Ishgard Housing No Lottery For Wards

[Rolder50]

This is what I feel will be an incredibly rude awakening for many people championing the lottery system. With a free-for-all system, you could bounce around to different houses or wards to hopefully grab your "backup house." When house hunting myself, I always picked out several just in case I couldn't log in fast enough or someone beat me to the plot I wanted. With the lottery system, you get one shot—with odds ranging below 1%. Lose the lottery and you can pretty much kiss housing good bye because now every plot is gone and they won't release new wards for a year or two at best.

Once again, they're just slapping a band-aid on an objectively terrible system and people are eating it up without releasing just how bad it'll end up being in the long haul.

Frankly, any system they put into place with the current setup of wards and such is going to be an objectively terrible bandaid. First come first serve screws over people who can't be up at the butt-crack of dawn when servers come up, or have poor load times even if they can. Lottery has the issues you mentioned here. Free for all with a random timer rewards people who can no life sit in front of a placard and rewards those who can set up a keyboard macro.

The only true fix would be to add some kind of instanced housing to go alongside the wards we have now but for some reason they adamantly refuse to do this.

[Eretria]

Yes, our FC has a large. Yes, I have a medium. I had a small and made use of the relocation immediately thing. I should be advocating for FCFS right? No. I am not. I felt bad when I relocated and there were folks standing there clicking, but human nature being what it is, I relocated anyway. That was the system, right? When I would see plots come open I would calculate primetime for my friends so they could walk right up, click, and get the house after only an hour instead of the 12+ hours others stood there for.

The entire time I was doing this, the entire time, in voice, all of us, were lamenting that this was a horrible, horrible, horrible system. Just let us deposit money, draw a winner, and have done with it. And now they are doing it. I am so very happy, for all those in my FC who don't have the TIME to click. They don't have want to choose between hopping into an expert queue or farm a mount, or advance their story and having to sit. clicking. a. placard. May as well be playing a phone game at that point. They work. They have real lives. They can't login at 4am to sit in queue.

Will they win a lottery right away? Probably not. But instead of hours clicking, now it'll just be the same effort it takes to not win the cactpot. With far better odds. I guess those advocating FCFS feel that folks with less time to play, but who pay the same amount for the game, haven't "earned" a house, or "put in the work" and that it "isn't that hard" to click. I disagree. Folks with an hour a day to play have the same right to a chance at a house as me, who works from home and can play anytime.

[ForteNightshade]

Sure if you target a highly coveted plot, your odds will become worse which is understandable. Even now, a medium or large plot on an existing world can easily attract 50 or more players camping it due to their scarcity and desirability.

However, if you just want a house, I doubt you will be competing against more than 10 or even 5 players at most in a lottery.

Let's say there are 20,000 active players in an average world and 6,000 players already have a house in the existing wards. That leave 14,000 active players entering a lottery of 1,440 Ishgard plots, which is an average of 10 players to 1 plot.

If we take into account that some of these players will be competing for highly desired plots, this brings down the average even lower for a player just looking for any house.

I'm pretty sure if you are willing to scout around, you maybe find a plot which has 2-3 or even 0 players trying for. Hardly the hundreds of ppl to per plot odds which has been bandied around to scare people off.

Just for perspective, an average of 50 players per lottery plot equal 50,000 active players on a world looking for houses, am average of 100 players equal 100,000 active players on a world. Recent census have shown that even on the most populous servers like Balmung and Mateus, the number of active players still fall below 30,000 players.

You would be amazed just how many people will camp smalls.

The problem with your estimation is it doesn't account for half the Wards being FC restricted. Therefore, we're reducing that 1,440 to 720 which effectively doubles all the people competing for the same plots. With that said, you aren't entirely incorrect. There will likely be a handful of houses with a small amount of applicants... just like how a handful of smalls still linger even a half hour after the servers go live with the current FCFS system. The only difference is the present system allows you to have multiple plots to increase your odds of landing a house while the new lottery system does not. No matter how you slice it, most houses will be substantially harder to get because you only have one chance.

You'd rather some people have no chance just so you can fight with bots which could be potentially even lower chance then lottery. Yea SE doesn't agree with you on how it should be.
Also in pretty sure that they said somewhere they aren't releasing all the plots at one time so back to square one with 5000+ people competing for 200 plots

You aren't competing with bots when new wards launch. They're only an issue once plots are demolished. That is when a lottery system makes sense to avoid the RNG nonsense of waiting 1 to 22 hours.

And SE isn't doing this because of bots. Don't kid yourself. If SE actually cared, they would invest into a proper housing system, revamp the Apartments or actually do something about bots. They aren't and they don't. You need only look at the guy who owes 40 plots over on Gilgamesh to show how much SE cares about botting.

[ForteNightshade]

Frankly, any system they put into place with the current setup of wards and such is going to be an objectively terrible bandaid. First come first serve screws over people who can't be up at the butt-crack of dawn when servers come up, or have poor load times even if they can. Lottery has the issues you mentioned here. Free for all with a random timer rewards people who can no life sit in front of a placard and rewards those who can set up a keyboard macro.

The only true fix would be to add some kind of instanced housing to go alongside the wards we have now but for some reason they adamantly refuse to do this.

