The New Housing System is Terrible

[Saefinn]

I know it used to be worse, but it is far from being anywhere I guess, acceptable. Because to boost my chances at getting a house at the initial rush, I did the following:
- Had the day booked off, so I'd not be at work on patch release
- Picked up ExitLag to reduce latency
- Moved the game to an SSD (though a good idea in general)
- Had the patch downloaded ready
- Had a game plan, ward/district picked, a best route with a chance of as many houses as possible, and to practice that route.
- Did all of the previous point on Ninja for the extra speed and ability to teleport quickly.
- Had the launcher ready to click the moment it is available

Do all that and have the "Play" button take an age to load because of congestion (or error or crash, like friends of mine had) and find yourself in a 1,700 person queue and find there's no plots left when you finally make it in.

Then find you have a chance at still getting a house due to old plots being given up. In order to increase your chances, you need to camp. Fortunately the community has devised a solution to work out the probability of when plots are most likely to open. With this advantage you're still competing heavily with a lot of people and your 'camping' window at this point is still huge...just not the full 24 hour window. So you'd need to camp to have a chance.

And whilst camping you might find:
- Somebody who hasn't camped walks up, gets lucky and swipes it from you.
- You get up to go to the loo or do any basic human function. And somebody gets it.
- You finally get lucky with 1 other person on it on a plot that's been free for 20 hours and that person is AFK with a high chance of it becoming available and then somebody comes along and relocates their house (this happened to me last night).

As an RPer, I am looking for a house for a specific RP purpose, hence my determination. On several occasions I came close. Which makes the whole thing incredibly frustrating.

We 100% need a better system. It isn't suited to handle this population of players.

IMO, seek to improve on the apartments system. Replace them with an instanced housing system. Not everybody will benefit from being in a housing neighbourhood and would be satiated with an instanced housing system. EG. my FC's house has no active neighbours. The idea I have for the RP housing plot I was going to grab? It doesn't need a neighbourhood and I'd be happy if I could use my apartment like a housing plot, so I could have the outdoor and indoor space as it was mostly the outdoor space I was looking at using. I expect it'll alleviate some of the wards too and make it easier for people who want a plot in a neighbourhood. And give people an incentive scheme to relocate their housing plots to this 'new' instanced housing.

With the idea of improving the apartments system to be instanced housing they could even take it one step further and allow you to change the background scene to match certain themes, this would give an additional incentive for people to use this system than build in a neighbourhood, because your house could be in locations that don't have housing wards, as an example. Imagine having one set in Sui-no-sato? Or on the steppe? Or in Yanxia? Or near Ala Mhigo? Or in the sea of clouds? Or somewhere on The First?

Maybe shorten the max timer wirth a smaller window. Restrict relocation except to the new wards. Reactivate it after a reasonable time after new wards go live. Or just turn off the timer for when housing goes live for the initial rush. It'll give more chances at getting /a/ plot then.