Would a raffle system be that hard?

[ItMe]

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.

Yeah... whenever I zip around a ward I only really see people at the market boards.
For all their talk of wanting neighborhoods and the community feeling they sure aren't doing much to provide on that front, huh...

Why would a bot buy a house?

... don't they do this to try and flip them?

Those automated placard campers aren't bots.
[...]
Using the third party tool is still wrong but we really need to stop calling everything a bot when it's not.

100%
This is a big pet peeve of mine.