A Better Way for Houses Up For Grabs

[Maeka]

So.... we have a huge problem when it comes to there being a shortage of houses, and the answer isn't very easy on how to make sure everybody who wants a house, can get a house.

Rather than ask people to set aside their real-lives and to sit for 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24 hours spamming clicks on a placard, how about we do this instead?

1). When a house is going to be up for sale soon, 24-48 hours before it is available, there should be a sign-up period. Everybody can sign up and deposit the gil for the house.

2). When the timer expires, the game will randomly select 1 of the players who signed up before the timer expired.

3). Said player wins the house and gets a letter in the mail informing them.

4). All other players are refunded their gil in the mail.

5) (Optional): Those who do not already own a house should have a higher chance than someone who does own a house already.

There. Everybody has an equal chance of winning the house, without having to rely on lag, bots, or having no real lives.

[LalafellDown]

I would like to add that you can only bid on one house per account. Also if you already own a house you cannot gain another house unless relinquishing your old house.

Also if you relinquish a house or FC the house gets put on the market and that house owner/FC cannot buy a house for 30 days.

Make it happen SE.

[Maeka]

I would like to add that you can only bid on one house per account. Also if you already own a house you cannot gain another house unless relinquishing your old house.

Also if you relinquish a house or FC the house gets put on the market and that house owner/FC cannot buy a house for 30 days.

Make it happen SE.

I don't know about 30 days. 7 days, maybe.

If I owned a small house and I wanna move up to a medium or large, I wouldn't want to wait 30 flippin days. But yet, we shouldn't let people just dump houses to snatch another house right away. I think 7 days is fair.

[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.

[KadaRemnant]

This system is so bad and should not be there, no matter how many think it is for the greater good. I don't know why some people who wants a house, gets punished because sellers can't be handled.
I pay monthly to play and not to do this. In this game, rng is set with a need and greed, but in housing, this is so bad, thought poorly and very not respectful to us.
I really want SE remove this timer and think of another way without punishing players who pay for their game to have fun. We shouldn't have to click hours and days on placards only to get a house.
Lottery, instanced housing, limit 1 house and fc per account, etc.
They have choices.
Remove this timer SE please!!!!!

[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.

[LaylaTsarra]

Lottery isn't going to happen. It rewards people not willing to do more than put their name into a hat. Lots can be done to improve housing but this is certainly not one of them.

[tdb]

Lottery would give an equal chance to everyone, instead of rewarding those who can nolife their days away at the placards. Or those who use a bot to do the clicking while afk. If you lose a lottery you can just be like "shit happens", instead of "I can't believe I wasted six hours of my life on this".

The best thing would by dynamic wards or instanced housing (being able to get a small private ward with our FC house and individual player houses would be sooo nice), but failing that it would be good to distribute houses more fairly.