An end to the camping timer. An end to resale. A return to...

[Catstab]

I think the best solution to housing shortage is a return to ARR pricing. A small house used to cost 40 million or so. It would then devalue a couple million per day, until it was cheap enough for someone to decide they wanted it.

Benefits:
-It kills the camp. You know exactly what time the house will be the price you're willing to pay. Come back then and buy (or find out someone else wanted it more)
-It stops the resellers. That house is wide open. If no one is paying what it costs right now, you won't make any money at all trying to buy it for resale.
-It rewards players the most invested in the game. Farmed 40m for your personal? Your FC of eight people put in 5m each? The house is yours, no waiting.

Detriment:
-It pulls housing out of the price range for people who are on trial membership and for people who have only been playing a few months.

If SE leaves house pricing where it is, they need to make enough for everyone (~80 wards total or instanced housing)

If SE is going to leave supply where it is, they ought to price the houses accordingly.

Especially if it will stop flippers and end camping.

[ForteNightshade]

And throughout ARR, entire wards were mostly vacant plots. Which kind of defeats the whole point of having a housing system to begin with. Furthermore, it wouldn't do much to deter anyone. Gil has virtually no value anymore due to the massive inflation. So the exorbitant prices wouldn't matter to many players. Not to mention how much worse botting has got. All in all, you're just rewarding the extremely rich players or those willing to RMT.

[Jojoya]

I think the best solution to housing shortage is a return to ARR pricing. A small house used to cost 40 million or so. It would then devalue a couple million per day, until it was cheap enough for someone to decide they wanted it.

Benefits:
-It kills the camp. You know exactly what time the house will be the price you're willing to pay. Come back then and buy (or find out someone else wanted it more)
-It stops the resellers. That house is wide open. If no one is paying what it costs right now, you won't make any money at all trying to buy it for resale.
-It rewards players the most invested in the game. Farmed 40m for your personal? Your FC of eight people put in 5m each? The house is yours, no waiting.

Detriment:
-It pulls housing out of the price range for people who are on trial membership and for people who have only been playing a few months.

If SE leaves house pricing where it is, they need to make enough for everyone (~80 wards total or instanced housing)

If SE is going to leave supply where it is, they ought to price the houses accordingly.

Especially if it will stop flippers and end camping.

The best solution to the housing shortage is to implement an instanced housing system as most of the other MMOs with housing use so every character can own one or more houses depending on what the player wants that character to have.

Increasing prices won't reduce demand. The player base has become far too large and there are too many wealthy players with nothing to spend that gil on. If anything, it will encourage RMT among the less wealthy players because there's no real risk to gil buying.

It doesn't kill the camping. The camping goes away only if the timer is removed.

It won't stop the resellers. They'll continue to flip for profit as they always have. Someone willing to pay 100 million gil for a house is just as likely to pay 120 million to the flipper who got to the plot first.

Gil is a bad way to measure someone's investment in the game since not all game activities reward gil equally based on time investment. Are omnicrafters more deserving of a house than the players who love to PvP or run roulettes? No, they aren't.

Players on the free trial have gil cap of 300k and are not allowed to own property so doesn't affect anything they have access to. New players bypass the impact if they go the RMT route.

If SE is going to stick to the ward system, boosting up initial pricing is not going to put much of a dent in demand. If you really want to put a dent in demand, attach a recurring monthly fee to house ownership. Someone who's not going to use the house is pretty unlikely to buy it if they know it's going to have a long term cost. Someone who has bought a house but is no longer using it is a lot more likely to relinquish rather than keep wasting gil month and month.

[Catstab]

The best solution to the housing shortage is to implement an instanced housing system as most of the other MMOs with housing use so every character can own one or more houses depending on what the player wants that character to have.

That'd be the ideal. Next best thing would be 80 wards. Best thing for the current system, I still think, is this price increase.

Regarding 'it doesn't kill camping':
It does, though. I'm proposing an end to the housing timer, along with this price change. These 40m smalls, 150m mediums, and 500m larges would be walk-up-and-buy.

Regarding 'It doesn't kill resale':
It does, though. If a reseller purchases a small for 40m, he now has to find someone willing to pay him significantly more than 40 million and then also pay the placard another 40 million.

The price you gave may just be wall-spaghetti numbers, but no one is paying 100 million gil for small houses. Mediums do sell for that, but in this case mediums would be 150m at the placard. So a reseller would need to find someone willing to spend 330m+ to get into a medium house.

