Housing Roulette was an absolute trash idea.

[dspguy]

The system is fine the way it is. Lottery wasn't supposed to fix the shortage. It was supposed to remove placard spamming and fighting bots for a plot. Honestly, placard spamming was just lottery where you sat there for 12-24 hours spamming a placard, mostly against bots with an advantage. Essentially, your odds were, at best, 1/number of players there. Which is just like lottery now. Except no reason to stand around and waste a day on a virtual house.

I can't speak for other servers, but on my server - there are still smalls in the new wards that weren't purchased. We are on a decently populated server. If we have plots that weren't purchased in this first round - we are essentially right where we need to be supply-wise. Maybe a touch more in the future as more players come into the fold. However, auto-demolition might free up enough to balance it out.

FCFS wasn't right for people that can't login at 5am EST on patch day and play a different lottery - the queue lottery.
Placard spamming wasn't right for people that can't dedicate days to fighting spamming bots for a house.
Lottery evens the playing field.

The only thing I can say about placard spamming... is it would have worked if the random lockout was much shorter. If you recall, part of the reason for the lockout was the prevent people from relinquishing a plot and having someone relocate into that spot, in exchange for gil. If they made the lockout short - like 15-30 minutes, it would be just enough time to make it too risky to pay someone for the plot that you might not get. And 30 minutes of spamming a placard isn't terrible and it also rewards those that are dedicated to checking ward vacancies often.

Edit: I just checked the 5 housing districts - wards 26-30. 107 open plots. Some mediums. That's not counting plots vacated due to relocation. 107 unbid plots. IMO, if you don't have a house on Leviathan by now, you don't really want one. According to sources online that estimate server population, Leviathan is right in the middle for total population and near the top for active population. I'd say that's a good barometer for the status of housing.

Most servers have no shortage.

[Khryseis_Astra]

I mean, it is a fantasy game…

Sorry it ate my reply!

People are too difficult, people want shiro or mist, while ishgard or goblet are almost completely deserted, and yet people complain that there's no houses, it really is self inflicted at this point

I mean, it is a fantasy game…

[Khryseis_Astra]

I’m sure people have lore/head cannon reasons for preferring certain areas, as well as just aesthetic reasons. And it varies per server. Empyreum is actually pretty popular on my world… but we have a huge contingent of crafters who practically lived in Firmament (and many still do! lol) I like Lav because it’s waterfalls and forests. As someone who actually spends a lot of time at their house, I have to like the scenery.

I’m just wondering what happens when all the hype dies down, and there’s that dead zone before 7.0. Are we still going to have to sit in 9-day lottos? Or could they maybe bring instant relo back? I got my first house pre-ShB. I had my choice of 3 empty plots that had been sitting empty for so long that there wasn’t any placard spamming required. My current house was an instant relo to a medium that was auto-demoed. After having a medium for over a year, I realized I prefer the layout of a small better, despite losing the extra floor. But I’ve lost every lotto I put in for. Last one was only 5 people, til number 6 swooped in and won on the last day. I know people who would love to upgrade, but I can’t downsize! lol Hoping everyone goes after the handful of mediums that opened up last round so maybe I can finally get my small and give someone else another chance at an upgrade.

[JOsha]

Once again, you never had to camp a placard all day long, the only time you needed to camp was in the middle of prime time.

Not necessarily. Prime time might've been when a lot of houses were opened up but that doesn't change the fact that the house could've opened up before or after. Not every house went on sale during prime time. Also even 3-4 hours is a lot, you really expect people to be jobless just sitting there for that long when they could either spend that time playing ff or something else? Spend time working, etc?


What about people like me who don't have a server in our country, the closest is EU and we get a ping of 150-180ms, it was virtually impossible to fight against european's playing on 20-50ms.

[JOsha]

Ladies ladies...lets all calm down in a bubble bath.

That said I think it would be nice to..
1. Make the lotto system much shorter
2. Allow you to ask your retainer to place a bid on up to 3 choices of lot; using the gil you have on them. Your retainer would automatically bid on any of those lots based on the priority (1>2>3) allowing folks to bid that do not have time; while still keeping the lotto intact; while drastically speeding up the entire housing process.

