Thank you, lottery

[Jojoya]

I'd rather camp a placard. I've lost 3 lotteries on medium houses, and I haven't checked yet, but there's probably none left now in any of the areas' personal wards. Every lottery cycle that goes by gets worse and worse, as fewer and fewer houses are available, and more and more people bidding on the smaller number of what's left.

You'd genuinely be happier giving up 15-25 hours that could be used to play other parts of the game just to lose out on 3 houses to bots and leave you in the same position as the lottery has so far?

Think hard on that. Perhaps you're someone with lots of extra time on your hands to waste but most players aren't.

It's still not the lottery that's causing the problem. It's the lack of supply to meet demand, whether that demand is to get a house at all or to get a specific size/plot location. It's not going to matter what purchase system SE implements, there will be players who are left unhappy unless SE fixes supply.

I think this will continue for JP/NA/EU new servers too.

JP isn't getting new worlds. They're just redistributing some of the existing worlds to a new data center to ease log in congestion.

SE is going to have to tread carefully with the new NA/EU worlds. Data center travel will not be the amazing game changer that some make it out to be. There's a lot to be learned from both Materia and from the current state of the housing system under the lottery. There's no incentive to leave friends behind if you're moving to a worse situation for the sake of benefits that won't materialize for several month.

[Archaell]

Previous system was better for players willing to put in the placecard clicking time. It was not fun, plenty of wasted time, but even with bots the chance of getting a plot was several times higher due to smaller competition and plots being available more often than the 9-days cycle.

[Shibi]

... There's a lot to be learned from both Materia and from the current state of the housing system under the lottery. There's no incentive to leave friends behind if you're moving to a worse situation for the sake of benefits that won't materialize for several month.

Let's hope they know it's a perfect system and don't need to change a single thing <wink>

I say that with a wink, because you were in the threads back in February/March where I was in begging for housing in the old cities for Materia sooner, and you know there were NA players in those 2 threads saying nope, no FCFS for Materia (even though we play in NA), you must wait for 6.1 and lottery.

Even though we know it's not ideal, I still expect that SE will do the 90 days though, with all the damage that does to server identity and community cohesion on sprout servers.

[And yes, you were right about JP, thanks for the correction, its just moving from 12's to 8's.]

[Jojoya]

Let's hope they know it's a perfect system and don't need to change a single thing <wink>

I say that with a wink, because you were in the threads back in February/March where I was in begging for housing in the old cities for Materia sooner, and you know there were NA players in those 2 threads saying nope, no FCFS for Materia (even though we play in NA), you must wait for 6.1 and lottery.

Even though we know it's not ideal, I still expect that SE will do the 90 days though, with all the damage that does to server identity and community cohesion on sprout servers.

[And yes, you were right about JP, thanks for the correction, its just moving from 12's to 8's.]

I still feel that lottery was the correct decision, though I agreed with you (and the others) at the time that the long delay was unnecessary. As expected, RMT and players operating multiple shell FCs showed up. The lottery at least would give players a fighting chance to win against those abusing the system.

What I don't think any of us anticipated was SE reserving 18 wards in every housing district including Materia worlds even though there's no way any Materia world already had 5400 FCs let alone FCs that would meet purchase requirements. Instead of RMT and shell operators having to fight to get their foothold on prime plots, SE handed them over on a silver platter.

Imagine if SE had made an exception for the Materia worlds and set it up as wards 1-4 FC and 5-24 personal even with the lottery. That would still have been 1200 houses for FCs but 6000 for Personal. Do you think you'd still be seeing problems or would almost everyone be settled into their personal house if they wanted one by now?

Sadly, I agree with you that SE is likely to do the same thing again on the new EU and NA worlds this summer. Maybe now's the time to open a dialog in General Discussion with feedback in hopes they can still make changes to whatever their plans are. It's not just housing that will be an issue.