Housing Roulette was an absolute trash idea.

[rainichan]

EQ2 has always had instances and came out the same time as wow. You can have unlimited items basically in your housing instance. My wife built a castle from the ground up. You didn't get a plot/instance with a house. You could get an instance based on a certain zone and build every wall, floor, roof, etc of your house, and fill it with whatever you could place down. Not to mention you could right click and preview paintings and furniture right from the broker. As old as EQ2 is, and with no limitations on instanced housing, it would work here too.

If the servers weren't made for that, it'd take a lot more work to rework everything and would need an entire overhaul of the system, it wouldn't be something they could do in a week on top of everything else for patches + xpac + graphical update. Finite dev time + finite devs makes this incredibly difficult for something that they didn't intend in the first place to code.

Unfortunately "durrrr throw money at it" isn't an actual solution to technical problems.

Considering they wanted to add more DCs during ShB and they even said "we tried throwing money at new servers and they just didn't have them," money is indeed not the answer to this. Their main focus is making sure people can actually play first, as that will always be Priority 1, and as I recall they've said they want to expand housing servers once they're done expanding DCs and additional servers. It'll take time and I know no one wants to hear that it's going to take time, but the need to actually secure things needs to happen first before they can do anything more. At the very least I would love for them to rewrite enough code to compartmentalize housing items filesizes to open a couple more wards each patch, but I don't know how feasible that is.

[Araxes]

I dunno. Back when i bought my medium house, the Server i play on was pretty empty. I just walked up to the house i wanted and bought it. Done.
Back then there was enough houses for everybody who could afford it but they failed to keep up with the rising demand.

Either give instanced housing or give enough wards. That simple tbh.

[MrJPtheAssassin]

I dunno. Back when i bought my medium house, the Server i play on was pretty empty. I just walked up to the house i wanted and bought it. Done.
Back then there was enough houses for everybody who could afford it but they failed to keep up with the rising demand.

Either give instanced housing or give enough wards. That simple tbh.

Never really had issues in SB getting my small, the same goes for any of my friends. I feel the housing issue started in ShB when a huge flood of ppl started playing the game and they really didn't do much with housing in response. I honestly can't remember if they added any new wards in Shb. They may have added maybe 5 wards then? Im not really sure since I can't remember correctly.

[hobostew]

Really feels like housing has become this resource black hole for the devs lol

I wonder if they regret adding it in the first place

[Renathras]

Never really had issues in SB getting my small, the same goes for any of my friends. I feel the housing issue started in ShB when a huge flood of ppl started playing the game and they really didn't do much with housing in response. I honestly can't remember if they added any new wards in Shb. They may have added maybe 5 wards then? Im not really sure since I can't remember correctly.

Well part of the problem is also what players want. Notice the person you replied to said Medium, not Small.

Even right now, there are a bunch of Smalls that weren't sold in the first round because no one bid on them. Many had 3, 2, or even 0 bidders. I bid on one with 0 (first time I ever tried buying a house and I found the slots people weren't bidding on and didn't seem to want and where across the wards there were several versions of that plot that no one was bidding on, meaning it wasn't in high demand) and won since I was the only bidder.

There seem to be enough SMALLS to go around. People just want mansions and think housing is broken when they can't have one. They say they can't get a house, but what they mean is they can't get a Large (or in some cases, a Medium), not that they can't get a house (Small included - Smalls can have gardens and the other stuff players say they want that an Apartment can't do) or have no where to live/put their (indoor) housing items (Apartments and FC chambers both can do that)

[Fable]

I think my favorite was just clicking to buy without the purchase timer. Even with people buying to resell, it felt better to me even on my congested server.

[Joven]

So choose between getting a house and playing with my friends? You realize how unhinged that is right? Or even the ping issues from being in a foreign DC?

And even within same region, having to leave a FC *with your friends*, spend *real money* to transfer, for a *chance* at a house? That's not a solution, that's another problem!

So someone offers you a suggested workaround you call them "unhinged"? Ok. And I wasn't referring to you specifically. Other people who are less attached to their data center might see it as an opportunity. Just because it doesn't work for you doesn't mean it can't work for someone else.

You aren't owed a house simply for having a subscription. From this level of reply you're not looking for a solution, you just want a gimme.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Really feels like housing has become this resource black hole for the devs lol

I wonder if they regret adding it in the first place

At this point just nuke the whole system. Either allow the feature to be accessible to all players or dont have it at all.

[MrJPtheAssassin]

Well part of the problem is also what players want. Notice the person you replied to said Medium, not Small.

Even right now, there are a bunch of Smalls that weren't sold in the first round because no one bid on them. Many had 3, 2, or even 0 bidders. I bid on one with 0 (first time I ever tried buying a house and I found the slots people weren't bidding on and didn't seem to want and where across the wards there were several versions of that plot that no one was bidding on, meaning it wasn't in high demand) and won since I was the only bidder.

There seem to be enough SMALLS to go around. People just want mansions and think housing is broken when they can't have one. They say they can't get a house, but what they mean is they can't get a Large (or in some cases, a Medium), not that they can't get a house (Small included - Smalls can have gardens and the other stuff players say they want that an Apartment can't do) or have no where to live/put their (indoor) housing items (Apartments and FC chambers both can do that)

As said before that is server based. On high-pop servers like mine and most of aether even small dry up very quickly. Stop comparing your server to others since yours may not be as high pop as mine or other servers. I can bet you right now there be very lil smalls on Jenova in the next lottery. Also, ppl can be picky if they want since all housing areas are not created equally. I don't know anyone who likes the goblet and the ones who are in the goblet want out badly including myself. I told my story a lot in this thread so I'm not repeating it again but I just say I have a large that I really hate for a lot of reasons now and I want to leave it badly. I'm even going to downgrade to a med if I can win one in a better housing area(which means any housing area that is NOT the goblet). If you are in a area you really hate its hard to enjoy a house so I don't blame ppl who are picky. Maybe they need to update the goblet design and actually make it look nicer and not a brown turd.

[Kewitt]

Having gotten a small with the old system losing it because I was in the hospital for a year. Getting a 2nd one with the old system.
Moving this time to a medium house, this time was way better.