Please remove random purchase timer!

[kellyvs]

The concept of having a random hidden timer after a house is demolished is asinine. All this does is encourage players to camp out at a plot and continuously spam the purchase button. Then with the wide range that the timer can vary from will also just encourage the use of bots to bypass this mechanism.

I have personally been trying to purchase a home for several days now across several different plots. I've personally spent absurd amounts of hours just sitting here spamming the purchase button only to lose out to someone else or have someone "relocate" their home to the spot that we were trying to buy. This also drives extreme animosity toward that individual as we were there going on 12+ hours.

One suggestion that I could give as a potential redesign is to treat buying a house like loot in a dungeon/raid. After a house is demolished have a fixed time limit that allows players to cast a lot on the house. Then after the timer expires, whomever has the highest roll wins the house. If the player fails to claim the house after a period of time it gets forfeited to the next highest winner; so on and so forth.

This will allow for the players to feel they have an equal opportunity to purchase a home and not be forced to sit in front of the plot for absurd amounts of time just in the hopes that they get "lucky" enough to click buy at just the right time. You have to remember that not everyone has an equal opportunity when it comes to internet connection quality and ping.

I completely understand that there needs to be a mechanism to prevent house flipping, but the current implementation is not the right solution. Please redesign this!

[Penthea]

Any system that requires players to be lucky to get a house is a bad system. And yes that includes the current one, and the ones from before. Lets not ask for a different type of bad system. We should instead demand something that gives equal opportunity to all with zero rng. Which is how housing should be.

[kellyvs]

I would also like to see an implementation that does not involved any form of RNG. I would hope that it would not just turn into an auction type system though. As all that would do is allow the super rich players to control the housing market. Would you have any ideas for a non-rng solution Penthea?

[Talacocheta]

Since I'm still new to FFXIV, perhaps I'm not understanding why it's not possible for a person to just walk up and buy a house if they see an empty plot. If it were that way, would it not mean that even if gold were exchanged for the plot, the seller would have no control over someone just walking up and purchasing the plot if it's available - so it wouldn't be something that any buyer would do? Thus, there wouldn't be flipping because there won't be people willing to risk giving their gil to someone when they wouldn't have a guarantee of getting the plot. Perhaps I'm just naive.

Barring just being able to purchase a plot outright, I do support the lottery system, but only if it collects a certain number of people's entries and is within a certain time frame if the limit isn't reached. As an example, if a plot were to come open, it would accept the first _X_ people's entries who try to buy the house, or it would only stay available to accept entries for 12 hours - whichever comes first. That way, people who are actively trying for homes won't have to sit there for days praying for RNG to bless them, and those who get to it early will have a better chance at getting a try because the entry limit may not have been reached yet . (And they won't have to wait forever to find out if they won or not if they do get an entry.)

The number of entries to buy each housing plot could be determined as a percentage of the world population so that there is an equal chance for everyone on every world.

Only characters with the correct amount of gil on them to purchase the home can enter. The winners and losers could be notified by mail - or if that's too difficult to implement - the placard would show the winner's name. A 12-hour timer for entering, and then another 12 for being notified, would allow for people to keep trying for a home if they didn't win without having to wait for too long. (I'd say that a 24-hour window each should be the longest that should be considered because then it would be 2 days total.)

The winner would have 12 or 24 hours from the time of winning to complete the transaction. If they don't complete it in time, then the plot would be available again for another round. Just my suggestion.

[Risvertasashi]

But without this system, people buy plots and resell at a huge mark up.

[Sairys]

Since I'm still new to FFXIV, perhaps I'm not understanding why it's not possible for a person to just walk up and buy a house if they see an empty plot. If it were that way, would it not mean that even if gold were exchanged for the plot, the seller would have no control over someone just walking up and purchasing the plot if it's available - so it wouldn't be something that any buyer would do? Thus, there wouldn't be flipping because there won't be people willing to risk giving their gil to someone when they wouldn't have a guarantee of getting the plot. Perhaps I'm just naive.

