Lottery is a joke.

[Avoidy]

Balmung has one (1) plot available. Nearly 600 people have bid on it at the time of this writing.
I had a pretty good laugh when I saw that. Housing in Final Fantasy XIV is the greatest joke of all time!

[Yodada]

Balmung has one (1) plot available. Nearly 600 people have bid on it at the time of this writing.
I had a pretty good laugh when I saw that. Housing in Final Fantasy XIV is the greatest joke of all time!

Only 600? Thought the Balmdongians would be more desperate for Houses. Good to see its less then 10% of Houses a new World would be coming with the new DC.

Guess its time to make a few alts on the NA DC to snack a few Houses on the new DC when it comes.

[Pablomaldito]

Only 600? Thought the Balmdongians would be more desperate for Houses. Good to see its less then 10% of Houses a new World would be coming with the new DC.

Guess its time to make a few alts on the NA DC to snack a few Houses on the new DC when it comes.

It's already over 600 bids at less than 48 hours into the lottery. And no, the total number of bidders on this one house is not going to show you just how much demand there is for houses on Balmung. Not everybody is able to permanently set aside millions of gil for a miniscule chance at getting a house in each lottery round.

When Empyreum opened up for the first time, there were easily over 4000 bids out for the 360 personal houses available. When around 180 personal houses became available after the ward reallocation, there were over 3000 bids out there. Those 540 Empyreum houses plus the handful of houses that opened up in the old wards are simply far less than enough to supply the thousands of bidders who were left without a house. They could easily fill multiple entire housing districts and some people would still be left out. That is a better picture of the demand for houses in Balmung. If everybody from Balmung who still wanted a personal house were to transfer to a new server, that server's personal housing allocation would fill up instantly.

edit: I actually made an alt on one of the new servers in your DC. Got a nice medium house in Mist on that character. The new servers in Europe are awesome because they were just added to existing DCs - so they have seamless access to the economies and communities of already established servers. That's something we're not going to have quite as easily with the new NA DC.

[Avoidy]

Only 600? Thought the Balmdongians would be more desperate for Houses. Good to see its less then 10% of Houses a new World would be coming with the new DC.

Guess its time to make a few alts on the NA DC to snack a few Houses on the new DC when it comes.

It's gone higher since then. Also in the previous buying period, there were ~7 plots available and they had roughly 200~300 people entered per plot. 1,400+ across several plots is obviously very different from 600 for one plot, so I don't think this number is necessarily an accurate gauge. For one, it's incomplete. But also there are factors like ward preference (some people hate shirogane), or simple despair. Some people see that number of entries and just walk away without trying. Others have quit the game until 6.2 and simply aren't playing. Others still, simply became so numb to the lottery experience that they forgot we were even in a buying period. This was the case for me; I checked after being reminded by someone else, because the system is such a joke that I've kind of stopped getting my hopes up for it.

The new NA DCs will definitely have a lot of free homes, but actually moving datacenters and leaving everyone you know behind comes with loads of downsides that (imo at least) aren't worth the one upside of owning a home that goes away if you unsub for a little over a month, with shoddy furniture limitations in a dead neighborhood on a friendless dc. I'm positive others will find this trade worthwhile though, since I already know about a dozen people who dumped their FCs so they could start a shell FC and one-time decorate a home that they barely used after furnishing. To me, this is a stupid trade. To them, it's #TotallyWorth and that's fine. To each their own.

[Darthgummibear]

Only 600? Thought the Balmdongians would be more desperate for Houses. Good to see its less then 10% of Houses a new World would be coming with the new DC.

Guess its time to make a few alts on the NA DC to snack a few Houses on the new DC when it comes.

I can guarantee you the number of people who actually want one is much higher. It's just that from my own experience, I would bet that given how much of a dumpster fire the housing system is in this game that a lot of them have simply given up. I wouldn't even have my apartment if someone in my FC hadn't switched servers.

[Yodada]

The new NA DCs will definitely have a lot of free homes, but actually moving datacenters and leaving everyone you know behind comes with loads of downsides that (imo at least) aren't worth the one upside of owning a home that goes away if you unsub for a little over a month, with shoddy furniture limitations in a dead neighborhood on a friendless dc. I'm positive others will find this trade worthwhile though, since I already know about a dozen people who dumped their FCs so they could start a shell FC and one-time decorate a home that they barely used after furnishing. To me, this is a stupid trade. To them, it's #TotallyWorth and that's fine. To each their own.

Crossworld Linkshells, World & DC Travelling will still existing after they released the new DC. Shocking I know. I mean at least a good point that people can't carry Balmung around as a "Look I'm from Balmung" special sign anymore and it wont be the Quicksand you are probably used to if they leave but people can always create a new one on a new World ;P

[Jojoya]

It's gone higher since then.

Hasn't gone up that much - only 666 bids when I looked just now. Being the only available house on Balmung, no one is gaining anything by waiting to enter. There are no other options currently.

It's also hard to say how many of those entries, or of the 1500 or so entries you reported from the last lottery period, are players trying to relocate. Being in Shirogane right next to a marketboard is going to make it very attractive to current house owners.

I don't doubt that there's more demand for houses on Balmung than the current bids represent but people aren't doing themselves any favors by not bidding unless they'd dead set against owning a house in Shiro.

Crossworld Linkshells, World & DC Travelling will still existing after they released the new DC. Shocking I know. I mean at least a good point that people can't carry Balmung around as a "Look I'm from Balmung" special sign anymore and it wont be the Quicksand you are probably used to if they leave but people can always create a new one on a new World ;P

Unless someone is using a third party tool for communication, you're effectively cut off from your friends by being on another logical data center.

For cross world linkshells, friends lists, tells, etc. to be useful, your character needs to at least be on the same logical data center to talk to your friends. It's not going to work if you're still on your home data center unless your friends are also on that data center. You won't be able to be in the same FC as your friends, nor will you benefit from any FC actions being used by the FC your character is in as those don't work cross world let alone cross data center.

Being on a completely new data center with completely new worlds will be an economic headache for sellers considering data center travel is available. When there aren't enough listings to populate your local marketboard to get everything you need, might as well go to a world that will have everything. That means a lot of the gil being generated locally ends up off world with nothing flowing in from other worlds to replace it.

Materia might be isolated by itself, but that works to their economic advantage because they're forced to rely on each other for the items needed/wanted. Gil might change hands between worlds but it's not leaving the data center short of someone giving up and transferring back to their old home world.

There's really little incentive to get people to permanently move to the new NA data center when it opens other than getting the house. A lot of players might transfer temporarily for the Road to 80 buff if they're still leveling alts jobs but they'll transfer back once the 90 day waiting period is over.

[dspguy]

This new lottery system is a joke, it is certainly better than before

Yes, it IS better than before. Many times better than before. The lottery system wasn't designed to fix the housing shortage. It was designed to eliminate placard spamming for hours on end. No one is placard spamming any more. Success.

but having every single player be on the same level when it come to the lottery actually feels terrible.

Ok? Let's go back to placard spamming I guess. Since certainly that was fair...

Getting a house before you were click warring against like 20 other people, which means about 5% chance (given all players were equal).

All players were not equal. Lots of click spammers out there. Maybe the chances should have been 1 in 20, in the hypothetical case you were talking about. But in reality, it was probably more like 1 in 100+. Keep in mind, click spamming bots don't take bio breaks, eat dinner, walk the dog, etc. Maybe you have equal odds if you just happen to be spamming at maximum humanly capable speeds for that one tiny window when the plot was actually released to be purchaseable.

But, the odds were never even with the old system. The lottery system, by pure definition puts all players on equal footing.