Can we cut the ward system and finally go for instanced

[Stormpeaks]

How about we dont go for "fully instanced housing" ? That sounds like a good idea, people have worked for their houses as much as a lot of you have, they dont deserve their houses taken away from wards because you cant get one. You have multiple options to get a house, you can move to Dynamis, or to a less populated world in which there is more availability.

It really is time to stop this nonsense of wanting to punish the ones that got a house because you dont have one.

[Xylira]

How about we dont go for "fully instanced housing" ? That sounds like a good idea, people have worked for their houses as much as a lot of you have, they dont deserve their houses taken away from wards because you cant get one. You have multiple options to get a house, you can move to Dynamis, or to a less populated world in which there is more availability.

It really is time to stop this nonsense of wanting to punish the ones that got a house because you dont have one.

They could and probably should just leave the existing wards for people that want to live in a ward, and add fully instanced housing as an additional option.

Having to change servers just to be able to get a home also has a lot of draw backs for people, mainly in that it makes it more difficult to play with friends. Yes there's server and data center travel now, but those still have limitations like not being able to use your retainers and not being able to join an FC on another server.

[SassyAssassin]

Here is an example of 'soul'

Beautiful................

[Carin-Eri]

Beautiful................

It's certainly unique!

[Seraphor]

They could and probably should just leave the existing wards for people that want to live in a ward, and add fully instanced housing as an additional option.

Having to change servers just to be able to get a home also has a lot of draw backs for people, mainly in that it makes it more difficult to play with friends. Yes there's server and data center travel now, but those still have limitations like not being able to use your retainers and not being able to join an FC on another server.

It's not just housing though. The servers aren't evenly populated, and they need to be. As the player base expands, all they can do is add new servers, they can't make existing servers bigger.
What do you think is going to happen come 7.0 when nobody on Crystal can play the game? Stuck in a 6 hour log in queue while everyone else is making their way through the MSQ.
Evenly distributing players across worlds is something that needs to happen, and housing is as good a carrot as any. There's actually nearly enough houses for everyone who wants one, if they would just move off their congested worlds.

[Xylira]

It's not just housing though. The servers aren't evenly populated, and they need to be. As the player base expands, all they can do is add new servers, they can't make existing servers bigger.
What do you think is going to happen come 7.0 when nobody on Crystal can play the game? Stuck in a 6 hour log in queue while everyone else is making their way through the MSQ.
Evenly distributing players across worlds is something that needs to happen, and housing is as good a carrot as any. There's actually nearly enough houses for everyone who wants one, if they would just move off their congested worlds.

Housing is not nearly enough of a good enough incentive to spread out the playerbase, If it were it would have already alleviated the problem. People want to be able to play with their friends without inconveniences and restrictions, and transferring servers goes directly against that unless entire friend groups choose to do so. Do you think anyone that does already have a house is going to want to lose their current home if they transfer servers along with their friends that don't? I highly doubt they would, resulting in distancing friends and splitting up communities. Unless SE can break down all of the barriers of server/DC travel limitations, or manage some kind of 'mega server' approach that many other MMOs have pulled off, there will always be a tendency for friend groups and communities to want to stick together, which inevitably leads to some servers ending up much more populated than others.

As for server overpopulation during expansion releases, yeah it sucks, but it calms down after 2-3 weeks. At least now with server/DC travel, players can choose to temporarily move to less populated servers to play, and then move back to their home DC/Server once things start to calm down. Which isn't ideal, but it's more tolerable than a full server transfer.

[Jojoya]

It's not just housing though. The servers aren't evenly populated, and they need to be. As the player base expands, all they can do is add new servers, they can't make existing servers bigger.
What do you think is going to happen come 7.0 when nobody on Crystal can play the game? Stuck in a 6 hour log in queue while everyone else is making their way through the MSQ.
Evenly distributing players across worlds is something that needs to happen, and housing is as good a carrot as any. There's actually nearly enough houses for everyone who wants one, if they would just move off their congested worlds.

It's up to players to make that choice for themselves, not for SE to force it on anyone. Housing is evidently not enough of a carrot for some, despite all their complaints.

Many players have this strange idea that everyone else is the problem and that the others should be the ones to move instead of accepting that they too are contributing to the problem. Problems get solved when those who see the problem do what's necessary to fix it. If they expect others to fix it for them, they're going to have a long wait.

Housing is not nearly enough of a good enough incentive to spread out the playerbase, If it were it would have already alleviated the problem.

Except a year ago, the game was in a very different state. There was no data center travel. There were only 5760 plots per world.

Now we have data center travel. Now there are 9000 plots per world (except on the new worlds), a 55% increase. But the data center travel is still new and many players are skeptical about how using it often will impact their game experience.

As one of those who had been skeptical and has moved characters to Dynamis, I can say it's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Then again, I was already used to using world visit a lot for hunts so I was experienced with a lot of traveling between worlds.

I think a lot of the hesitation would go away if SE could implement communication channels between logical data centers on the same physical data center. There's very little difference between world visit and data center travel other than losing access to FC chat and cross world linkshells. Wait times for data center travel have been generally short (usually less than 3 minutes and mostly under a minute) except patch week. If your social circles tend to rely on Discord instead of the game chat channel, there's really no difference between the two.

[Krakksie]

1 year and 2 months later a winning bid finally came through for an upgrade of small to medium. Do i still stand by what I said on my first post? 100% I do stand by it.
On multiple occasions during this lotto cycles I was considering dropping the game due to the frustration the bid system causes (the prior system was not any better either).

I still honestly want to see an instanced housing system to be implimented to allow all players to take part in the housing content. So no londer do players have to suffer from the endless supply of refund days for the housing plaque board.