House Raffling

[EaMett]

A lot to unpack and honestly I don't feel like doing a full response to both posts above so you'll have to excuse me for cherry picking (I say this but watch me write another wall of text). I will say this:

- The PvP nature of housing is in the design of it. SE's mention of housing was related to them wanting housing to be difficult to obtain (not the pvp directly).
As far as quoting SE on this, I have done so in the past around the time shirogane landed iirc. A couple of weeks ago I tried to find my own post and gave up after an hour or so of sifting through my own years worth of assinign comments on these forums (assuming it was here that I posted that and not on reddit). Again I don't care enough to spent more time looking for this. I had done the legwork back in the day to check it for myself. Maybe today you can too. If I remember correctly, it was a quote from Yoichi Wada in a foreign press interview (either jap or french, I forget). Also if I remember correctly, yoshiP made a similar statement though that was related to the high price of housing. Good hunting, you have more info here than I did when I went looking for it.
In this case there is a reason this has been parotted all these years.

- JoJoya: asking me for quotes and citations needed for 80% mentions when I demonstrated my reasoning above AND you haven't applied half the level of scrutiny to your point as I have mine.. It's the pot calling the kettle black! You might as well just outright discredit your own stance at this rate.
Also, don't be daft, I never said JP servers didn't count, read my post again, specifically the win-win-win section. I'm sorry you couldn't make sense of it, honestly I'm unsure of how I could make it any clearer. Maybe give it another go.

- If you want to discredit my point by using the Housing Census thread (beyond anecdotal mention), you are more than welcome to compile comprehensive data from it, corelate it in time with overall game active population and make your point here. It's going to be a rough ride but I'll be more than happy to listen to what you have to say. Heck, I'd even be happy to overlap my own data with this to get a clearer image. Until then, it's just unquantified speculation.

- In regards to the census data limitations. I'm well aware of some of the limitations. It is worth mentioning that some census data comes from lodestone image updates within a timeframe, which does not suffer from the same limitations. Some other updates are based on mounts/minions close enough to the census data used that those limitations don't express themselves. Feel free to have a look around for yourself. The one I will mention, is the 2017 data has a big dip down. Like I said in that post, this is a blip in census data, the player base dropped significantly for SB launch two months later (ie: a big chunk of players may have been innactive). I opted NOT to use the SB data because it was unclear whether it was due to inactivity or because players hadn't yet purchased the expansion. So I left the Oct/Nov 2017 data instead and left it up to the readers to do their own research if they so desired to pick on it.
As an FYI, if you readjusted the 2017 data for the SB data the plot availability would be closer to 35% availability (27% before patch). Which although on the low end, is still in line with the 30-50%. And despite it being still so low, you've been arguing that housing wasn't an issue.. Weird, why is that? Did we even have account limitations back then?
So, no, it isn't unreasonable to suspect the numbers used are inflated in some cases. However, everything seems to depict a pretty linear and consistent image. So argumenting that this has any significance needs to be backed up pretty significantly. Again, be my guest, as I have already looked through the data and figured that it wasn't game changing. But you're more than welcome to prove me wrong.

- In the same vein I left out the 5.1 data just because it wasn't what we were discussing. We were in agreement that housing was hard to obtain in 5.1, it was prior patches that were in contention. The data for 5.1 is 56% availability (48% before patch). Which is in line with the rest. And this is what we agreed wasn't enough housing.. But somehow before that, things were easier? On the lower pop servers representing the lower 20% of players.. sure? But that subset is not representative of the whole. Also, there would be no reason for SE to consistently add wards if there wasn't a shortage in the first place, which makes the argument odd to say the least.

Likewise, I didn't include the upcoming Ishgard patch because speculating on server population for 6.0 is a bit of a fruitless endeavor. (Technically it would be speculating on SE's speculation of what 6.0 population would be, so even worse)

Lastly I'll close with this :

"If housing is supposed to be PvP, a bad situation would be a good thing since it would promote even more competition. Right?"

If a resource is limited and players are meant to compete for it, then in a way, yes. The inability of some players to get housing (which I assume is what you mean by "bad situation") is part of the feature. And the difficulty is dictated by which percentage of the population has access to the resource (the more have access, the easier it becomes).
As population grows so does the difficulty, so you need to consistently add more resources to keep that percentage, and therefore difficulty, leveled. SE does this by adding wards/districts, limiting accounts, etc. And my point has been that in addition to the design being PvP based (regardless of intent), SE have consistently demonstrated the behavior above, reinforcing that this has been the intended behavior for the feature for a while now.