These are good suggestions, the kind that we need. I also agree that the lotto system needs to move faster.

[hobostew]

People are too difficult, people want shiro or mist, while ishgard or goblet are almost completely deserted, and yet people complain that there's no houses, it really is self inflicted at this point

I remember I saw this coming years ago because even when it was the current expansion Ishgard was always a complete ghost town on account of it being extremely gloomy and depressing. What the community should have asked for is Sea of Clouds housing so we could live out our sky pirate dreams. Too late now I suppose.

[MrJPtheAssassin]

I wish Jenova's Ishard was a ghost town...Again Im looking for a med not a small. Even then I have seen a few smalls here and there but not that many on my server's ishgrad. Also does anyone knows if there a tracker for lottey cycles? (really wish they tell us the bid starting day and ending day on the timer menu...)

[Packetdancer]

It was luck. Not Dedication.

I've said before in many housing threads that I have my personal house due to simple dumb luck.

I had been playing placard-clicking games for hours. I lost one house to someone relocating after I'd been there click-click-clicking for two hours, lost another to what I can only assume was a bot, and at another plot I ran into folks from a friend's FC trying desperately to get a house so they could finally do submersibles. (As I knew from my friend that their FC was trying to get a house, I knew the pleas of the folks there from that FC were real.)

In the end I gave up. And then, right as I was about to do something else, I noticed one house free in Shirogane, and went "Well, I'll disappoint myself one last time." Walked up to it, no one was there. "Obviously the timer's still got hours on it." Clicked... and I owned a house.

"Dumb luck" is not a good basis for home ownership (in reality or a virtual world), which is why the lottery is not great. But "dumb luck that drives you to unhealthy habits in the vain belief it will improve your chances" is even worse, which is why the placard system that left people there frantically clicking (or blatantly botting) for hours and hours to get a house was even worse.

I do definitely think they ought to mail back gil (or send you a notice you won) rather than making you go check the placard... but I suspect the reason they don't is that the quantity of data that would abruptly slam into the systems might make things fall over. And they probably are (rightly) concerned that if people lost the house and then the mail system sent their gil into the void, they would be Rather Angry.

[Packetdancer]

Because they're lazy and don't want to give players what they want or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Almost certainly not this. On a wild guess, memory/bandwidth considerations; smaller housing units are easier to persist to and from long-term storage, as a lower number of furnishings (and fewer customization switches to flip) means a smaller maximum size on the data blob being sent back and forth. Apartments staying within a smaller range almost assuredly means that they can instance more of them, meaning they can have higher availability.

Most likely, the housing instance servers have something like "an apartment takes X amount of bandwidth/memory, a small house takes 1.5X amount of bandwidth/memory, a medium takes 3X, and a large takes 6X" or whatever. (Numbers are entirely made up and just for illustrative purposes.) Meaning that for each large house, that same amount of resourcing could run 6 apartments, or whatever the real/accurate number would be.

Changing absolutely nothing else, if you just made apartment interiors the same size as large houses, it's likely we'd be able to have fewer of them 'active' at a time, and the 'you could not leave the area' error when there's no housing instance space available would be a lot more prevalent.

And while it's easy to say "just add more servers", it's also worth noting that the houses need to be saved to/from long-term storage when they're loaded in or unloaded. You need a centralized place for that, and it's quite possible to overload those systems when scaling up; witness the issue when the housing lottery was first introduced, where messages with the winning plot numbers got lost because of the sheer volume of lotteries. It was bad when it broke the lotteries. It would be so much worse if the things that got lost were the changes that people made to the houses they have; spending three hours decorating only to have it drop the changes on the floor would be heartbreaking and infuriating.

All of those problems can be solved from a technical standpoint, yes. But they're best solved at the initial time of server design, and the servers for this game were put together under the gun and incredibly hastily during the ARR relaunch; it's quite possible (arguably, even likely) that those issues cannot be solved with the current state of the back-end servers, so would require large amounts of redesign/rework.

