Gotta love loving a house after 13 hours to blatant third party software

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Originally Posted by MilkieTea

If the reseller is planning to sell the house, they can demolish, and then let the buyer know exactly when the plot will be for sale. It carries only the same risk as reselling used to - someone could possibly come up and purchase it in the window it’s become available - which is not much risk if you plan things accordingly.

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It's no risk to the reseller. They were already paid to relinquish the plot.

The risk is all on the "buyer's" end since they have to compete against all the other players who want the plot. Available plots don't go unnoticed for hours. The housing discords update their lists hourly. The plots only appear to be ignored because few players are interested in camping during the initial hours when the plot is extremely unlikely to have the timer expire.

What displaying the timer would do is make it easier for the reseller to attempt to purchase multiple houses on multiple worlds. They can set up a list of when houses on multiple worlds will be ready for purchase then switch between characters a few minutes before the appropriate time to try their luck against the other players present. One plot gets purchased (regardless of who gets it) and they're able to switch to the next world on their list. Right now they're hobbled by uncertainty on when the right time might be, making it harder to juggle attempts to purchase multiple houses especially across multiple worlds.

It's hard to say whether displaying the timer would result in resellers getting more houses. They'll be able to attempt to purchase a lot more houses but they'll also be competing against a much high number of players at each house.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

It's no risk to the reseller. They were already paid to relinquish the plot.

The risk is all on the "buyer's" end since they have to compete against all the other players who want the plot. Available plots don't go unnoticed for hours. The housing discords update their lists hourly. The plots only appear to be ignored because few players are interested in camping during the initial hours when the plot is extremely unlikely to have the timer expire.

What displaying the timer would do is make it easier for the reseller to attempt to purchase multiple houses on multiple worlds. They can set up a list of when houses on multiple worlds will be ready for purchase then switch between characters a few minutes before the appropriate time to try their luck against the other players present. One plot gets purchased (regardless of who gets it) and they're able to switch to the next world on their list. Right now they're hobbled by uncertainty on when the right time might be, making it harder to juggle attempts to purchase multiple houses especially across multiple worlds.

It's hard to say whether displaying the timer would result in resellers getting more houses. They'll be able to attempt to purchase a lot more houses but they'll also be competing against a much high number of players at each house.

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That's still behavior that really shouldn't be encouraged... the person that buys the house should only be the person that's going to use the house... not a house flipper.

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Originally Posted by Almagnus1

That's still behavior that really shouldn't be encouraged... the person that buys the house should only be the person that's going to use the house... not a house flipper.

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I understand where you're coming from with this but I think it's also wrong to think that everyone selling a house is a flipper. The current housing design has one major flaw when you demo: you don't get your money back. You have to wait for 45 days. So, if you're moving to another DC because your friend group is migrating, you're trapped on the old one just to get your money back from the system. It used to be that if you were moving, you could easily put up a PF or poke a friend, recoup your money from selling the house at placard price (which is still the case with relos on most servers) and then quit the game, move to a new server, whatever.

This isn't to say that there aren't people who snipe housing for resale purposes, but the people who do so are selling FCs with a house for profit, not relos.

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Originally Posted by Almagnus1

That's still behavior that really shouldn't be encouraged... the person that buys the house should only be the person that's going to use the house... not a house flipper.

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I agree but the number of flippers out there is smaller than some want to assume. Is it genuinely a good idea to penalize the greater player base over the misdeeds of a few?

It's not the purchase system that encourages flippers. It's the ward system itself that encourages flippers. As long as anything considered desirable is only available in a limited quantity, flippers will appear to control that resource for their personal profit.

SE could switch to using the same system that LotRO uses for expanding its Neighborhoods and STILL flippers would exist because the number of mediums and larges are relatively small, because a small facing a wall in Goblet is not a beachfront in Mist or Shirogane.

Without an instanced system that allows players to purchase exactly what they want without impacting the ability of others to purchase the same thing, we will never be rid of flippers.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

It's no risk to the reseller. They were already paid to relinquish the plot.

The risk is all on the "buyer's" end since they have to compete against all the other players who want the plot. Available plots don't go unnoticed for hours. The housing discords update their lists hourly. The plots only appear to be ignored because few players are interested in camping during the initial hours when the plot is extremely unlikely to have the timer expire.

