The automatic housing demolition timer for Worlds in the European Data Center, which was halted temporarily in November 2024, will resume with the release of Patch 7.3 scheduled for early August 2025.
Login and go to your houses if you’re wanting to keep them to avoid demolition.
The ironic part of this is if they spent the money to upgrade the infrastructure so anyone who wanted a house (of any size) could have one, and therefore didn’t need the auto demolition any more, more people would pause their subscriptions when they’re not actively doing anything, which drops SE’s revenue.
So I get why fixing housing isn’t a big priority, it would impact their bottom line twice.
On the other hand, still sucks. Especially with many countries struggling with cost of living and some dealing with active war zones (to be fair, some of these pauses on auto demolition are for that reason), it just feels like it’s rubbing salt into the wound, especially when you might not be able to replace it in the future depending on your server.
They could take some other cost-cutting steps with a housing system without auto-demolish if the plots were made abundant. Like if someone’s subscription lapsed for some time, then it’s entirely possible to move that data to cheap but slow storage. Then people still have their old stuff as an incentive to get back in.
It’s mainly to do with the neighbourhood concept they use. They keep all the housing loaded up because they’re legitimate zones you can enter, log in or out from, teleport into, etc. Because a lot of those things exist regardless of the housing owner playing or not it’s not really feasible to archive it because other players also see it and access it.
I did some quick math (read: asked ChatGPT) and there are 9000 plots per world and 90 worlds. Thats 810k plots. Assuming $13/month for entry is the standard and all plots are taken by individuals (they aren’t) that’s $10,530,00/month in just homeowners. I know these numbers are largely useless but it’s gotta be close-ish. And that’s nuts.
There’s some variance there (for example on Materia they haven’t opened wards 25-30 yet), not all plots are sold, and FC housing isn’t quite as stringent since as long as at least one person in the FC enters the house they keep it, but still crazy numbers regardless. You can see why they’re disincentivised to fix it.
Yeah, numbers are likely way off but I’m sure it’s the same reason they’re not ever going to crack down on mods. At any given time I’m seeing 10k+ accounts online in Mare and I don’t play during peak times. That’d be a huge hit if they banned ONLY 10-20k accounts.