My Infographic of the Results of the Latest Private Housing Lottery

[HermitUK]

Pretty simple, just put out an instanced housing system that goes alongside the current system. People who want the neighborhood feel can still compete for those plots, people who don't and just want a house to decorate can have an instanced house. Also, if you provide instanced housing, there would be less competition / demand for the ward plots as well.

You'd still need more servers though. Presumably if it was instanced, the house instance would be spun up when you or someone else visits and spun down when you leave, so you need capacity for that - presumably during busy periods you may not be able to access your house if the instance server is congested (same thing happened with Inn rooms during the EW congestion as I recall). Plus you still need to store all the relevant data regarding house fixtures and fittings, colours, etc.

I'm sure on a per-house basis it would be less resource-intensive than the housing wards, but it still requires some hefty investment in additional server architecture.

[Mika_Zahard]

Funnily enough the small house across from the one I bid on in the FC area didn't get a single bid. Lots of FC smalls are left, too. People had lots of time to make their own dummy FC and get a house so I figured there'd be more competition. But judging by the housing bids, I guess people just don't want a small.

Its more like people dont want to leave their FC/friends only for a chance of an FC house.

If i was in a diff FC on Brynhildr, i'd definetely do it on a heartbeat (i'd have a medium already by this point).

[ChiefDork]

The only time SE ever did a housing rollout well was the last expansions in the 4 wards. They advertised it months in advance did not bring the servers up early and everyone who did due diligence had an equal chance to get a house. They should have done it for this rollout but instead made everything behind the scenes rng vs active rng.

[-Teria-]

All this tells me is that they need to invest some resources into redesigning the layout of wards so that FC specific wards are comprised almost entirely of Large and Medium sized houses with a select few smalls that can't be easily combined with other lots and that they need more private wards across the board for all the solo players.
Or redo apartments in such a way that people can get access to larger interiors through gil purchased upgrades since it's all instanced anyway and puts not load on the server unless someone is inside unlike an entire housing ward which is constant.
Heck maybe a combination of both.
Most people would probably be content with just having an apartment if it meant having the same interior space as a house. There would be a lot less people fighting over housing plots if the only thing they'd really be fighting over is lawn space.

[Avoidy]

Funnily enough the small house across from the one I bid on in the FC area didn't get a single bid. Lots of FC smalls are left, too. People had lots of time to make their own dummy FC and get a house so I figured there'd be more competition. But judging by the housing bids, I guess people just don't want a small.

I bet that'll change with the next lottery, as desperate shell FCs just bid on whatever they can now that the mediums and larges are gone.
What a bummer. So many of these smalls could've made individual purchasers happy.

[Eraden]

That was an amazing collection of statistics and the best part of all of it is that it is actually useful data. I seriously wonder if SE hasn't already done these analyses as well. If they have, I wonder why they have done done anything about it. Is it possible that SE considers such an investment in additional infrastructure as not be able to pay for itself?

[Jojoya]

The only time SE ever did a housing rollout well was the last expansions in the 4 wards. They advertised it months in advance did not bring the servers up early and everyone who did due diligence had an equal chance to get a house. They should have done it for this rollout but instead made everything behind the scenes rng vs active rng.

Uh, no. Let's not try rewriting history and claim that SE has ever done it well.

SE has never done a true rollout during ward additions. A rollout would imply part of the available supply is withheld to be released at staggered intervals to give those online later a chance to purchase. SE has never done that.

Everything was sold out (at least for NA) in the 5.35 ward addition within an hour of the servers of coming online. There were many, many players left out not due to a lack of due diligence but due to very long log in queues caused partly by players trying to get in on what they saw as their only chance to get a house.

Players unable to log on when the servers came online (real life obligation doesn't stop for most people) were left fighting over the placard scraps for the next several months.