This is how house selling used to work and made flipping really easy. At the end of the day, if you're selling a house you can just not start the process if you can see any player nearby other than the buyer.

Barring just being able to purchase a plot outright, I do support the lottery system, but only if it collects a certain number of people's entries and is within a certain time frame if the limit isn't reached. As an example, if a plot were to come open, it would accept the first _X_ people's entries who try to buy the house, or it would only stay available to accept entries for 12 hours - whichever comes first. That way, people who are actively trying for homes won't have to sit there for days praying for RNG to bless them, and those who get to it early will have a better chance at getting a try because the entry limit may not have been reached yet . (And they won't have to wait forever to find out if they won or not if they do get an entry.)

There's no real reason to limit the number of entries to anything less than everyone or make the time for entries less than 24 hours.

All that really achieves is pushing people to constantly check the boards because it's still a form RNG to be waiting for decay timers to pop, then on top of that you're praying RNG works out in your favour at the end of the auction.

If you doubled down on this with a 12 hour time limit for the winner to complete the transaction then you're also introducing the joy of hoping the 12 hours to claim actually falls in a window you can actually play in.
Combined with a limited number of entries this would mean you'd probably need to avoid bidding on stuff until later in your normal play time. Otherwise you're either bidding on stuff you'd need to pay for when you can't be online, or you're running the risk of delays in you being online the next day causing you to miss the deadline.


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Personally I'd rather wait til the auto-demo timers are back up, then look at the impact of people who got grandfathered into the new ownership rules (i.e people with more than 1 personal and 1 fc house), and then have another look at the acquisition method.
If we get housing to the point that there's more plots than people interested in housing the timers shouldn't be an issue because we'd likely start seeing plots going for reduced prices.

[MaybeOliverB]

But without this system, people buy plots and resell at a huge mark up.

Ah yes, magically people stopped trading houses at their respective server value. Just because the game is titled Final Fantasy doesn't mean you can live in your very own fantasy.

This is how house selling used to work and made flipping really easy. At the end of the day, if you're selling a house you can just not start the process if you can see any player nearby other than the buyer.

Personally I'd rather wait til the auto-demo timers are back up, then look at the impact of people who got grandfathered into the new ownership rules (i.e people with more than 1 personal and 1 fc house), and then have another look at the acquisition method.
If we get housing to the point that there's more plots than people interested in housing the timers shouldn't be an issue because we'd likely start seeing plots going for reduced prices.

Used to? Nothing's changed. Literally nothing has changed for sellers.

The % of houses that are grandfathered to this day is so negligible that it could fall under the margin of error if we were to make an actual poll on how many players own more than 1 personal house. Speaking of error, the actual housing rules are 1 personal per server and up to 8 FC houses per server. Know what you're talking about before spreading false information.

[Sairys]

Used to? Nothing's changed. Literally nothing has changed for sellers.

The % of houses that are grandfathered to this day is so negligible that it could fall under the margin of error if we were to make an actual poll on how many players own more than 1 personal house. Speaking of error, the actual housing rules are 1 personal per server and up to 8 FC houses per server. Know what you're talking about before spreading false information.

The random timer changed things significantly. Buying outside relocation now has the risk of the timer being really long which means sellers can't ensure their buyer will even be able to be online when the house becomes available, compared to the previous system.

I'd be interested in where you get the data to make the assertion that it's negligible, of course that would be covered under looking at the impact of them... you know... what I suggested.

Actually, the rules are that you can own 1 personal per server and can only buy an FC house if you are not part of an FC that owns housing on any of your other characters.

Similarly, there is an expectation that FCs should have at least four members to buy a house. The hoops you need to jump through to personally own the full 8 FC houses on a single account make it rather clear it's outside the intention of the rules and is ultimately taking advantage of things such as the game not punishing FCs that fall below the minimums

[Risvertasashi]

Ah yes, magically people stopped trading houses at their respective server value. Just because the game is titled Final Fantasy doesn't mean you can live in your very own fantasy.

