A Better Way for Houses Up For Grabs

[ItMe]

To quote someone from the last "housing should be a raffle system" thread from almost exactly 2 months ago:

House raffles get suggested every day, though people usually call it a lottery. They're a terrible idea.

The main trouble with this: You can win a house while offline.
So botters can log to one account, enter raffle, log to another, enter raffle, and keep going. You could enter a raffle with 8 FCs on the same account, giving yourself 8x the chance to win as any random first-time-personal seeker.

The current system makes sure you're at least running the client if you're going to win a house, and only lets you attempt on one character per account at a time. This suggestion looks to be a small quality of life upgrade on the surface, but after spending 10 seconds to actually think it through, it offers an obvious and massive advantage to exploiters and this would greatly reduce house availability to players.

[Tranquilmelody7]

To quote someone from the last "housing should be a raffle system" thread from almost exactly 2 months ago:

The easy solution to that is to just cap the amount of players who can enter the raffle.
Ideally a smaller number, like a few dozen or so.

Spam Clicking away for an indeterminable amount of hours under desperate hopes of getting a house is flat out bad for people's physical and mental health, especially when many earnest would be buyers are competing against cheaters running scripts to auto click the placard.

[Flay_wind]

Spam Clicking away for an indeterminable amount of hours under desperate hopes of getting a house is flat out bad for people's physical and mental health.

There's always an option not to do that.

[tdb]

To quote someone from the last "housing should be a raffle system" thread from almost exactly 2 months ago:

I'm not sure why you think that's some kind of insurmountable problem. It's easy to imagine the raffle reformulated in a kind of similar way to the Ishgard restoration FATEs. When the plot frees up, a time for the raffle is announced on the placard. When the appointed time comes, players have 10 minutes to enter the raffle. Logging off or leaving the zone will automatically cancel the entry. Once the time is up, the winner is chosen.

This would do away with the need to stand at the placard for hours and allow for planning, while still requiring players to be present to win the house. If the timers are arranged so that multiple raffles go off at the same time, it would also force players to choose the plot they like the best. Or perhaps the one with least competition.

Of course, botters with multiple accounts can also have multiple computers so they can have all accounts logged on at the same time. That can't really be changed since SE has no way of knowing if several separate accounts belong to the same person.