A Better Way for Houses Up For Grabs

[ramsesh]

It’s not toxic. Blame SE’s game design.

[Jojoya]

it may not be toxic, but it's morale breaking at the least. I personally feel it's borderline toxic -- allowing someone to have 10x of something while other people who are playing hardcore and still have near zero chance of getting it seems a bit morally bankrupt.

Yes, it's upsetting that some players have 9 houses per world on a single account with most of those houses purchased after the new rules went into effect in 4.2. One would hope that SE would do more to enforce the posted changes they implemented in 4.2. Why they haven't is something only SE knows.

It's still not toxic. People need to stop throwing around buzzwords trying to push emotional buttons because all that does is lead to feedback getting ignored.

[Realism_Snide]

I can't speak of others, but I at least did not propose lottery as a way to fix limited housing. Rather, I proposed it as a method of distributing said limited housing which is more fair than the current timer system, while solving the same problems that the timer solves. Instanced housing would be the ultimate solution, but it likely requires a large amount of effort to solve. For one, I have no idea of how much server capacity it would require compared to current. And it seems like SE might have some philosophical issues with removing neighborhoods from housing. Changing the distribution method is realistically doable and only requires a small or moderate amount of effort.

I agree, and I also agree with your raffle proposal, but think that only limiting the winners to those who are online and not afk is pretty unfair to everyone. Instead of clicking for 20+ hours, now you might have to run around in place for 20+ hours. Or you might be at work, and you won the raffle, but can't collect it on time. That would just encourage players to skip on work, or sleep, or meals, just like clicking on the board. It would be better if you got a time limit of 12-24 hours to collect your house prize, imo.

[Barwara]

A raffle also wouldn’t change the fact there’s a shortage of housing. Even if the raffle worked perfectly and everyone had a shot, you might still go months, or years, without getting said house.

[Realism_Snide]

A raffle also wouldn’t change the fact there’s a shortage of housing. Even if the raffle worked perfectly and everyone had a shot, you might still go months, or years, without getting said house.

No, but it will fix the health hazard that spamming a placard for 20+ hours brings.

[Nabiri]

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.

I really love this idea. It sounds fair to me. If we have the gil to pay we should have a chance at our favourite house.

I'm also all in favour of instanced housing (as long as it comes with a yard! and you can choose your size of house!)

[Nabiri]

Crafting doesn't require any monetary investment, in-game or IRL. It only requires some time investment to level up, but that's working for it, isn't it?

Little off-topic, but when SE first announced housing, I pictured it as something we would have to craft.
I figured we would buy a plot, then have to craft a ton of materials to make a SMALL house.
Then if we wanted a medium, we would have to craft a ton of higher level mats to upgrade our house to medium.
Same idea for large.

I had this idea in my head that we could all have the houses we wanted, eventually, if we worked hard for it.

[Wrestlefire769]

No. A raffle situation ignores how much gil these RMT outfits have. They will just buy so many tickets that the sweepstakes basically becomes irrelevant.

It'd be like putting 50 in front of each placard instead of 2-4.

The only solution is to remove all reference to availability until all timers run out. If the gil price is up, the thing can be purchased. If not, at whatever point in the process, the last owner's name is there.

[Reinha]

Housing is a Gil sink. People are treating it like a rare drop or a lucky roll when they suggest stupid ideas like a raffle. It's not supposed to be a reward for the lucky but for the rich.

When you try to give everyone an equal chance with practically no barriers of entry you end up increasing demand by an insane amount. People can afford a small house just by doing the MSQ and selling the gear rewards they don't need. Then, what a surprise, there are too many players at each placard. It's ridiculous.

They need to turn housing into a proper Gil sink by raising the prices to a point where there are actually a handful of empty houses at all times. It would get rid of placard clickers overnight and the random timer would become a non-issue. Everyone would have to reevaluate how much effort they are willing to put in to get a house, if they actually need a medium or mansion and whether or not buying a house is compatible with their frequent breaks from the game. The number of people interested in or capable of paying 20mil for a small, 80mil for a medium and 200mil for a large, for example, is a lot smaller than the amount of people who think they are owed housing right now. Yet those higher prices would allow players to have more control over the process of getting a house compared to being at the mercy of raffle RNG or fighting other players at placards.

Adding Ishgard housing at the previously mentioned example prices would potentially remove 75 billion Gil per server from the game. Having less Gil in circulation would further reduce competition for housing as time goes on and more plots become available.

[Themarvin]

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-day-system%21 <--- this will work