Housing Lottery Suggestion

Here's an idea I thought of to try to make getting a housing plot less strenuous (because players shouldn't have to endure repetitive stress injuries related to hours of constant clicking on placards) and hopefully more equitable.

1. A plot becomes available.
2. A player with the available funds goes to the placard and clicks on it to purchase the plot. They must have the funds in their inventory to buy it and the money goes into escrow while they are entered into the lottery for that plot.
3. The player must remain in that housing ward for the duration of the plot timer. Leaving the housing ward removes players from the lottery (and returns their funds to them from escrow).
4. A lottery winner is randomly chosen.
5. The lottery winner gets a PROMINENT message on their screen that they have won the plot and they have a limited time (i.e. 60 seconds) to accept.
6. If the lottery winner does NOT accept, they are removed and a new lottery winner is chosen. This process continues until a winner accepts the plot.
7. All persons who did not win the plot are returned their money out of escrow.

Relocation is still entirely possible for all plots.

Perhaps there is also the possibility of giving the losers of the lottery a small, hidden buff which applies toward the next time they enter a plot lottery and it is cumulative. So with each loss, their chance of winning increases until they finally win and then the buff resets back to zero, putting them back on equal footing with everyone else once more.

Sounds fair to me.
I especially like the idea of a secret cumulative buff. That's a good way to cull the frustration of always losing.

So what you're saying is, instead of actively clicking the placard (And ultimately, having some personal affect to getting the house they want), you want to completely remove that, give it to an AI that could just as easily make sure you never get a house from a probability standpoint..

Not to mention, if "putting money down" was all that was needed, then congrats. You have made it so the Bots always win.

The bots don't get tired. The bots don't get bored. They don't lose connection suddenly due to an internet dip.
They would be there for the entire duration, meaning the % chance of getting the plot continues to increase while actual players (the people that'd use the plots!) lose out. Sure, now and again a player would beat the bot. But that would be astronomically few and far between.

I'm not saying the system isn't without merit. I mean I know a few people that would love to not hurt their wrists spamming the placard. But it has another pitfall that, personally, I don't know if I prefer it.

Oh, bully.

This thread.

AGAIN.

Sounds far better than the current system, which is why it will never be implemented.

Everyone wants to say it sounds better, but it realistically lowers your chances of getting a house. I understand that isn't the goal of the idea but it would only further frustrate people.

I'm not a fan of the idea. I've seen it being mentioned here and there but I'm not a fan at all.

I wish housing was available for everyone, but betting it on a lottery system dosen't sound like a solution to me.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

Everyone wants to say it sounds better, but it realistically lowers your chances of getting a house. I understand that isn't the goal of the idea but it would only further frustrate people.

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And the current system isn't super frustrating as is?

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Originally Posted by Zhalar

Here's an idea I thought of to try to make getting a housing plot less strenuous (because players shouldn't have to endure repetitive stress injuries related to hours of constant clicking on placards) and hopefully more equitable.

1. A plot becomes available.
2. A player with the available funds goes to the placard and clicks on it to purchase the plot. They must have the funds in their inventory to buy it and the money goes into escrow while they are entered into the lottery for that plot.
3. The player must remain in that housing ward for the duration of the plot timer. Leaving the housing ward removes players from the lottery (and returns their funds to them from escrow).
4. A lottery winner is randomly chosen.
5. The lottery winner gets a PROMINENT message on their screen that they have won the plot and they have a limited time (i.e. 60 seconds) to accept.
6. If the lottery winner does NOT accept, they are removed and a new lottery winner is chosen. This process continues until a winner accepts the plot.
7. All persons who did not win the plot are returned their money out of escrow.

Relocation is still entirely possible for all plots.

Perhaps there is also the possibility of giving the losers of the lottery a small, hidden buff which applies toward the next time they enter a plot lottery and it is cumulative. So with each loss, their chance of winning increases until they finally win and then the buff resets back to zero, putting them back on equal footing with everyone else once more.

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I personally don’t mind a lottery system (can’t really be worse that what we have, imo—and SE will never do instanced housing, so I’ve given up on that), but giving a player only 60 seconds to accept would only increase the already staggering amount of frustration that this housing system already creates. Consider people that may have to work or go to school that can’t always be at their PC or console waiting for an acceptance notification. Increasing that to at least a couple hours would be better. Wouldn’t completely mitigate scenarios where people are in school 8 hours a day or work 8 hours a day, but it’s much better than only being given a minute to accept a win.

Plus, think about if you’d gotten up to go to the bathroom and come back to see that you missed a 60-second pop-up about a house. People already sacrifice sleep and other basic necessities to spam-click placards. I don’t think this would be mitigated by such a short acceptance timer.

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Originally Posted by JamieRose

And the current system isn't super frustrating as is?

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Your chances of getting a house with a lottery system will not improve.

