Quote Originally Posted by Saya_Shriogane View Post
But its not zero right? Also if you tell me that making 17 FC's (or more) containing 4 characters each naming them ABC [1..N] to buy out whole ward is not for RMT purpose im gonna laugh.
Laughter is the best medicine.

Some are. Most aren't. You have players that love to decorate and want to control how the ward looks. You have other players who love the workshop theorycrafting and want access to more workshops to play with different builds (only 4 subs is not enough to accomplish that).

Of those that are purchased for RMT purposes, most aren't being bought for resale. They're being purchased to get access to gardens and workshop to earn gil from selling shards on the marketboard and vendoring salvaged accessories ("100% hand-farmed! No bots involved!") and then selling that gil. While the initial start up cost is a lot, once the right parts are built and access to the correct sectors gained, a very nice gil income is generated.

We can complain about players taking advantage of what SE allows all we want, but ultimately the problem is SE allowing it because they'd rather rely on what rules can be enforced through programming than pay a couple of employees to run reports and monitor things manually. They'd have to make some pretty significant changes to the housing system to put a stop to it, and those changes would like also negatively impact players who are staying within spirit of the system as much as the letter.

SE backed themselves into a corner when they originally decided that housing should be FC only and that they would use that system to support personal housing as well. They should have made personal separate from the start as they had originally announced.

Quote Originally Posted by Reinha View Post
People may not remember this, but on new ward releases people did not have to wait for any invisible timer that would have given bots an advantage. The bots were only a problem for plots that were demolished or auto-demolished. First come first serve meant that you could zone into a newly released ward, walk to a house that had not been bought, and then simply buy it. I managed to buy a house several times that way.

Then people asked for a lottery and here we are.
I remember those days. I got my first house and my current house that way.

It's also days long past. It hasn't been possible on any NA servers since Spring 2019 because SE wouldn't take steps to make certain supply kept up with demand and made shell FCs a more reliable way to obtain a house for personal use since the advent of the lottery than buying a personal house directly.