WoW's player housing will have no FOMO and private housing wards

[Jeeqbit]

let's say 500,000 neighborhoods/wards of 50 plots in open world since it's infinite. Please walk me through the hardware requirements they'd need and the infinitely growing map and or UI to search through 500,000 wards?

Firstly, each ward is a "server program". To understand what a server program is... type in your windows search bar "cmd" and open the Command Prompt. That's what a server looks like.

Secondly, seeing as I have run game servers before, I can confidently say there isn't usually much overhead... to such a point, you can run multiple of them. In fact, SE does run multiple of them - they run 12 wards on a single physical machine, alongside several other zones and MSQ instances. We know this from their hardware failure reports where they reveal which zones were on that physical machine.

But you know what? Modern hardware is so good in 2025 that they could probably run a lot more server programs than they currently are on the same machine. Unless the server is hogging resources it shouldn't be (wouldn't surprise me, because it's SE), they could probably run hundreds of wards on one machine.

But anyway, SE has all these machines (yes, this is a picture of SE's machines and yes, each one of those cabinets contains hundreds of motherboards):


Based on the recent Ramuh hardware report, they had 36 server programs running on one machine. So to run 500,000 wards, they'd need 2 server programs each (ward server, and private room server), making for a total of 1,000,000 server programs. Thus, they'd need 27,777 physical machines. However:

• The "30,000,000 adventurers" wouldn't all get a house. Many of them are bots or don't get beyond the first quests or are alts.
• Nobody is saying to have unlimited scaling wards. They are saying to have unlimited scaling instances.
• Instances are "freed" when not in use, allowing someone else to use them. This makes it scalable without needing to run 27,777 physical machines. Instead, you'd only need, say, 111 machine to account for up to 2 million active players spreading their activity through the week, leaving only 10% of them using their house at a time. And we don't even seem to have 2 million right now (more like half that) so we'd get away with 55 house instance machines.

Again this is assuming 36 server programs is even their limit and did I forgot to mention that the server programs themselves could just be made to handle even more instances per program, taking advantage of modern hardware and multi-threading.

[Feronar]

WoW's new player housing looks really cool so far, whether it actually ends up being good (Which I hope it does) remains to be seen. If it turns out well, it could provide some inspiration (And motivation!) for SE to fix FFXIV's housing system.

[VoidsentStatus]

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- RMT bots -> youtube search "The WoW Botting Situation is Actually Insane..." and "Exposing the Botting Mafia in World of Warcraft" by MetaGoblin. FF14 had like 10k RMT related bans per week back in dec 2023 while I'm seeing 270k for the same month for WoW from a community manager post. Having 6x the ban count for the same month is telling.

- It's the same GM limitations and expectations as other games when you watch interviews from ex-staff. Graded on ticket volume handled by hour and heavily discouraged or fired for handling situations you personally want to but aren't efficient toward ticket volume such as one guy who got fired trying to track down accounts that had been stolen and the transfer of funds path to shut down the operation instead of doing harassment tickets etc. They aren't allowed to show up in-game randomly anymore except for under specific guidelines which is why open world bots that are obvious plague both games. Blizzard's ToS is poorly written and nowhere near as detailed as ff14's. And I'll take the in-game restraining orders over extra item restores.

- DPS gaps aren't as close as ff14, and healers being mandatory is never a thing for casual content in any mmo, it's always a discussion of how hard into higher content you have to go before it's actually mandatory. There's always classes with shields and heals that are tank or dps that don't need healers at all until a certain threshold.

- That's speaking about how it makes it better, not speaking about every addon that ruins the game and created development challenges as a problem because of it. I don't care about the shaders and body m*ds and timers and ui qol ff14 3rd party software has either, it's the automated rotations, automated callouts, aoe showage, teleport hacking, PoV shifting, party finder requirements, privacy violating, sometimes illegal content producing, things that I'm talking about. You don't have a healthy relationship with 3rd party software if it's something new players complain about that isolated your playerbase, harmed users, and interrupted/changed the developer content design direction that's frustrating to them.

- check date of the video and comments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHgKhpcnzr0

Also don't know how you define unique ranked pvp rewards because there are titles, adventure plate packs, and weapon glam rewards for high ranked pvp. I'm assuming you mean glams like some people wanted to come back, or if you mean changing rewards with each season.

[Velthice]

I'm sure SE will respond to this in a timely manner

...and somehow that response will include releasing another piece of content aimed at raiders

[Feronar]

Blizzard has far better engineers than SE.

Blizzard's engineers and SE's engineers are good in different ways. Blizzard's Engineers seem to be better at trying new things and fixing problems, often in creative ways, but WoW is often messy and unstable following a major content patch release. Square-Enix's engineers seem more rigid and stuck in their old ways, not able to innovate as much as Blizzard, but FFXIV seems more stable, that is, it doesn't glitch out or act weird or have as many disconnects as WoW after a content patch.

