Housing Market Demand Leading to Health Concerns

[Jojoya]

I do get it and I understand what you are saying, but you must also understand that SE should be held accountable for the things that they encourage from their playerbase and the lengthy amount of time spent with the placard timer is certainly something awful that they do encourage.

Where is SE encouraging the player base to camp placards? Please provide links to statements by SE employees encouraging players to spam click placards for up to 24 hours in attempts to purchase a house.

Oh, right. They aren't.

I think you forget the timer was a suggestion from players to stop house flippers from monopolizing the house market. Perhaps you should be blaming those players who suggested and the other players who supported the idea (how ironic if we were to go back through forum posts and find you had been one of them).

2018 was a great year to buy a house between the addition of the new wards and the timer. There were worlds with hundreds of houses available for most of that year because the flippers could no longer monopolize the market even if it didn't stop flipping altogether. The timer did its job.

Go back to the forums in 2018 and you're not going to see complaints about the timer. You're going to see complaints that world X has no available houses while world Y does, and how players shouldn't have to transfer worlds to get a house.

I don't think anyone would have predicted the surge in the player base size in 2019 that swallowed up all that housing that had been available in 2018, nor that some players would form such a strong obsession with owning a house that they would do nothing but click placards for 24 hours trying to buy.

No one is being forced to do it. There have been players posting here recently that they chose not to camp and still managed to get a house because they happened to stop to check the placard at the right time. Others could do the same if they wanted instead of camping.

You said yourself in another post last year. The timer and the way some players will camp placards is a symptom not the problem. The problem is the lack of houses compared to the number of players that want to own a house. Instead of focusing on the symptom, we should be focusing on correcting the problem.

I'm honestly really looking forward to Ishgard! I hope they add a LOT of houses. But I just wish they'd do more now. Let players share apartments. Let us use indoor items inside (who cares if it looks a bit funky!?) Indeed, if apartments, the supposed bandaids, were less restrictive there would be way less people foaming at the mouth for a house. Apartments the way they are now are little better than a tease.

If Ishgard ends up the usual housing district, it's going to increase the number of houses on every world by 25%.

I doubt SE would increase the number of wards at the same time. They'll want to see how quickly wards fill back up first. It could end up like 2018, with most worlds having some houses (if not hundreds) left available for months.

Sharing apartments isn't necessary (though it doesn't harm anything either) when every character (not just player) can have an apartment. There are apartments available on every world right now and SE told us when apartments were added that it was relatively easy to increase the number of apartments compared to increasing the number houses.

Adding apartment size options would go a lot farther toward solving the house demand than adding tenant rights. It is something that SE said they had under consideration back in 2018 though as far as I know they haven't mentioned it since.

[Penthea]

Where is SE encouraging the player base to camp placards? Please provide links to statements by SE employees encouraging players to spam click placards for up to 24 hours in attempts to purchase a house.

Oh, right. They aren't.

SE don't explicitly say "you should chain pull trash at max lvl" and yet that is the standard among the community. SE encourage this attitude by creating trash that is weak enough that it can be done, and by making enmity generation a lot easier than before. People wouldn't be camping placards for hours at a time if the timer did not last for hours at a time. Furthermore botting with the placard is so popular because it's the most efficient way to do it. Where have we heard something like this before? Oh yea many players are constantly saying that multi-pack pulls are more efficient so that's why they do it.

You said yourself in another post last year. The timer and the way some players will camp placards is a symptom not the problem. The problem is the lack of houses compared to the number of players that want to own a house. Instead of focusing on the symptom, we should be focusing on correcting the problem.

This does not mean I said I do not think the sort of behaviour that we see surrounding placards isn't problematic. It means that I recognise that the placard is a band aid fix on a problem that is in dire need of far larger change. I would prefer the root problem to be fixed than just the placard. I said it many times before, I even said it earlier this week in another thread. My opinion on this hasn't changed.