Fix Housing Megathread

[Thorncraft]

Once a plot is relinquished 8-12 hours for relocation after that NO more relocation and it goes up for sale. Maybe instantly for sale or for a 4-6 hour window (something reasonable). It sucks waiting hours and hours just to have someone relocate because the "invisible timer" can take up to 24 ungodly hours.

[Catstab]

Once a plot is relinquished 8-12 hours for relocation after that NO more relocation and it goes up for sale. Maybe instantly for sale or for a 4-6 hour window (something reasonable). It sucks waiting hours and hours just to have someone relocate because the "invisible timer" can take up to 24 ungodly hours.

I see where they were coming from with the 24 hour timer. With a 4 hour time you could release a plot at 3 am and it would sell by 7, making transfers pretty simple. That said, I think the timer in general is a travesty. People pour blood, sweat, and tears into thousands of hours camping every day across the game. It's horrible. SE really needs to come up with a way to make the camping process fully passive.

Obviously their thinking was we would just walk up, check, no. Walk up 6 hours later, check, no. 4 hours later, check, yes! But in reality, you can click 36,000 times in those 10 hours, so players will click 36,000 times.

[Nepentha]

I see where they were coming from with the 24 hour timer. With a 4 hour time you could release a plot at 3 am and it would sell by 7, making transfers pretty simple. That said, I think the timer in general is a travesty. People pour blood, sweat, and tears into thousands of hours camping every day across the game. It's horrible. SE really needs to come up with a way to make the camping process fully passive.

Obviously their thinking was we would just walk up, check, no. Walk up 6 hours later, check, no. 4 hours later, check, yes! But in reality, you can click 36,000 times in those 10 hours, so players will click 36,000 times.

My college degree is in psychology, research specifically. In one of my freshman research methods classes, we did a study using rats to determine behavior with different delivery of food (reward).

Other groups got fixed ratio schedules (the rat would receive a pellet after a set number of bar presses). Or Fixed interval (the rat receives a pellet after a set amount of time has passed).

My team got the variable ratio schedule. (There's also fixed ratio which has similar results.) There was no set amount of time or number of bar presses. Meaning the rat had no idea when they would get a food pellet, no matter how many times it pressed the bar or how long it waited between bar presses. It was entirely random. Much like the clicking of a placard in FFXIV's housing savage.

Predictably, the other rats learned to either wait a certain amount of time, then go press the bar for a food pellet. Or press the bar a certain number of times to get a food pellet. Our rat, having absolutely no freaking clue when it'd get a pellet, never stopped pressing it.

Thanks to SE, players have been reduced to rats on a fixed or variable ratio schedule.

[Catstab]

Predictably... Our rat, having absolutely no freaking clue when it'd get a pellet, never stopped pressing it.

Yeah, I don't know what SE expected other than what they got. As you say, the results are predictable.

People need to be given information for their own good, or they hurt themselves learning the hard way. The timer is not explained in detail anywhere by SE, leaving first time house buyers to depend on veteran players for advice. Even the advice of veteran players is just "click or use a controller for 4 hours straight over and over again." And of course the more desperate players ignore that advice and continue to click closer to the full 24 hours of the timer, over and over again.

Yoshi P says they will consider a lottery, and I really hope they find a way to keep the bots from taking an unfair advantage from it. Barring that, and barring the "enough houses for everyone" hope- I'm starting to think the best suggestion rolling around lately is Themarvin and the "3 placard clicks per day" idea. It would force all of us to use the timer as SE intended. Check and see, come back much later. Even the bots would not be able to overpower such a system. I didn't love the idea at first, but I'm coming around.