Suggestion For housing

[Penthea]

How exactly would it make the issue worse?

Players with multiple accounts could enter the lottery for a plot multiple times. There is a famous pair of players on Mateus who own an entire ward. Imagine how many times those two people alone could enter the draw.

Similar to the above multiple players could pool their resources and tip the odds heavily in their favour. Not so much of an issue for private home purchase, but considering a large wealthy fc trying to collect shell fc houses...this could become a serious problem. There are already some wards full of shell fcs and some of them had to deal with the inconvenience of the placard timer. The lottery would make it easier for them to get more plots.

Lottery makes participation easier, which is obviously your intention with your suggestion. However for that convenience you trade it for the above happening, as well as a general increase in competition. Right now a lot of players don't do the placard spam because they don't want to or are unable to. Lottery would be a near zero effort undertaking which would mean the amount of people who are able to compete could dramatically rise (depending on the server), which of course means your odds of winning a plot could be far lower than before.

By introducing lottery SE would be effectively encouraging players to use several accounts, their own or from multiple players, to increase their odds of getting a house. And this is because this would be the best way to get an edge in the competition. Right now a commonly used edge is bots that spam click the placard, but not everyone does that as it has its own risks due to being against the ToS. There would be nothing in the ToS, for obvious reasons, that would prevent multiple accounts from bidding on the same plot. So players could game the lottery system risk-free.

I agree the placard timer is horrendous. But lottery is not the way to fix it.