<MATERIA> First-Come First-Served AND Lottery Plots

[Taitaibun]

Onions wold be nice. Right now it's a case of relying on that one person who brings over hundreds of onions every three days. I wonder how many hundreds of millions of gil they have made? It would have to be a lot.

(Aether being locked for new characters means I have 1 mule left, and I don't want to use him up yet to do the same)

Until then - have a level 3 alt on another data centre... buy up cheap onions and mule them over please you make good profit and my Choco can level more.

heh.

I mean give me the gil on another server and I'll do it? None of my alts really have gil or anything, I only play my main which is on Bismarck. Oooor wait until 6.1 for your onions. I'd offer to buy onions for you but I'm keeping my housing hoard fund.

[Shibi]

I mean give me the gil on another server and I'll do it? None of my alts really have gil or anything, I only play my main which is on Bismarck. Oooor wait until 6.1 for your onions. I'd offer to buy onions for you but I'm keeping my housing hoard fund.

Or release the old cities now. And we can get started.

[Divinemights]

They definitely is not going to release Materia wards until 6.1 and go live with lottery system. This is their only way to prevent/reduce the possibility of RMT obtaining plots.

RMR will not be able to use leaks of current system to their own advantage. They will need to go through lottery system like normal players

[Taitaibun]

They definitely is not going to release Materia wards until 6.1 and go live with lottery system. This is their only way to prevent/reduce the possibility of RMT obtaining plots.

RMR will not be able to use leaks of current system to their own advantage. They will need to go through lottery system like normal players

I don't really get what you mean with leaks. Currently everyone has to click for a house for hours, days, weeks, if not months to even get one. It's all random, just depends on who clicks buy first after the hidden timer goes off.
Plus if you're in a house/fc sales communities they don't allow RMT, so that eliminates that chance.

[Jojoya]

I did think of a way that SE could initially roll out wards on a FCFS basis while retaining some measure of fairness - stagger the release of the wards (assuming that is possible with their programming).

Example: if servers come up at 3am, ward 1 + subdivision become available immediately. Ward 2 + subdivision would be available at 5am. Ward 3+ subdivsion available at 7am, etc.

It staggers the opening the wards so those not able to be online when the servers come up from maintenance would at least have some small choice of wards at a time they can get online.

Then once everything is sold out or after a preset period (which ever comes first), change wards to lottery. That way there's no massive waiting period for getting a house but there's also no unfair advantage to those who are able to get online at a single specific time.

They definitely is not going to release Materia wards until 6.1 and go live with lottery system. This is their only way to prevent/reduce the possibility of RMT obtaining plots.

RMR will not be able to use leaks of current system to their own advantage. They will need to go through lottery system like normal players

There's no way to prevent RMT from getting into the system unless they ditch the wards and go full instanced, or they remove FC housing. As long as players have some way to transfer control of a housing location, RMT will exist when the supply is smaller than the demand.

I don't really get what you mean with leaks. Currently everyone has to click for a house for hours, days, weeks, if not months to even get one. It's all random, just depends on who clicks buy first after the hidden timer goes off.
Plus if you're in a house/fc sales communities they don't allow RMT, so that eliminates that chance.

Why people use script bots to do the clicking - they can go do other things on a different account or outside of the game.

Those communities have no way to prevent RMT. Additional arrangements can able be made outside of their specific discords with no one the wiser as long as no one says anything. They can't police member behavior outside of the discord.

[Shibi]

I did think of a way that SE could initially roll out wards on a FCFS basis while retaining some measure of fairness - stagger the release of the wards (assuming that is possible with their programming)..

Stagger opening was one of the first things I thought of for Materia old cities, but it's likely not going to work as they seem to need to always need to bring down the servers.

Plus of course, the vast bulk of Materia players who will be after housing don't have the housing quests done yet (they are locked). Those need to be collected and then travel and go in from the overland to enter the wards and buy. Staggered wards through opening, mean it's possible the ward could be full and people can't enter to complete the quest.

My thought after, for people stuck in the queue, and people playing from NA, where a release is likely to be 3am or so, was how it could be nice if they can set all houses placard timers to an exact time, but stagger them, rather than staggering opening up the wards.

All wards open (so the housing quests can be done 4 times over) but Ward 1 opens up as fcfs immediately... Ward 2's placards are open and clickable, but will be purchasable from hour 1... Ward 3's placards are open and clickable, but will be purchasable from hour 2... up to ward x-y are going to be half lotto solo and lotto fc.

Or do it over 12 hours, with 2 wards popping open each time.

[Bubble_Butt]

I personally like lottery : if you work full time, it's impossible with the old system to have the free time to 'camp' and its a system that favours faster connection / PC / etc and it's also unhealthy. As it is now, I am personally against FCFS.

But I think the staggering idea would stop a lot of issues with the FCFS system and this needs more attention / upvotes. I am for lottery, but staggered FCFS would be just as good and in some cases better.

The positives of staggering and reducing the windows and have different wards at different times seems - people generally play with those in their zones, would reduce tedium and bots can click forever so I feel it would improve the chance for a RL player to get it. it would allow people that work etc to time their purchases as well.
Especially with bots. The larger the window, the more a human would tire or have commitments to attend to.

I wish we could fix the issue with supply : Bots don't seem as regulated yet on Materia as on JP servers from my experience - the same gil sellers have been running around and the Uldah aetheryte has a chunk of bots inside, regardless of reports.

I can both understand the delay, and somewhat dislike it : It is nice to give fresh players a chance, however I've personally been sitting on house gil since about HW. So I can appreciate both arguments : Some people have been waiting 'in line' for longer than it takes to raise a child and have them go to school. but content should be available for everyone.

