Something I've noticed about ESO is that ZOS seems to have this decentralized philosophy regarding much of the community aspects of the game. Community wise, it's like the game is made up of islands, and from a certain read of the game, it seems rather deliberate. For example, there is no public auction house. Even with tools like Tamriel Trade Center, this is extrinsically collected data from individual players that opt into the add-on. Even with tools like this, the game is still pretty shy about providing hard data about numbers on the server. (Something else of note, the guild finder doesn't even give you a full list of the guilds on the server, it just generates a hundred guilds for you to look at based on the category.) Theoretically, you can form a sort of census to come up with pretty educated conclusions on population, but you can't actually know from the outside. You could come up with pretty astute inferences if you spend a lot of time looking into it, but the fact is that this information is completely arcane to the average user. I have this feeling that this is not just a coincidence, and if I were to offer a guess on the why? The only conclusion I'm drawing is that it has something to do with player psychology. At this point, I'm in the exploratory on the reasoning, but what I'm seeing is that ZOS relies on obscurity, and I have to wonder if it's about discouragement found in hard numbers. If the game's health kept obscure, does it actually help retain a lot of players? Is the intention for the game to feel like it's always booming?

This leads me into the Public Listing question. Why aren't there - at least in a limited capacity - publically listed player properties? To me, this just seems like such a good idea on the face of it. They could put out things like properties zoned like restaurants or cafes, prisons, etc. and players/guilds could set them up as walk-in hubs for any player to walk into. With the size and activity of the RP community of this game, this would be straight up coconuts to not jump in on. I cannot begin to imagine the potential of using housing in this way. I really wonder why they haven't, and from my experience following this game for years, ZOS seems to have a lot of smart people that work on the game, so it really gets me thinking. If my observation on the decentralized philosophy of the game is at least somewhat accurate, I wonder if after all this time player housing has been a thing why they have hesitated implementing this feature in the game. Now, public listings will inevitably have most listings showing mostly empty properties at any given time, this is true for games like SWTOR that does have public listings. I wonder if this lack of public listing has to do with the same theory of player psychology and discouragement from hard numbers. Could ZOS be facing a complex problem with implementing public listings due to this reason?

I gotta say, I really don't know. But I'd love to hear some thoughts on this. Maybe I'm reading way too much into it.