About Plot selling

[Ilitsa]

Eorzea needs a real estate brokerage! List your property for sale! The broker takes a fee (removes gil from the game) of 20%. Once you list, you cannot delist and the system starts a reverse auction, lowering the price (like it does for new plot sales) until it sells.

I could get behind this idea

[KaitlanKela]

To be fair selling houses was A-OK back when housing first launched so people were buying in the knowledge that they could recoup some of that gil from another player if they decided to give up the plot. It's only since the auto-demolish disaster that the GMs reversed their stance on the issue due to so many people buying purely to resell.

Was is A-OK as in GM asked and approved with a consistent statement, or was it a don't ask don't tell thing, like parsers?

I'm thinking it was the latter, and (while it's crummy since housing is so broken right now) SE has every right to crack down and enforce their user agreement. That should have been apparent from day 1.

[Judah_Brandt]

I believe it was more of a "don't ask don't tell" system, but with the housing situation as it is you have players effectively holding a feature of the game for ransom. This directly goes against the part of the EULA about "negatively affecting a player's experience..." Creating an artificial embargo where you can demand a ransom for a feature in the game is absolutely, unequivocally a bad thing to do especially since you are selling an asset held by the server, not something you crafted out of materials or can be directly sold back to the server. Sympathy for taking advantage of people isn't a thing. You purchased a house from the game, for whatever price, and can retrieve that Gil back through not using it. The refund option if it were immediately available would just the same be abused by people to double-dip by both reclaiming the Gil they paid the server for the plot and then still collecting ransom from a player who wants to use the feature. By effectively doubling, tripling, quadrupling the price of this in game feature, how do you not see the harm you are causing another player's experience. You paid 2.5 million Gil for a small plot, but think another player should have to pay three times that to use the same thing you paid far less for? That's far from fair, and if you can't understand that then you're quite obviously mistaken. There's a giant warning about losing the housing item you place before you do so, you accept that consequence by placing it so complaints about that should be completely ignored.

[KaitlanKela]

I believe it was more of a "don't ask don't tell" system, but with the housing situation as it is you have players effectively holding a feature of the game for ransom. This directly goes against the part of the EULA about "negatively affecting a player's experience..." Creating an artificial embargo where you can demand a ransom for a feature in the game is absolutely, unequivocally a bad thing to do especially since you are selling an asset held by the server, not something you crafted out of materials or can be directly sold back to the server. Sympathy for taking advantage of people isn't a thing.

Yes, I agree.

Basically since there is no system for selling your house in the game (besides the auto-reclaim 45 days 80% thing which is a recent addition), you purchased the house knowing it was a one-way transaction. If you did it spuriously and now regret it, tough.

There's especially no reason to be complaining when you can capitalize on the auto-reclaim.

[Ashkendor]

No offense, but have you ever heard of house flipping in real life? The potential mark up on real estate ventures is extraordinary if you have the available cash to gamble the market. Purchase a fixer up at a fraction of the cost, have construction done and resell it sometime thereafter. You can turn a profit several thousand beyond your initial investment. That is not greed-- just simple economics. People wanting a return on their investment in-game is comparable to the aforementioned. Granted, most go well above making a little profit or merely wanting to recoup their losses. While I agree with your solution, as it stands, you're demanding a lot of people to essentially give up millions of gil under the current system.

Er... except house flippers typically do a lot of renovating. You can't really compare that to what's happening with our housing system since you can't sell an actual house - you can only basically sell knowledge of the exact time that you relinquish the plot. I don't have a problem with someone wanting to recoup their loss for the plot. I do have a problem when I see people putting Smalls up on Party Finder for 20-50mil. Trying to exploit a limited resource like that is wrong imo. :/

[Ilitsa]

"negatively affecting a player's experience..."

Thing is, this is such an umbrella term that literally ANYTHING can be reported on.

[Kosmos992k]

Thing is, this is such an umbrella term that literally ANYTHING can be reported on.

The thing is, it's a catch all to allow SE the flexibility to deal with unexpected circumstances - within the terms of the user agreement.

[Mael-bess]

No offense, but have you ever heard of house flipping in real life? The potential mark up on real estate ventures is extraordinary if you have the available cash to gamble the market. Purchase a fixer up at a fraction of the cost, have construction done and resell it sometime thereafter. You can turn a profit several thousand beyond your initial investment. That is not greed-- just simple economics. People wanting a return on their investment in-game is comparable to the aforementioned. Granted, most go well above making a little profit or merely wanting to recoup their losses. While I agree with your solution, as it stands, you're demanding a lot of people to essentially give up millions of gil under the current system.

True, but it's also quite different. First in real life you renovate the house entirely to be able to make any profit out of it when selling. Second in real life there's a bunch of supply, as much, or even more, than is demand for houses.

This doesn't happens in game, house spaces (plots i guess) are very, very limited and when you "sell" your house you're basically, like many people said, taking a bribe to demolish it so that the buyer may (not even 100% possibility) buy it. Any content or investment you've made in it, means nothing, only the plot does.
As it is right now, this needs to change, i don't like seeing people giving up so many gil, but i hate house hoarders even more, it's unfair for both sides: players with houses and players without houses.

[Linadae]

What the housing mafia are essentially doing is the equivalent of sitting on an npc that people need to use preventing them from being able to target that npc. Then saying they will only move if so much money is paid.

This does not fall under flipping or any other real estate terms because frankly...you are not selling the property. You CAN'T sell property directly to another player only SE can sell property.

What you are doing is selling the right to be the first in line to purchase the property from SE when you vacate. This falls under extortion and racketeering.

People who participate in this even go so far as to use exploits to ensure they can purchase as many free lots as possible whenever new wards are released.

So I agree, these people should get suspensions and even bans for this. After all, in the real world they would be facing jail time.

[Valkyrie-Amber]

if you buy a plot and dont use it let it go 45 days and get 80% back what you payed for it and don't make people pay like 2 times + for the same item you bought but dont use.