Quote Originally Posted by Fluffle View Post
From the past few days, my friends have been house hunting non-stop. Of course it is our fault for doing so, but it has interfered with our gameplay (and I'm concerned for my friend's physical and mental health at this point lol).

Feedback appreciated for why this might work / might not work, just no toxicity please. Also if somebody else has already posted this idea or anything, links are appreciated because I did fairly minimal research on this topic.
Honestly, now isn't a good time to be house hunting on a higher population server. The demo timers are still paused for both NA and JP data centers. The JP timers will resume with 4.5, we have no time frame at the moment for when timers will resume for NA data centers. Without the auto demolitions, that only leaves houses being voluntarily vacated for things like server transfers creating a smaller selection for buyers currently.

I would not be a fan of the lottery system mainly because you can pretty easily switch between a few houses in the same district to check if the timer is over (assuming they're not being heavily camped), while the lottery system would have you placing all your eggs in 1 basket (location) for x amount of time (up to 24 hours in your example). If people are trying to get an FC house and not a personal, you could actually have people actively stalking multiple locations for a house with the current system and you would lose that with a lottery system.

I'm not a fan of our current system. I'd prefer that people didn't have to camp a plot for multiple hours only to lose it when someone else walks up while the first player had to use the restroom (something that happened to me once); however there were lots of people complaining about the housing problems before and this was the best solution SE could come up with at the time. I would still hope that the housing system could be expanded with some sort of instanced housing so that every character on every server could have a house if they wanted without taking away from anyone else.