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

[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.