Housing Roulette was an absolute trash idea.

[Amenara]

Really feels like housing has become this resource black hole for the devs lol

I wonder if they regret adding it in the first place

I would hope their regret would be making a system that had no future-proofing at all, though I imagine a lot of that came from not expecting anywhere near the growth that they have had.

[Midareyukki]

I would hope their regret would be making a system that had no future-proofing at all, though I imagine a lot of that came from not expecting anywhere near the growth that they have had.

That's the thing. I don't think the devs at all even dreamed that their game could reach these numbers.

They made a game to compete against WoW. But they were expecting to just be kept afloat, around numbers that would make their game appear "successful". You know, at least in stark contrast to 1.0, in a genre that was kinda dying for a while. Even at its relative heights before the boom in popularity from SB and beyond, they were counting themselves alongside games like GW2 or PSO2.

Suddenly, this game became all the rage. It not only crashed the servers so hard that instances died on Stormblood, it led to sales being suspended in late Shadowbringers. The massive exodus waves from World of Warcraft made people experiment with the game and come to enjoy it. No one expected WoW to crash as hard as it did, and certainly no one expected FF14 to grow as much as it did because of it.

But here's the rub.

Even before, we had issues with supply. Sure, it was just "a matter of time" until you had a house*, but... it certainly wasn't this bad. Then the influx came, and they needed to put in restrictions and systems to try and alleviate things, like relocation or the 1-house limit. And it just... didn't work as great as they wanted it to. And now we have this. It doesn't matter what system you're in. If you can't solve the supply numbers, your systems will always generate salt.

*of course it's not as clear-cut anyway because some people bought ENTIRE DISTRICTS worth of houses at the time... so that's just a matter of speaking really.