Except that these gil outfits have billions of gil and many disposable characters -- they would overrun such a lottery system almost instantaneously.
yeah, you're right.
And if we add the rule : "1 registration at any given time per account?" This should resolve some problem, no? Not the multiple account kind of problem, sure.
But those will never be solved as they are considerate separate "person" even if one single person own them.
Of course it would be tracked on the server side. Why would that be even remotely a problem? There's plenty of other state tracked server side already, including various kinds of timers. The leve allowance timer is actually pretty close to what's needed here; just add another timer like that but change the parameters so it charges by 1 attempt every 8 hours, up to 3 stored attempts max.
I know bashing SE is a popular pastime on the forums, but really, the developers can't possibly be that inept.
Not a matter of them being inept. There's just so much weird stuff we see in the game due to code limitations that it can be hard to tell what is or isn't possible.
If the 3 chances were on a per character basis, then I wouldn't have doubts about their ability to do it. That's the Timers menu in a nutshell.
It's when things are intended to apply account wide that I run into doubts. The game seems to struggle with how to handle issues for characters on the same account. My alts can't have a house because this character on the same account owns one. My alts can't also be tenants of the house because they're on the same account.
Other players are able to have multiple shell FCs own houses on the same world while their character is the only FC member and the game evidently can't figure that.
Some things don't make sense and it's hard to tell where design decisions leave off and code limitations begin.
One thing to keep in mind - let's say the Firmament is Ishgard housing; giving us five residential districts to consider.
Each district contains 60 houses, times what are we at now, 24 wards? So that's 5 x 60 x 24 = 7200 houses.
So basically, you'd need the server to now track which plots a player has clicked on, and how many times they have clicked it, for every single character in the game.
You'd need the data for every single plot even if only a few plots are currently open.
Granted, the game might only have to LOAD the data for the housing district the player is in, but the data for all five has to be physically STORED somewhere.
That's not a small amount of data to be added to the player databases.
Kudos for coming up with what might be the worst proposed solution yet, I guess.
The timer is not a problem, if you fail to try a third time with the next server soft reset, you forfeit that chance, it is the best system of all, and people don't sit and click all day long... it also eliminates botting/macroing and auto clickers.
It flushes out the corruption almost all in one... likewise getting rid of people being toxic to each other at the spot of the house.
Just put a Wait list in each ward that people can sign up on. No rng, no clicking etc. You go to the ward you want put yourself on the list, game goes down the list offering open plots to those at the top of the list. End of the day if you are on the list you assured a plot some time in the future. Only caveat being you would have 24-48 hrs once your turn is up too go buy a open plot.
So many other games do housing better. Not sure why this is a struggle for SE considering this is one of the most lucrative MMORPGs on the market. I feel like the rules should be; 1 house per account, all alts share the same house, I love the put your name on a list and wait system with a 48 hour notice timer till forfeit, timer for relinquished or demolished houses till you can buy. The only other thing I could think of is generating a new ward after reaching capacity. I feel SE has the resources to do so.