Definitely

Every system they've attempted is objectively terrible in one form or another. It's just annoying to see people praising the devs and shouting how much better housing will be because of the lottery when it won't change anything. In fact, the odds will be lower.

What we should be doing is demanding a better system. Not praising them for throwing yet another band-aid on their stubborn neighborhood concept that hasn't worked for over half a decade. Even adjusting Apartment sizes would be a step forward but apparently "they weren't designed for that!"

[Breakbeat]

allows them to go "Y'know, I never really thought of having a house. But hey why not". Then they stop what they are doing, go put their lottery in, and just go right back to the content they WANTED to be doing in the first place. They'll get the plot, then do nothing with it but walk into it every so often to save it.

Yep, to be fair, that's pretty much me, except for the fact that I would spend a fair amount of time designing the place, then when bored of that design, re-designing the place, and repeat - so there would be, for me, entertaining hours spent; I wouldn't be 'just walking in to save it.'

That being said, though, the time I spend messing with my house would be minimal compared to time I spend in the rest of Eorzea. 1 hour for every 25 doing something else, give or take.

So I completely agree with a portion of any/all housing areas to be FCFS. I'm content to play the lottery, and if I win, great. If I don't, fine. I'll just re-design my apartment for the 183rd time. LOL. There are folks way more into housing than myself who need something more concrete than a lottery to do their chosen thing in FFXIV.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Perhaps the ESO approach would serve better here by making housing instance-based rather than perma-space. Granted I think that would heavily nerf outdoor decorating and kill the fun of seeing other people's houses and outdoor decor in a neighborhood but at the very least this means every player will be able to have their own housing without getting into plot wars. Here's hoping Island Sanctuaries happen to be something akin to that.

I dont think people fully understand how much strain, difficulty and costly for them to just add "more perma plots". I dont imagine the solution is THAT simple for them.

[TwistedTea]

Frankly, any system they put into place with the current setup of wards and such is going to be an objectively terrible bandaid...The only true fix would be to add some kind of instanced housing to go alongside the wards we have now but for some reason they adamantly refuse to do this.

And this is exactly it. It's a supply problem which ward housing will never be able to adequately address with increasing player populations.

Some solutions that people have proposed over the years:

1. Make apartments upgradeable for gil all the way to penthouses. Give balconies for gardening. I think a lot of players will be super happy if apartments could be upgraded in size even without gardening.

2. Introduce a fully instanced housing system while keeping the existing ward housing. A lot of players do not care about having exclusive ward houses in neighbourhoods and would be happy with fully instanced houses which their friends can visit etc. The players who do care about exclusive wards houses can fight it out while everyone else enjoys their fully instanced house.

3. Hopefully, Island Sanctuaries will end up having some form of housing. This will reduce demand for small and less desirable medium ward houses.

[IDontPetLalas]

Yes, our FC has a large. Yes, I have a medium. I had a small and made use of the relocation immediately thing. I should be advocating for FCFS right? No. I am not. I felt bad when I relocated and there were folks standing there clicking, but human nature being what it is, I relocated anyway. That was the system, right? When I would see plots come open I would calculate primetime for my friends so they could walk right up, click, and get the house after only an hour instead of the 12+ hours others stood there for.

The entire time I was doing this, the entire time, in voice, all of us, were lamenting that this was a horrible, horrible, horrible system. Just let us deposit money, draw a winner, and have done with it. And now they are doing it. I am so very happy, for all those in my FC who don't have the TIME to click. They don't have want to choose between hopping into an expert queue or farm a mount, or advance their story and having to sit. clicking. a. placard. May as well be playing a phone game at that point. They work. They have real lives. They can't login at 4am to sit in queue.

Will they win a lottery right away? Probably not. But instead of hours clicking, now it'll just be the same effort it takes to not win the cactpot. With far better odds. I guess those advocating FCFS feel that folks with less time to play, but who pay the same amount for the game, haven't "earned" a house, or "put in the work" and that it "isn't that hard" to click. I disagree. Folks with an hour a day to play have the same right to a chance at a house as me, who works from home and can play anytime.

This person gets it, and I'm not angry at anyone who took advantage of the current system as described above, even though as someone who falls into into the "has a job and can't afford to login and spend my clicking' category. That is the current horrible system, it is what is. I do get frustrated these systems don't improve however.

[Moonlite]

Lottery does suck. But it seems to be the best with current design philosophy at SE. No straining health waiting, no internet speed check, server/login stability issue, or pc speed check. Everyone can leisurely try. Yes the thousands of players who knew they couldn't meet those conditions will probably try. Why shouldn't the whole player base get a chance to try? Yes thousands more will be disappointed they didn't get a house. But before they had zero chance.



On a side note. Did they say if you can see how many people have bid on a house?

[Eraden]

Lottery does suck. But it seems to be the best with current design philosophy at SE. No straining health waiting, no internet speed check, server/login stability issue, or pc speed check. Everyone can leisurely try. Yes the thousands of players who knew they couldn't meet those conditions will probably try. Why shouldn't the whole player base get a chance to try? Yes thousands more will be disappointed they didn't get a house. But before they had zero chance.



On a side note. Did they say if you can see how many people have bid on a house?

To the best of my knowledge, there was no mention of that. Personally, I think it would be a good idea to let players know how many bids have been placed on a property. That would allow players to spread out a bit and give everyone better chances at getting a house.