Quote Originally Posted by gifthorse View Post
I think Instanced housing is a pointless feature. Nobody cares what's happening in your own personal instance. So you end up just playing alone. If I wanted to play alone I would play a single player game. Even if it extends to guildmates, then you have - what? - five people who will participate in the instanced zone regularly.

It ends up being nothing more than singleplayer fare (for all intents and purposes). And I don't think I have to elaborate much more than to say it's pointless to add in-depth single-player game mechanics in an [SIZE="6"]MMO[/SIZE].

And if SE wanted to implement housing, they could do so without it compromising on the artistic integrity of the zones. Copy-paste is a very powerful tool, and with further expansions comes more space. It's not an impossible feature to implement anyway. Ultima Online, ArcheAge, Mortal Online, Darkfall are all examples of games with persistent housing. And yes, Ultima Online had persistent housing. (Instanced housing was probably implemented to combat urban sprawl on your shard, which admittedly was a problem in Ultima Online).
I don't know what LS you belong to, but I'm in a newly formed LS with at least 35 active players. By implementing an instanced guild or LS headquarters you can share the environment with the people you are closest with you guild mates, to meet talk and hang out. There are plenty of ways of making this work and just because you cant "go big" because it is not in the scope of the game does not mean more realistic/creative content shouldn't be added.