Quote Originally Posted by Catstab View Post
500 million gil is nothing to a player that wants to be among the 432 players per server to have a personal large.
125 million or less gil from 4 or more members is nothing for an FC that wants to be one of the 144 per server to have a large.

Even owning a small house is only available to 2,880 characters per server. For something that exclusive, people can rake together 40 million.
The 960 FCs per server that have smalls can probably handle getting 10 mil or less per member together.

These were the prices in ARR era, though they were adjusted by server to compensate for population. We as players begged Yoshi-P to slash them. He said "wealthy players will buy out wards if we do that." We insisted. He caved.

So you have it right there that multiple plot owners would be crippled by the price hike, and with the price hike we can do away with the timer. Frequently, campers spend 100+ hours at small plots before achieving a purchase. So my suggestion saves campers ~100+ hours at the cost of a reasonable amount of gil.
Yes and the prices were cut because no regular player could afford them at the time, leaving housing for only those who treated the game like a business and made house-flipping lucrative (both for gil and for real money).
A large number of players trying to buy small houses now can only afford small houses because they like playing the game casually and/or worry more about what they're doing is fun versus lucrative.
All your suggestion would do is punish players who play casually, which in my eyes is worse.