SE... What stupid slight of hand are you doing with the Housing purchasing?

Ok.. so... Last night, while randomly checking the housing to see if there might be a small house i could get, i was supersized to find that there was one for sale in Kugane. So i runn over hoping to possibly be the first one to see it and yay! no one standing around the house placard.

I go to buy it.. and the system refuses, staying i cant buy it yet. But... its SHOWING as being able to be purchased... even has the "time till devaluation" timer going (which was showing 13 hours at the time.) I spend the next 20 minuts trying to buy it, only to constantly, over and over, be told its not able to be purchased, while the placard itself is TELLING ME, its for sale. Its even showing on the MAP and the Ward list that it can be purchased.

Figuring for some reason i had to wait for that 13 hour timer that WAS being shown.. i went to bed and got on about a hour befor that timer was set to expire. Only to suddenly see someone else had gotten it.

Square... WTF kind of stupid game are you playing?

I know there is some hidden-timer between when a house gets demo'd and when it can be purchased again, but why the hell do you have that hidden timer going WHILE Showing the house for sale at the same damn time? All your doing is causing confusion for people.

If you want to put a random timer on a house, then fine... put the random timer on it but DON'T LIST THE DAMN THING AS PURCHASABLE while that timer is ticking. :T

If your so insistent on having some hidden timer going, have the house go into a state of "for sale soon" and leave it at that.. DONT sit there and leave it in a state that makes people THINK they can get it when there's some arbitrary counter they CAN NOT SEE behind the one they CAN SEE, keeping them from doing it.



And sorry for the rant.. but that really ticked me off. It's sloppy, and poor programming/design to show 1 thing, while instead doing something completely different. It serves no purpose other than to anger and frustrate people. It's sending a message that you WANT to play tricks on your player-base when you do crap like that :T

If you look through the forums you will see that this was discussed in several threads already. Yes, it bothers a lot of people right now. But maybe stick to one of the threads that already discussing this with Feedback on how to change it. Always offer a solution for a problem. It will get more attention than a "I don't like it the way it is right now."

The devaluation timer has nothing to do with when a plot can be purchased by someone who doesn't already own a house. It just states when the purchase price will be lowered if it's not purchased by that time.

It shows available because a current house owner can relocate to that plot if they choose, which then in turn opens up another plot elsewhere.

The hidden timer exists to prevent players from selling plots to other players at inflated priced. Sadly it doesn't work because SE doesn't enforce the published limit on the number of FC houses a player can own so the flippers and multi-house owners have turned to using FCs to get additional houses for their purposes.

They are aware it's a problem. They've told us they're going to be working to address housing issues after launch, though I doubt we'll see any thing helpful occur until 5.1 at the earliest.