That pretty much did happen, yes. The one exception is selling to people who already own a home, and so can bypass the timer. But that's a much, much smaller market.

The one living in a fantasy seems to be you, my friend ~.^

[MaybeOliverB]

The random timer changed things significantly. Buying outside relocation now has the risk of the timer being really long which means sellers can't ensure their buyer will even be able to be online when the house becomes available, compared to the previous system.

Nothing stops players from trading FC houses. It's been that way since 2.2. And since 4.2, nothing stops players with personal houses to sell their house through relocation. Literally nothing has changed for sellers.

I'd be interested in where you get the data to make the assertion that it's negligible, of course that would be covered under looking at the impact of them... you know... what I suggested.

If you think you can challenge these generous numbers, go ahead. You still won't be able to make it look like grandfathered personal houses are remotely common.

Love how you miss the point every single time. Why do you care about grandfathered houses when you don't even need to be grandfathered in order to own more than 1 house? You've been barking at the wrong tree this entire thread. Now you're just all over the place trying to tell me that the actual amount of grandfathered houses doesn't go down.

I know housing way better than you do, just look a few posts up. I can tell you that I own more non grandfathered houses in the Mist than the amount of grandfathered houses left in that specific housing area on my server at this point. The % of players with more than 1 personal houses before 4.2 was already low and let's argue that half of those were intended for resell. Well guess what, these plots have been sold since then. Now you're left with the other half of an already small % of houses that are grandfathered. It's been nearly a year since 4.2. Players have move to different servers, stopped playing, got rid of their extra home because of X reason. Chop that number in half and you end up with a handful of people left with more than 1 personal houses.

There was 2 880 plots per server before 4.2. Let's say a very generous 10% of the houses were owned by players that already had a personal house. So 288 houses. Patch 4.2 increased the amount of plots by 50% and now sits at 4 320. Remove half of the 288 grandfathered plots that were only kept for resell purposes. 144. Remove the other half that have let go of their plots for various other reasons, 72. Barely a full ward... out of the 72 wards available. You're getting pretty close to 1% of houses being owned by grandfathered players.

More houses are auto-demolished every month on Gilgamesh compared to the total amount of grandfathered personal houses. But hey, I don't see you complain about all those people who do absolutely nothing with their house for 45 days. Do you think it's okay to have more than an entire ward in limbo all year long on a populated server?

Actually, the rules are that you can own 1 personal per server and can only buy an FC house if you are not part of an FC that owns housing on any of your other characters.

Similarly, there is an expectation that FCs should have at least four members to buy a house. The hoops you need to jump through to personally own the full 8 FC houses on a single account make it rather clear it's outside the intention of the rules and is ultimately taking advantage of things such as the game not punishing FCs that fall below the minimums

You are clueless. Here are the current requirements for a free company




What you are all overlooking is the temporary changes to purchasing land. Some are still ongoing, some are not. How do I know? I wasn't able to purchase more FC houses on the same account when the new wards were only available to FCs or personal houses reolcation.

Timing wise, when 4.2 went live there was a 2 week window where only FCs could buy new houses(though people with personal houses could still transfer plots). After 2 weeks they opened up new purchases to players again. During those 2 weeks the restrictions in place prevented someone from picking up an extra FC house, after the 2 weeks passed anyone could purchase normally again. On the busier servers those 2 weeks saw a ton of FCs finally get their housing and most(or all) of the plots getting bought up before individuals could make purchases again. On the medium and smaller servers some of those plots have yet to be purchased 11 months later.

It's true that the limitation on FC houses per account was quietly lifted (probably when personal housing could be bought again), and I actually agree that this is a good thing. SE needs to make up their mind about how to deal with alts, and the housing situation has kind of forced their hand but they're still waffling over it, probably because it goes against their original stance.

It was listed as a temporary change. They never said when it was lifted, but you can now buy FC houses on an account where other characters are in an FC that already owns a house.