Tips for buying against Plot not yet available for purchase. 4.2 housing

[MizArai]

That's...not really true. If we can see the timer and the timer is greater than, say, an hour...reselling is already killed because that's an hour for anybody else (other than the purchaser from the reseller) to get in and be ready to grab.

Simply HAVING the timer fixes that...except it doesn't because of relocation not having a timer.

If you can see the timer, then you can plan on when the plot would become available. So just having a timer wouldn't fix it (especially if it was seen and only an hour or two long as you suggest), because someone could easily walk away, live their life, and just plan on coming back to the plot 5-10 minutes before it was available. Of course, we're still assuming that it wasn't just taken by a relocation, which leads me to this next part. I stand by my original statement.

Not seeing the timer was the point of it in the first place. Players were yelling and screaming about how awful house flippers were and were demanding that SE do something so that we couldn't easily resell houses. If we could see the timer, then someone could pay a relinquish and just come back whenever the time says (assuming the plot wasn't taken by a relocation, which is how they're sold now instead).

Plots relinquished by owners will be unavailable for purchase for a limited time. The time when the plot becomes available is set at random, and will not be displayed anywhere.

Yoshida made a point to emphasize that the timer would not show anywhere. It was obviously an important point to him having the timer not visible, so no one could know when the plot would actually become available.

I understand it makes life hard for us now. I didn't want to change from the old system. I saw nothing wrong with being able to walk up to a house and buy it right after it demo'd. It made housing so much easier to acquire. And no matter what people say, a lottery wouldn't be any better than the RNG timer nonsense we currently have.