(10-20-2015, 01:35 PM)Calliope Cloverbloom Wrote:(10-20-2015, 12:46 PM)Kage Wrote: I've read that LotRO reached similar issues according to this post.
There is housing in other worlds so the issue is that the far more populated wards reach full much faster. Their system applies to the worlds at large and not per world so there's plenty of housing on the other worlds but the more active ones got full. They implemented essentially what SE is doing now.
It did... sort of. People didn't understand the system, and so they would complain because they couldn't get the exact specific land spot that they wanted (certain spots in a ward are always more popular than others due to the view or whatever, I'm sure that's the case in FFXIV too). What they didn't realize was that if they and a friend paid a little gold to buy up the last couple spots for houses of that size, it would trigger the server to generate new wards due to crossing that "availability threshold", which it wasn't currently wasn't due to those couple of "not in the popular spot" houses of the given size being available.
Yep, this. What would typically happen was all the small houses in a ward would get snapped up, then the big ones would linger a while and it would be hard to get small houses where you wanted. It wasn't a terribly big deal - my first house in LOTRO, I really wanted one specific spot. I ended up waiting about 4 days until I could get it. My second house there was part of an attempt by my guild to fill up a neighborhood with only guild members, so with that one I ended up getting a leftover deluxe house in a spot I didn't love, but that was sort of an artificial restriction.
In general, housing in LOTRO is far more functional than in FF. If you simply want a house, and you have the money, you can get it without a problem, even on the more populated servers (my first character was on Landroval, my second on Laurelin, both of which are highly populated servers), because it spawns new wards on demand.
I've argued (both here and on the SE forums) that a hacky variant of that could be implemented by SE fairly easily: The take the existing number of wards and pool them. Each server starts with 1-2 wards, and then they draw new wards from the pool as those wards fill up, LOTRO-style. The hardware costs don't change, as it's still the same number of instances. You simply have those wards allocated unevenly between the servers. Low population servers might be fine with their initial 1-2 wards, while servers like Balmung might have 12-48 wards. It doesn't solve the problem, but it at least mitigates it.
