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

[Paladinleeds]

We definitely could use a good gil drain, I'm all for it. Housing is like owning a real life mansion in Hollywood, only some people have access to it, the rest get apartments.

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.

[WalxAtNite]

Maybe *slightly* unrelated, but still related...

I'd be interested in seeing the results of a waiting list. Not *actually* using the waiting list, but just putting one together.

I'd like to see the numbers and the expected wait time for those at the bottom of that list. I bet it's depressing, but I also bet it puts things into perspective for us.

I'm new to the game, and I've resolved myself to the fact that I'm never going to own a house. FC room is a small space to call my own, but not the same. I'm okay with that. I don't play 14 to decorate a house... but damn. It would be pretty cool if I could.

I think that's most everyone's mindset at this point and why things aren't changing. Most of us have just accepted it.

But I think putting together a waiting list might help to put things into real perspective.

[Videra]

Hard disagree. The dev team just needs to swallow its pride and add instanced housing.

[Edax]

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.

Or maybe we could do both, increase housing supply and unit cost at the same time.

[Dustytome]

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.

Which realms? Balmung had an issue with that a long time ago, but with the addition of Shirogane, additional wards and world relocation incentives, I don't believe that's been an issue as of late.

[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.

[Mavrias]

So give gil buyers all the housing?

You can just craft, dude. Not everyone with a lot of gil buys it.

[alimdia]

An auction system would need to have a cap to make it fair with everyone, but a cap is just basically raising the price of plots since everyone will pay the max price when we only have 1-2 plots open at a given time.

A lottery system would be a better compromise, right now housing is about who's lucky enough to hit the purchase button the second the house goes available, you can have the same luck factor without requiring people to spam a placard for 18 hours.

Or better yet, add instanced housing.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

You can just craft, dude. Not everyone with a lot of gil buys it.

Yeah, but the current hordes of RMT bots, the twitch scams, and all that lead me to think that there are, in fact, a ton of people buying gil. RMT is probably huge in XIV at the moment.

[TheRogueX]

In either scenario, I would see players who already own housing also having to participate in either the auction or lottery alongside those who don't have houses to keep things fair.

Players who already own a private house can't buy another on that character anyway so it's not as big a deal. They should be limited to just one per server though. There needs to be some sort of active policing in place, too, to prevent people from making tons of 1 or 2 inactive (except for the one time every 35 days that is necessary) character Free Companies and buying up houses. But that last part is just my 2 cents on that part.

I do agree more with the lottery system than the auction system because the latter would just lead to a similar situation as before, where housing only belongs to those with the most money. It definitely wouldn't help with the RMT problems we have.

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.

IRL, everyone should have the ability to have a home. Not a mansion, just some sort of permanent shelter. This is not a handout; this is reality. In game, we all pay a subscription fee and should all have equal access to content in the game. This means there should be rules in place that allow everyone to have some sort of access to housing and not have it limited to those who have the most time or the most in-game money. This is not pandering. We are paying for a service; we should have equal access to that service.

Also, you talk about the 'free market' like it is something good. Unregulated and under-regulated free markets are some of the worst things to ever happen to this world.