Just do yourself a favor and get an apartment.

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Originally Posted by JamieRose

And the current system isn't super frustrating as is?

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You can at least work for it in a clicking duel among the few people that have gathered there.
While a lottery would essentially invite every single homeless person with enough gil (and gil isn't hard to come by) to compete against you.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

I personally don’t mind a lottery system (can’t really be worse that what we have, imo—and SE will never do instanced housing, so I’ve given up on that), but giving a player only 60 seconds to accept would only increase the already staggering amount of frustration that this housing system already creates. Consider people that may have to work or go to school that can’t always be at their PC or console waiting for an acceptance notification. Increasing that to at least a couple hours would be better. Wouldn’t completely mitigate scenarios where people are in school 8 hours a day or work 8 hours a day, but it’s much better than only being given a minute to accept a win.

Plus, think about if you’d gotten up to go to the bathroom and come back to see that you missed a 60-second pop-up about a house. People already sacrifice sleep and other basic necessities to spam-click placards. I don’t think this would be mitigated by such a short acceptance timer.

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Okay... And people work and go to school and can't be at a placard clicking for eight plus hours that it sometimes takes to get a house. Or they get up to go to the bathroom and miss the open window for whatever few seconds on the placard and miss clicking on it and don't get the house. How is that any different than missing a 60 second RNG lottery timer that pops when winning the lottery I proposed? They're all human factors that affect the current system as is. There's no difference whatsoever.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

You can at least work for it in a clicking duel among the few people that have gathered there.
While a lottery would essentially invite every single homeless person with enough gil (and gil isn't hard to come by) to compete against you.

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The current system is entirely RNG and who happens to luckily enough click during the open window. How is that different from a lottery?

A lottery is RNG, same as the timer still is and people have a limited time to accept the win. It's not a guaranteed win until people start getting cumulative hidden buffs for losing on plots repeatedly. Then they'll eventually get their plots and be taken out of the competition. If they're bots (answering the proposed idea that supposedly bots will get all the plots that someone said earlier), SE is pretty good about catching botting, so they'll get actioned (read: banned) and the plot will cycle back into the demolition system and become available again for purchase. It's not perfectly ideal, but it's better than what we have now and still relies upon RNG with a small amount of player effort that doesn't actively harm players. (Because I don't enjoy repetitive stress injuries and physically disabled players shouldn't be excluded from housing).

If we did this then someone would just make a million bots and have them entered into the lottery. They can run a script to accept if they win.

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Originally Posted by Zhalar

The current system is entirely RNG and who happens to luckily enough click during the open window. How is that different from a lottery?

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Personally I don't consider lottery to be a fix for something that is already a lottery. It's simply trading one bad system for another.

Your suggestion will not really fix much. All it does is increase the amount of players who can compete due to no longer needing to spam click, which is a labourious process that understandably turns many people off.

With your suggestion people would still need to camp a location for potentially a long time, and they can still miss the purchase window (60 seconds is freaking tiny) because they needed to go to the toilet at the wrong time or need to do important real life stuff like work or college. Which means that the process of purchasing your first house would still encourage the use of bots. Considering bots can do far more advanced things like questlines across multiple zones, programming one to press a button in a window would be ridiculously easy. And this means that ps4 players would still be at a disadvantage because they cannot use bots.

Aside from removing placard spam, your suggestion doesn't actually fix the major issues surrounding the acquisition of your first house.

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Originally Posted by Zhalar

Okay... And people work and go to school and can't be at a placard clicking for eight plus hours that it sometimes takes to get a house. Or they get up to go to the bathroom and miss the open window for whatever few seconds on the placard and miss clicking on it and don't get the house. How is that any different than missing a 60 second RNG lottery timer that pops when winning the lottery I proposed? They're all human factors that affect the current system as is. There's no difference whatsoever.

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There is no difference between what you suggested and what happens now—which is why I disagreed with it. Did you actually read what I said, or did you just jump on me because I offered criticism for your suggestion?

With a 60 second timer to accept winning a plot, you’ve effectively made people sit at their computer and continue to wait for the win to go off...and hoping they don’t miss the prompt due to having to go to sleep, go to work, go to school, or get up to go a snack or go to the restroom. In other words, what they are currently doing right now. Meaning that, with your system, things won’t change. Hence why I suggested not making the acceptance timer 60 seconds and instead increasing it to a couple hours to give a little bit more leeway for life events. It wouldn’t completely solve people having to work all day or go to school all day, but it’s way better than being given a minute to accept. That’s way too short and will solve nothing. Note that loot timers in dungeons, trials, and raids last longer than what you suggested.

The irony is that you said:

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Originally Posted by Zhalar

There's no difference whatsoever.

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If there’s literally no difference whatsoever in the current system and what you suggested, why would even make the suggestion?