Quote Originally Posted by Catstab View Post
I mean, I suggested we make housing prices what they used to be. 40 mil smalls, 200m meds, 500m larges. This would be a gil sink of over 30 billion gear a year. Every response was "well then everyone will RMT for housing." So I imagine your auction suggestion will face similar "RMT bait" criticism.

I prefer these larger but fixed prices to your auction idea, since the auction would mean some would get very inexpensive housing and others would pay a great deal. But I do agree a gil sink would be helpful.
The main idea I'm looking at is how it would be possible to allow for someone other than whomever got there first (or relo'd there first) to have a shot at getting the house.

Once we're at a point where there's a different housing reassignment (be it an auction, raffle, or whatever) and a mechanic that allows for discoverability so a third party is able to disrupt a house flip, then its possible to get rid of the timer and let the market sort itself out.

While RMT is a concern, that may be mitigated by SE creating some sort of time token that is sellable on the market (so players can hoard those instead of gil and also convert gil into subscription time).