Dead from Plot hunting and I ask YOU a Question

[Yshtola]

I was gonna parrot the popular "just have a housing raffle" idea, but HOLY COW YSHTOLA!
THATS SOME GOOD INFO!
Thanks so much for making such a helpful and informative post. I'd shower likes on you if I could.

Though, if there were a more effective gill dump, wouldn't that increase RMT because people wouldn't have the gil to buy houses?
Wouldn't this just lead to a bigger bot problem?

Also, how did you get all this great information?

The "real" players are the driving force behind RMT. "Real" players always sell gil to resellers or other players. It's impossible to get rid of RMT, but you can drain the pool. More here: https://library.gwu.edu/sites/defaul...%20MMORPGs.pdf

Stats are compiled by myself:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing
https://mewfc.com

Does it make sense to consider the primary purpose of housing to be a gil sink/anti-RMT tool? Even if we say that there are three, four, or five times as many players as there are available plots, that also doesn't mean every player is looking for a house either. Instead of drastically increasing the cost-to-entry, doesn't it just make more sense to increase the number of wards, and add new housing locations? When Ishgard is made available, for example, it will presumably come with the same number of wards as all current districts. Beyond that, the only other ways I can see to increase availability would be to either breakup congested servers or force people who own multiple houses to give them up somehow. A gil increase only prevents new players from entering the system, it doesn't do anything to actually make new space.

There's already a mechanic to compensate for poor players, it's called the devaluation timer. I would suggest to read my post.

[Veloran]

That doesn't really address most of my points. If base housing prices are heavily increased, how does the devaluation timer help poorer players? If anything it helps the richer players by ensuring the price range of the plot remains well above affordable for many while still easily being purchasable by people who have many millions to spare. I mean forgive me if I'm majorly misunderstanding your profile tag, but you own like 48 plots, right? So you have more than enough gil to buy houses left and right. Meanwhile just to buy a small as a newer player I had to borrow like 2M on top of what I already had. So if these higher prices had been in effect at that time, a player like me couldn't have gotten a house at all, while a player like you easily could have gotten their 49th house. So I don't really see how this actually opens up the market, especially when the alternative of just adding more plots overall already exists.

[TwistedTea]

If base housing prices are heavily increased, how does the devaluation timer help poorer players? If anything it helps the richer players by ensuring the price range of the plot remains well above affordable for many while still easily being purchasable by people who have many millions to spare....So I don't really see how this actually opens up the market, especially when the alternative of just adding more plots overall already exists.

There's a limit to how many houses a single service account can own on a server: 1 personal house and 8 FC houses.

In order to own more, a player would have to get more accounts and pay the subscriptions.

~70% of the houses on NA servers are owned as personals.

Secondly, the majority of gil rich players are not motivated enough or have the time to grind out the gil and other requirements to owning that many houses.

Right now we have a situation where any new player fresh from MSQ with 3-5m can buy a small house.

Meaning the pool of competitors for a small plot is vast. If house prices were higher, there would be less people camping. The people who can't afford a house can wait for the devaluation timer to reduce the price and grind out gil in the meantime.

Adding new wards does not solve the problem,it merely kicks the can down the road; there are not enough houses for every individual player in NA servers especially if player populations keep increasing.

Upgradeable apartments for gil with balconies for gardening/delinking the FC workshop from ward housing would go a long way in reducing the demand for ward housing.

[MsQi]

The best solution would be an instanced plot system alongside the current ward system. It would give most people everything they want out of housing while leaving the few to squabble over limited plots in the wards.

Upgradeable apartments for gil with balconies for gardening/delinking the FC workshop from ward housing would go a long way in reducing the demand for ward housing.

That would satisfy a lot of people, though some would still like to have a house they can look at even if it's not in a neighborhood. I've said before it would be nice to have multiple apartments, no more than one per district, or allow apartment owners to have alts as tenants.

Either solution would probably remove enough players from the market so that those that want a ward house could have it without much fuss.