Would a raffle system be that hard?

[Jojoya]

Oh that would definitely be an improvement, though I do really enjoy how FF has us in wards, I like seeing my neighbours around, you know?

How often do you actually see your neighbors in your ward?

It's a rarity for me even though I go to my house a few times a day and I'll even craft in my yard when the weather is Clear/Fair. I've never seen the player who owns the house across from me even though I know they do go there because the yard is changed occasionally. Outside of friends coming to visit me at my house, the only time I've seen someone else in the ward is when I've gone to the marketboard and met someone who was also using it. It's not like my house is in a remote corner. If there was no Aethernet in the ward, there's a sizeable portion of the ward that would pass by my house to get to the beach or merchant stalls. Because the Aethernet exists, they can use that to get where they're going instead.

Wards do feel like ghost towns not because they aren't used but because there's no reason to travel through them.

You got a point there. They'd probably have to do something at raffle entry to sift out the bots from the actual players from the bots without the constant clicking for hours for an invisible timer.

Why would a bot buy a house? They don't have a use for one. If a bot operator is looking for a place a crafting bot can work unobserved, an apartment is a much better choice because they're instantly available and a lot cheaper.

Those automated placard campers aren't bots. They're normal players using simple repeating scripts (probably on a gaming keyboard) to do the clicking for them because they have no problems with cheating to get what they want.

Using the third party tool is still wrong but we really need to stop calling everything a bot when it's not.