Would the housing market be less crazy if the buying system was a silent auction?

[Mistyregions]

Well, since on some realms, apartments are already all gone, they'll need to be priced up too. How about 5 billion for an apartment, 50 billion for a small, 500 billion for a medium, and 5 trillion for a large. MINIMUM price that is. If you can't afford it, tough beans. May require upping the gil cap though.

Or maybe, just maybe, we should work on actually fixing the roots of the issues. I.E. improve apartments so they actually function like houses (i.e. crossbreeding and outdoor furniture options), and have them dynamically spawn new apartment amounts as they fill up. Make all houses FC only (this includes demolishing any personal house with full refunds of all items, even those that are destroy on pick up, as well as further gil to compensate for the destruction of the house, and I had one on Omega btw, so I would be affected, player houses aren't available on Twintania YET). Make FCs require a minimum number of active players (tied to unique Square Enix Accounts, possibly even cross-checking payment data etc to help further proof the system. It can't be 100% foolproofed, but you can do so much it becomes a near enough excessive amount of work to get around that most people give up) to buy certain house sizes (16 for small, 64 for medium, 256 for large perhaps). RuneScape had their clan citadels where if you couldn't get enough players to visit the citadel in a week, or do enough citadel activity in a week, it got downsized (and if you couldn't get 5 players to visit, the whole thing got shut down for every week you didn't get 5 people to attempt to visit the citadel). So the idea's been done elsewhere and without too much pushback either. Make wards for FCs only, and instancing for personal housing. Personal housing NEEDS to be instanced, or else you're going to need the kinds of prices I listed above at the very least.

Let me put it to you this way. If housing tommrow went free market, no regulation and the prices skyrocketed to 999mil. This is what I would tell you, ethire I would work my ass off for 999mil gil, or accept I wont have a house and focus on other things. Just like in real life. I dont complain to the goverment to make mansions more accessible to me and I instead worry about stuff I can do.

I accept not everything in the world has to be accessible or pandered to me or even given to me. In game or IRL.