What displaying the timer would do is make it easier for the reseller to attempt to purchase multiple houses on multiple worlds. They can set up a list of when houses on multiple worlds will be ready for purchase then switch between characters a few minutes before the appropriate time to try their luck against the other players present. One plot gets purchased (regardless of who gets it) and they're able to switch to the next world on their list. Right now they're hobbled by uncertainty on when the right time might be, making it harder to juggle attempts to purchase multiple houses especially across multiple worlds.

It's hard to say whether displaying the timer would result in resellers getting more houses. They'll be able to attempt to purchase a lot more houses but they'll also be competing against a much high number of players at each house.

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Lordy I wish they would just instance housing. The idea that a 3rd party mod like DC is used to help some get houses is absurd. What a sad sad piece of work SE housing is lol.

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Originally Posted by Arielen

I understand where you're coming from with this but I think it's also wrong to think that everyone selling a house is a flipper. The current housing design has one major flaw when you demo: you don't get your money back. You have to wait for 45 days. So, if you're moving to another DC because your friend group is migrating, you're trapped on the old one just to get your money back from the system. It used to be that if you were moving, you could easily put up a PF or poke a friend, recoup your money from selling the house at placard price (which is still the case with relos on most servers) and then quit the game, move to a new server, whatever.

This isn't to say that there aren't people who snipe housing for resale purposes, but the people who do so are selling FCs with a house for profit, not relos.

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tbh, I see the entire thing as "this is why we can't have anything nice". I'm not disagreeing that there are legitimate reasons someone would want to sell a house (and the real estate market exists IRL for many of those reasons). However; when it's so lucrative to flip houses to the point that the house flippers can inflate the price to more than double of the sticker price (which it before the random timer was introduced IIRC), the system is broken and house flipping needs to be discouraged.

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Originally Posted by Besame

Lordy I wish they would just instance housing. The idea that a 3rd party mod like DC is used to help some get houses is absurd. What a sad sad piece of work SE housing is lol.

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Same and if you want a community your company members can be your neighbors.

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Originally Posted by Verendal

13 hours. The person who won was using an autoclicker. VERY obvious because the character kept targeting things in an easily discernable pattern. You could tell where the mouse was clicking by standing in certain spots, could even work out where their camera was based on it. So far? NOTHING has been done by a GM.

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@Verendal, I feel you on this. I think the best way to keep the bots out is to up the difficulty on the activity. If it's easy enough for a bot to do it, then it's too easy. Right now people aren't training their own ML models to completely mimic their behavior (yet). Botters copy-pasta and perform basic edits on some script they find online and press execute.

Some people in this thread mentioned captchas, and while this is a little more prescriptive than I can contemplate at the moment, I at least agree in principle.

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Originally Posted by sharlim

@Verendal, I feel you on this. I think the best way to keep the bots out is to up the difficulty on the activity. If it's easy enough for a bot to do it, then it's too easy. Right now people aren't training their own ML models to completely mimic their behavior (yet). Botters copy-pasta and perform basic edits on some script they find online and press execute.

Some people in this thread mentioned captchas, and while this is a little more prescriptive than I can contemplate at the moment, I at least agree in principle.

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The problem with throwing more hurdles in front of people is your going to always have someone that figures out how to shortcut it, while the hurdles only frustrate the legitimate users.

Something that may work is once the house goes on sale it does a check at the top of every hour (or however long the window is) where it sees if someone bought a raffle ticket, then holds a raffle for all entries. If no one bought a ticket, the house stays open.

That way you create a limited time window so someone that wants the house is going to be checking it... but once the window opens they just need to pay full price for their house ticket, and hope they get it. By making it a limited time system (where you only have an hour to buy the ticket) it will help cut down on some of shenanigans with the housing mafia... but also stop with the insanity of people needing to be the first clicker for the house. A shorter time window would probably be better as that will help cut down on people bringing in the alt accounts for it.

Either way... the current system, while better overall than the older system, is still not a very good system and needs more adjustments.

What people don't understand here is that having an auto clicker doesn't guarantee a win. At all.

It's still random.

You can still win, if you click at that random second. I've seen over 20 people surrounding a house once. So much so that people culled out from the screen. Were all those people botting? No. Was the winner a botter? Maybe. But those other 20 people still lost.

You can't use your computer while it's running either. So the only difference is the physical effort.