The Japanese engineering mentality versus the Western engineering mentality also seems to extend to cars. Established Japanese brands like Toyota, Honda, and Subaru aren't exactly known for their cutting-edge innovation, but they are affordable and some of the safest and most reliable cars in the world, whereas Western brands like Tesla or Mercedes-Benz are often full of fancy gizmos, but are expensive and notoriously prone to breakage, requiring frequent, costly repairs. (Full disclosure: My car is a Subaru.)

[VoidsentStatus]

Nobody is saying to have unlimited scaling wards. They are saying to have unlimited scaling instances.

I'm not discussing unlimited scaling instances until WoW says that they're allowing it for personal use. Every sentence I saw was referring to a group requirement that I'm assuming is going to be the equivalent of signing up as an existing FC or getting enough signatures on petition from your friend list or something similar before you get access to that private instance. People were discussing venues and other community events that might come up because of housing, and from a community event/venue owner PoV, they're not going to use private instances because of the mssive headache and likely limitations that would exist. Because you're not in the public open world, that requires funneling all guests through whatever invitation methodology is decided on such as adding by name into a UI or being a friend or something else. Being able to hop from location to location is also extremely annoying when you have permissions to get through. Not to mention if there's a limitation to that invitation method that requires adding and deleting people throughout the night. That crowd is much more likely to use the open world housing option that exists. For the people actually looking to use the equivalent of Island Sanctuary wards, I'm viewing as either closed off immersive roleplay groups and selective FC's because it's only for members and likely their direct friend list for access, but not related parties. Not to mention that that FC can have, let's say 100 members, but only 50 plots that FC can spawn. 50 people still don't have houses, and that's assuming the 50 that do get plots use them for personal use and not FC functionality. The idea I'm pointing at being that even if an FC gets a private ward, there's a high chance people will double up if they're allowed to like on ff14. If they don't have instanced personal housing, I'm pretty sure there's a high chance of them being scuffed with demand because the instanced housing is functionally irrelevant toward taking away demand from public land.

[VeyaAkemi]

I will just say the same I said last time this was brought up: I don't play WoW, I never played WoW, I will never play WoW, this has nothing to do with tribalism, or even any of WoW... staff issues, but rather a very simple if silly one: I think WoW art style is horrid and I need to feel comfortable in my digital skin, but a very simple one: Competition in any market is good.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Housing is the only way SE can hold hostage subs. They're never going to give that up.

Tiny Indie Company. Please understand.

[Buttobi]

I am really looking forward to WoW housing as it seems like its going to be a better system than XIV or ESO. I never played WoW until DT dropped and boy oh boy has it been an amazing experience. The players, even the randos I get in dungeon finder, who have such a bad rep have been amazing, helpful and not even close to the monsters I expected fron all the stories you read online. SE really needs to step up after TWW and what it looks like is coming down the pipeline.

As someone who has been very loyal to SE, from FFXI through FFXIV, I never even imagined myself playing WoW at all, and now I am on the brink of cancelling my XIV sub and full timing it. Even my spouse said they wanted to take my temp and make sure I was ok when I was talking about it over dinner lol.

I had a very similair experience. Played Dragonflight near the end of Endwalker and had an immensely enjoyable time with both the game and its community. Maybe I got lucky but the community is not nearly as bad as people say. I look forward to this new housing system they are implementing.

So we're just gonna reduce map design, immersion, and QoL functionality down to just 'does it load'? lol
WoW hasn't made a breakthrough in:
- dealing with RMT bots in general
- having a GM team that actually works to customer satisfaction
- job balance design
- having a healthy relationship with 3rd party software
- healthy QoL in the workplace
- not having cashgrabs in the store
- handling wintrading in pvp

need I continue on the list of failures that are industry wide problems that Blizzard has failed on as well for decades.

I have no stake in either side of this argument, but I just want to mention that half the things you mention, ffxiv suffers from as well.

- GM's only tackle simple issues like communication abuse, as soon as something like cheating or wintrading is involved then the issue becomes too complicated for them and the perpertrators never get punished.
- The job balance is better but it came at a cost, job identity. Whether this is a good thing or not is up to personal interpretation.
- SE's relationship with third party software is more clear, but again the GM team does not do anything when addons are used for cheating because they only deal with communication abuse.

If you want proof for my GM claims, talk to anyone within the ffxiv pvp community. There have been numerous wintrading incidents where the players got mass reported, but their rewards did not get taken away nor did any of the perpetrators get banned. There is an unreal amount of receipts for these incidents.

[Oizen]

Island Sanctuary and Apartments prove that this is possible to exist in the game, the only reason they dont is either Laziness or they like it as a Sub enforcer.