Quote Originally Posted by Brightamethyst View Post
It's still insane to me that the game only holds your stuff for a very short amount of time. What on earth is going on server side that they can only hold the money and items from a demolished house for 35 days? Reclaiming your stuff shouldn't have a timer at all.
I assume it has something to do with the structure of how the data is stored. Server storage has to be allocated and managed, and that costs money. So to try to cut costs, most platforms will try to reduce that overhead as much as possible by allocating close to what they think they'll need, and not more. If every player who has ever had their house demolished had that stuff stored without limit, that has the potential to add up to a lot more data than the FF14 team had organized their system to support.

In theory they could change this, but from what we know the housing system in FF14 is a bit of a hack job; it reportedly takes the team a lot of time and effort to create new housing wards, when if the system were designed "better" it would likely be as simple as provisioning a server and flipping a switch. I'm not an expert on all things servers, but I suspect that the devs made some decisions about their architecture early on that have made changes very difficult to make without upending the entire system.