer fill up immediately, as a way of metering demand without creating ghost wards. It's an unsatisfactory solution, given that there is an inherent inequality between Small, Medium, and Large, and the problem is attempting to solve for "every player who wants one gets a house, of some kind" as opposed to "every player is able to get a house they are content with". In any case, it'd be incredibly difficult to walk back on this system given how much gil and time people have invested in it over time. The backlash would be utterly insane.