Quote Originally Posted by Strife_Elvedor View Post
Why can we have instanced Islands yet not instanced housing after 10 years of development?
We have instanced housing in the form or Apartments and private/FC rooms.
Is it just so the game ensures players keep a sub to keep their house rather than to play patch content?
Separate houses on wards are limited because each ward is a separate area server. Separate area servers have to be setup manually and resources allocated. If you didn't have neighbors it wouldn't feel the same. Other MMORPGs will often isolate the house so you don't have neighbors and it's not the same.

Also, SE use physical servers, so actual drive space has to be manually added. It's not dynamically scaling like a Cloud server does. There are MMORPGs that just go ahead and use the cloud, but it's slower in certain aspects.

So since housing is limited for these reasons, they want players that actually play to have priority on houses, rather than 95% of players with a house being unsubscribed and this is reasonable.
For a game that encourages taking a break it seems pretty detrimental to have scarce housing that penalises players from taking a break.
I doubt most people even have their own house so that statement is true for most people.
The longer this patch cycle has gone on the less excited I've become towards future content and I'm on the verge of leaving altogether.
I hope a hard limit is put on the patch cycles rather than them continually growing. We've gone from a 5 month expansion gap after the .5 patch to 8 months or more for the last two expansions.