Housing: Purchase Timer - Alternative Idea

[Penthea]

Pantea, I see your issue with the lottery system, but personally still think it could be workable, assuming SE is gong to double down and keep the system we have.

I get that you dislike the lottery system very strongly, for a reason I honestly don't fully understand, but it would honestly help things rather than make them worse, if implemented properly. Again, this is only if SE insists on keeping the placard spam mentality.

The problem with placard spam isn't the placard, it's the lack of housing. Taking the placard out of the equation doesn't magically fix anything. All that lottery would do is change the method of acquisition. It will not grant more even distribution of plots. It will not create more houses. It will not remove the rng placards produce because the nature of lottery is rng.

Placard spam is only an issue on servers where the wards are always full. It's little more than an annoyance on servers that always have empty plots. Surely this suggests that the problem with housing acquisition isn't the placard, but is instead the amount of houses and their distribution among active accounts.

The only thing lottery would help with is players who either don't have the time to or don't want to placard spam, who also happen to be on a server where the wards are always full. This means on servers where placard spam isn't a problem lottery would actually cause housing acquisition disruption because it would force a waiting time for purchase regardless of how long the land has been empty, and it would potentially add rng that wasn't there before because multiple players could end up bidding for one plot instead of getting several plots separately through placards.

Then there's the fact that the ease of participation would increase the amount of competition for each plot, so the chances of getting a plot can drop due to that alone.

Never mind how players who hold multiple accounts would be granted a very clear advantage with lottery. They have an advantage with placard spam now but only if they risk their accounts by engaging in botting, and many won't do it in case they get reported. With lottery SE would essentially be approving the clear abuse of odds players with multiple accounts would easily be able to do. It would actually encourage people to buy extra accounts to tip the odds in their favour.

A monthly sub doesn't cost much. Almost anyone with a job can easily afford to pay for a second or even third account. Especially if they only moonlight on paying for the extra accounts while bidding, then hand over fc lead to a character on their main account as soon as they win a plot, and then not pay the sub of their alt accounts until they want to start bidding again.

Sorry but I struggle to see how lottery could be argued as a legitimate improvement when there are so many obvious problems with it that dramatically outweigh any gains.