The 5.1 ward addition only saw some plots still available weeks later because there was a personal purchase moratorium so only FCs could purchase in the new wards, or existing owners could relocate (no one was going to bother relocating to the less desirable smalls). Plots opened by relocation again saw a lot of placard camping. The small percentage of houses still available in the new wards when the moratorium was lifted also disappeared almost immediately.

Now back in 4.2-4.3 we saw houses available for months because they increased the number of wards by 50% and the player base hadn't yet experienced the massive growth that occurred at the start of 2019 and again in 2021. We're at a point now that it would take more than a 50% increase to meet demand, especially if SE is going to begin reserving the majority of wards for FCs.

[Starshower]

Just goes to show there is an incredible demand for housing, and it's not being met! Only instanced housing can fix this issue!

[Pankzers]

That was an amazing collection of statistics and the best part of all of it is that it is actually useful data. I seriously wonder if SE hasn't already done these analyses as well. If they have, I wonder why they have done done anything about it. Is it possible that SE considers such an investment in additional infrastructure as not be able to pay for itself?

Thank you! Honestly, it's the transparency of the lottery system that has enabled me to collect such raw data in the first place. I spent an hour, maybe two, traversing the housing zones and recording the participant data for my server in a spreadsheet. I wanted my graphic to spur discussion, and hopefully inspire others to do the same and collect data.

I cannot speak to whether Square has decided the costs outweighed the benefits-- but given the global chip shortage greatly spiking the cost of hardware, covid causing the disabling of the auto-demolition, and the great WoW migration and Endwalker causing a population boom, it has certainly resulted in inaction, and demand for housing has seemingly outstripped supply by a large amount. Anecdotal reports from others seem to indicate that Sargatanas was not an outlier, and if anything, that other servers have had worse shortages of housing this round. If Square was not collecting data, they simply must be now due to how the lottery system works, and I can only hope that it spurs them to action in improving the housing situation. As someone who loves their housing system and this game, it makes me sad to see a listed "side activity" of the game limited for a significant portion of the player-base. (I know apartments exist, but by all accounts, they are not expansive enough, and are missing features present in full houses.)

[Jojoya]

I cannot speak to whether Square has decided the costs outweighed the benefits-- but given the global chip shortage greatly spiking the cost of hardware, covid causing the disabling of the auto-demolition, and the great WoW migration and Endwalker causing a population boom, it has certainly resulted in inaction, and demand for housing has seemingly outstripped supply by a large amount. Anecdotal reports from others seem to indicate that Sargatanas was not an outlier, and if anything, that other servers have had worse shortages of housing this round. If Square was not collecting data, they simply must be now due to how the lottery system works, and I can only hope that it spurs them to action in improving the housing situation. As someone who loves their housing system and this game, it makes me sad to see a listed "side activity" of the game limited for a significant portion of the player-base. (I know apartments exist, but by all accounts, they are not expansive enough, and are missing features present in full houses.)

One thing your data can't reflect (though SE should be able to see on their side) is how much of the demand seen in the lottery is from players who are trying to buy their first house and how much is from players trying to relocate their current house to a new location they prefer (and which still may not be the location they actually want).

The latter is still a valid concern but it can't be addressed in the same way that the general need for more houses is. Try to address the demand for specific plot sizes and you end up with what most FC wards in Empyreum look like at the moment - a bunch of mostly empty wards because it's not the small houses most players really want. Even full wards feel like ghost towns most of the time. Half empty wards are even worse.

Don't address the demand for specific plots and you end up with revolving drama over what players are worthy enough to own the most desirable plots. It breeds toxicity, as evidenced by a story someone shared in the Housing forum yesterday morning. They got lucky and won a large in this last lottery. Some of those who didn't get the plot started sending them obscenity-laced tells. That's toxicity bred by the system. If each of those players had been able to get the plot they wanted, none of those tells would have happened.

SE really needs to take a step back and look at both how and how much players utilize housing as part of their game experience. It should be designed around how players actually engage with the content, not some pipe dream that we'll be forming happy little friendly neighborhoods where everyone is dancing together 24 hours a day.