Quote Originally Posted by LianaThorne View Post
It is absolutely 100% luck based now, "get good" is a choice of a take since it involves zero skill to push a button once to submit a bid.
While I won't say it wasn't luck, I will say that you can put a little effort into your bidding. I won a Large Plot in the lottery.

On Wednesday after the patch, I went to Empyreum on my world.
I spent a couple hours going to every Large plot in every single FC ward.
I painstakingly typed out the number of bids for each of those plots into a spreadsheet.
I set conditional formatting to black out any plot with 7+ bids on it already.
This showed me trends on where people were bidding heavily. In this case, plot 30/60 across most of the Wards, and Ward 1 as well.

On Friday, I went back to Empyreum.
I sent several more hours revisiting every plot that wasn't blacked out, and updating bids on my spreadsheet.
I changed the formatting to now color code 0-1 bid plots, 3-4 bid ones, and black out any with 5 bids or more.

For those plots with one bid (there were around 9 left), I calculated the total number of bids for all plots in that entire Ward. I calculated the total number of bids for each plot across all Wards.

Two plots had the lowest on these values. Ward 9, Plot 42 and Ward 2, Plot 52. I went to check both out. #42 picked up a second bidder. So I immediately set my FC to bid on #52. With the result that I won it.

Was it 100% luck? No. I identified a ward with a smaller bid presence, on a plot with less bids overall. Showing a lack of general interest across the nearly 500 bids I calculated. But neither was it 100% skill either.

It was a combination of factors.
First the tactical advantage of knowing when and where to bid. Not rushing in right from the beginning, but instead waiting until others had done so, which gave me an edge and showed me what to avoid.
Second was luck, yes. Nobody else came to bid on plot #52, which means the data I collected held solid. I was worried Friday evening and Saturday morning before the results, that a flood of new bids were coming just before the results, as a number of people were expecting. But it seems as if most did their bidding through the week.
Third was the percentage. My FC placed four bids worth 47,500,000 gil apiece on this plot. Giving an 80% chance for my FC to win the plot vs. the 20% chance of the original bidder.

This isn't something that could have been done with the old placard system, of course. And in terms of Personal housing, it's more hit or miss.
But it can honestly be employed just as well. When a new lottery started for personal plots, you could as easily go in the day before and scout them all, record the same data. See where the majority of bidding is taking place for those plots.

It's time consuming, and it's not easy. But it may also pay off and give anyone the edge to get a personal. By letting them know where and when to bid, to make the odds work in their favor.