Would be great if they implemented some of the great suggestions people have had, but it's always going to come down to more wards. We are dealing with disruptions while they expand things : Hopefully they've taken extra wards into account....

[LunaFancy]

The point everyone seems to be missing is that when new wards are released there is NO TIMER.

First come, first served means literally that. You log in and run for your plot. If you miss one you dash to an aethershard and try for the subdivision or a different ward. You have multiple options and everyone is on a level playing field, I won a large in a new ward drop back on NA when I missed my first choice and ported to the subdivision immediately.

Fresh world FCFS is fair for all and on top of that you have multiple chances to get a plot on the night, lottery removes all the positive aspects of fresh wards.

The lottery is horrible for fresh wards. You have one shot and if you miss that one shot- you might not get another.

I don't think there is a single soul who would argue that the timer on demolished plots was a good thing, but new plots in fresh wards have never had a timer. So why people are all acting as if we were going to be fighting bots in a click war in the new wards is beyond me. It was never going to happen that way.

[Damptoe]

The point everyone seems to be missing is that when new wards are released there is NO TIMER.

Exactly. The lottery just makes the process of getting a house painfully longer for very few benefits when we could be kickstarting our economy and community instead.

There is no RMT problem for fresh housing districts and we're getting all 5 of them at once. I also fancy a real player's chances in a foot race against a dumb bot in a multiboxing situation, but I don't see a need for cheaters to use bots in the first place given how many plots will stay available for a long time anyway.

With the current population, houses will likely remain unsold for months potentially, with Ravana probably being the only exception. Unless there's a massive migration of people who held out until housing released.

Sephirot feels near or below early Stormblood Kujata's population, when there were still houses for sale with only 12 wards and no Shirogane yet. I know Zurvan and Bismarck will have absolutely zero problems getting houses.

[Jojoya]

Stagger opening was one of the first things I thought of for Materia old cities, but it's likely not going to work as they seem to need to always need to bring down the servers.

Plus of course, the vast bulk of Materia players who will be after housing don't have the housing quests done yet (they are locked). Those need to be collected and then travel and go in from the overland to enter the wards and buy. Staggered wards through opening, mean it's possible the ward could be full and people can't enter to complete the quest.

Agree that it's something that SE might not be able to do but it's an idea thrown out in case it is possible.

As for not having the housing quests done - I don't think that's going to end up an additional bottleneck. Someone who's doing one of those quests when the servers come up will likely be doing it because they intend to be buying a plot or purchasing their lottery entry immediately. They would in the wards regardless and that crowd is going to be broken up between the 24 different wards. Most players do not care what ward number they are in, they care about the plot location. If they try to get into ward 3 and it's full, they can always choose ward 19.

The point everyone seems to be missing is that when new wards are released there is NO TIMER.

First come, first served means literally that. You log in and run for your plot. If you miss one you dash to an aethershard and try for the subdivision or a different ward. You have multiple options and everyone is on a level playing field, I won a large in a new ward drop back on NA when I missed my first choice and ported to the subdivision immediately.

Fresh world FCFS is fair for all and on top of that you have multiple chances to get a plot on the night, lottery removes all the positive aspects of fresh wards.

The lottery is horrible for fresh wards. You have one shot and if you miss that one shot- you might not get another.

I don't think there is a single soul who would argue that the timer on demolished plots was a good thing, but new plots in fresh wards have never had a timer. So why people are all acting as if we were going to be fighting bots in a click war in the new wards is beyond me. It was never going to happen that way.

Don't think that many are expecting the timers to be there (unless they're new to the game and haven't experienced a ward release).

What they're concerned about is getting locked out of housing because they couldn't log in the exact second the server came online so by the time they're able to log in, what they want is gone with no chance to get it (and everything else might be gone as well if they can't log in until after work).

Lottery gives them a chance to get a plot if they can't log on right away. FCFS without timer would not unless the supply is so much larger than demand so plots are still sitting open days later.

That leaves the question of how much demand there is. The number of characters currently on a world doesn't mean much when a lot of those characters were created solely for free game time and the patch itself looks like it won't be until mid-April. A census at the end of March will probably give a much better estimate as it could check to see how many players have completed the 2.0 MSQ by that time.

Exactly. The lottery just makes the process of getting a house painfully longer for very few benefits when we could be kickstarting our economy and community instead.

There is no RMT problem for fresh housing districts and we're getting all 5 of them at once. I also fancy a real player's chances in a foot race against a dumb bot in a multiboxing situation that just slows them down, but I don't see a need for cheaters to use bots in the first place given how many plots will stay available for a long time anyway.

Given the current population, houses will likely remain unsold for months potentially, with Ravana probably being the only exception. Unless there's a massive migration of people who held out until housing released.

Sephirot feels near or below early Stormblood Kujata's population, when there were still houses for sale with only 12 wards and no Shirogane yet. I know Zurvan and Bismarck will definitely have no problem getting houses.

Housing is a nice tool but it's not needed to "kickstart" a community (not to mention that wards inevitably end up dead unless there are a couple of free companies present with members coming and going, or running the RP venues.

While it's got an economic role it can play via sale of housing furnishings, what your economy really needs is an infusion of players ready to spend gil on your marketboards. You're not going to get much of an economic boost if the only players who can afford to buy are the ones who are also doing the selling. All those level 30 characters getting a million gil aren't helping much if they were abandoned as soon as they hit 30 because the player was really after the free game time.

The housing process is already painfully long. The lottery isn't going to make it any worse. The real obstacle is players needing to wait for 6.1 when they're ready to purchase now.