I would actually love for there to be fully instanced housing, because I'd love for everyone to have housing. The reason I personally look for alternative solutions -- decoupling FC workshop or gardening from house ownership, moving FCs onto instanced 'airships' (because there are fewer FCs than players, and if you require a certain minimum rank and membership level, you put a soft cap on the number of instances needed) and out of wards (to free up space for individuals to get the housing plots), etc. -- is just because I suspect fully instanced housing is not feasible under the current server structure.

And while I would not be surprised if the devs, e.g. CBU3, would actually like to redesign the servers such that they could support it -- because let's be honest, anyone supporting a ten-year-old codebase probably wants to redesign it anyway -- I doubt that the publisher, e.g. SQEX, would sign off on it.

(Yes, it's easy to say that SQEX gets a lot of money off of FFXIV and that the money should go back into it, and that getting a team to rearchitect the servers to something more modern and less hastily-slapped-together during the ARR reboot would be a wise investment. While the statement is true, that does not change the fact that it isn't how video game publishing works... at least not at any game publisher I dealt with, in my personal experience. And while none of those were SQEX specifically, I certainly suspect the same is true here.)

[Joven]

Almost certainly not this. On a wild guess, memory/bandwidth considerations; smaller housing units are easier to persist to and from long-term storage, as a lower number of furnishings (and fewer customization switches to flip) means a smaller maximum size on the data blob being sent back and forth. Apartments staying within a smaller range almost assuredly means that they can instance more of them, meaning they can have higher availability.

Most likely, the housing instance servers have something like "an apartment takes X amount of bandwidth/memory, a small house takes 1.5X amount of bandwidth/memory, a medium takes 3X, and a large takes 6X" or whatever. (Numbers are entirely made up and just for illustrative purposes.) Meaning that for each large house, that same amount of resourcing could run 6 apartments, or whatever the real/accurate number would be.

Changing absolutely nothing else, if you just made apartment interiors the same size as large houses, it's likely we'd be able to have fewer of them 'active' at a time, and the 'you could not leave the area' error when there's no housing instance space available would be a lot more prevalent.

And while it's easy to say "just add more servers", it's also worth noting that the houses need to be saved to/from long-term storage when they're loaded in or unloaded. You need a centralized place for that, and it's quite possible to overload those systems when scaling up; witness the issue when the housing lottery was first introduced, where messages with the winning plot numbers got lost because of the sheer volume of lotteries. It was bad when it broke the lotteries. It would be so much worse if the things that got lost were the changes that people made to the houses they have; spending three hours decorating only to have it drop the changes on the floor would be heartbreaking and infuriating.

All of those problems can be solved from a technical standpoint, yes. But they're best solved at the initial time of server design, and the servers for this game were put together under the gun and incredibly hastily during the ARR relaunch; it's quite possible (arguably, even likely) that those issues cannot be solved with the current state of the back-end servers, so would require large amounts of redesign/rework.

I would actually love for there to be fully instanced housing, because I'd love for everyone to have housing. The reason I personally look for alternative solutions -- decoupling FC workshop or gardening from house ownership, moving FCs onto instanced 'airships' (because there are fewer FCs than players, and if you require a certain minimum rank and membership level, you put a soft cap on the number of instances needed) and out of wards (to free up space for individuals to get the housing plots), etc. -- is just because I suspect fully instanced housing is not feasible under the current server structure.

And while I would not be surprised if the devs, e.g. CBU3, would actually like to redesign the servers such that they could support it -- because let's be honest, anyone supporting a ten-year-old codebase probably wants to redesign it anyway -- I doubt that the publisher, e.g. SQEX, would sign off on it.

(Yes, it's easy to say that SQEX gets a lot of money off of FFXIV and that the money should go back into it, and that getting a team to rearchitect the servers to something more modern and less hastily-slapped-together during the ARR reboot would be a wise investment. While the statement is true, that does not change the fact that it isn't how video game publishing works... at least not at any game publisher I dealt with, in my personal experience. And while none of those were SQEX specifically, I certainly suspect the same is true here.)

Um, that was meant as sarcasm and to poke fun at a certain poster here who insists instanced housing is the end all, be all solution for housing and that Sqeenix is holding out on us because they're a lazy, greedy corporation. Which I don't wholey disagree with, but that's beside the point.