[Catstab]

All in all, you're just rewarding the extremely rich players

How else do you decide how to distribute a resource only ~20% of players can have? Each server has 5,760 houses (roughly 4320 personals and 1440 FC) and 20,000-25,000 players. Right now we decide which one player in five gets a house based on their ability to click a placard for several hours at a time, any number of times. Many people have commented how-anti fun this system is.

There needs to be a check on housing other than patience, free time, and abuse of your gaming hardware. I think 'players or FCs who have 40 million gil to invest' is a decent check. 40 mil is far from "extremely rich" it's just a player who has put a good year into the game at endgame content, or an FC that has 8+ people willing to pool a few weeks worth of work.

Not to mention, the game needs a gil sink. You say this would only benefit the rich, but I know some of the rich and they'd swat me for saying this, but small houses having a placard price of 3m contribute greatly to their riches. Having to invest 40 million gil every time you wanted a workshop would put a dent in profiteering.

[ADVSS]

I have to agree with the other replies, making them more expensive doesnt actually make them more available at all, except for more rich players. It doesnt stop campers because the timer is the reason there are campers, and it doesnt increase availability because the wards are limited and added so in frequently. The demolition timer helps, sure. But an instanced house would be better than anything else suggested. The other suggestion, a monthly gil tax would help speed the process, but at a snails pace. Having owned a couple houses in the past, i dont personally care much for them as the benefits to me are pretty much solved being in a FC that has a house. But im not other players who want that part of the game they already pay a sub for, and to them it means a lot more than me for various reasons, rp house design, etc. Instance housing is the best solution in my opinion. It caters to the entire spectrum whether the player base grows by a million or shrinks, it doesnt cause people to flare up at each other, it removes a major stress element for paying customers who still dont get to enjoy all the game can offer, and it removes suggestions like raise the cieling for people to get one, even if theyve been paying a sub for years and still havent gotten one, If the wards are a big deal especially for the RP crown, maybe allow instanced linking, where players can make their own neighborhoods that are linked some kind of way to a limit. That would actually be a cool idea though it might require them to spend some time and resources on the idea of housing. Either way the current system isnt promoting much positivity, is only making the situation worse as time goes by.

[Catstab]

spend some time and resources on the idea of housing

That's the biggest barrier.

If instanced housing is around the corner, or the next ward expansion adds wards 25-80, then the problem is solved and this idea can be ignored. My suggestion is grounded in the current housing system since that is what we have to work with.

And again, it does indeed stop campers, I have said that I want to abolish the timer with this change. The house is walk-up-and-buy at 40 mil, and will drop a few mil in price per day until it's worth someone's while. If it's only worth it to you after 2 more devalues, you know to come back in 12 hours. There's nothing to click, so no more camp. You buy it when it hits your price, or you get outbid.

[ADVSS]

That's the biggest barrier.

If instanced housing is around the corner, or the next ward expansion adds wards 25-80, then the problem is solved and this idea can be ignored. My suggestion is grounded in the current housing system since that is what we have to work with.

And again, it does indeed stop campers, I have said that I want to abolish the timer with this change. The house is walk-up-and-buy at 40 mil, and will drop a few mil in price per day until it's worth someone's while. If it's only worth it to you after 2 more devalues, you know to come back in 12 hours. There's nothing to click, so no more camp. You buy it when it hits your price, or you get outbid.

You can still do housing infinitely better by making it instanced. But sure, they can fix the timer if they do that as well as whatever else you say, doesnt improve on the housing as a whole in my opinion. Housing in this game is still 1 dimensional, besides people cleverly owning up entire wards to make their gingerbread neighborhood, or RP cafe district. You dont build the house wall by wall, you just put a precrafted shell on a precrafted foundation and plug a precrafted roof on top. Boring as hell, if you ask me. Luckilly clever designers have figured out ways to glitch in pieces here and there to create a more customized experience in such a bland system. But yeah charging more for a dull housing experience makes a lot of sense somehow, if you keeo willing yourself to believe that, i guess.

[Kleeya]

What you do you think is the best the day i want to give up on my personnal house :

- that the timer is still here, and that everyone, including you, can have a go at it ?
- that there is no timer anymore, and that i will just give the plot to someone i know since i can predict the exact moment the purchase can be made ?

As horrible the timer can seems to be, if you remove it then people will just start again, like they were doing before, to give the plot they own to their friends or even resell it for real money. There is a reason why the timer was put into place, and it is because the old system was worse.

Also as already said, we have enough problems with all the RMT bots as it is. We really dont need way higher prices.

[KalinOrthos]

Oh good, put housing farther out of the way of regular players who either RP or play casually without getting too far into the crafting system. That won't have any negative repercussions or result in massive player backlash, surely.