Instanced Housing: Ideas and Details

[Sourcy]

on Balmung

This one. Plus as a schoolteacher, I never was able to be at any of the placard openings on new wards.

[Khryseis_Astra]

I owned somewhere in the region of a dozen different houses during that period, and always felt comfortable letting my sub lapse/letting one get demo'd/relinquishing because I'd be back in something next FCFS wave. Not anymore. I'm honestly more sympathetic to people who started after lottery, as there are truly no shortcuts anymore.

I remember them saying when they first introduced the lotto that some wards could still be FCFS in the future, but that hasn’t happened. And if would be a nice experiment, if they did true FCFS instead of the invisible timer BS they had before. Literally you get there first, it’s yours.

Or instant relo. Everyone always used to say (and some still give that advice now) get whatever you can get, you can always relo later. But you can’t anymore, because you’re stuck in another lotto pool, with first-timers and other relos and people’s alts and everything else, and if you’re unlucky with RNG, you lose every time. So why not go for the best? Your chances are about the same when there are so few houses that everything has multiple bids, and the nicer plots only have slightly more.

So I agree, it’s definitely harder to get a house with the lotto. But the overall problem is the scarcity. There were never enough houses for everyone on a server to have one, and with the ward system alone, there never will be. To say nothing of people who want to upgrade and can’t, because there’s even less of those houses available. It’s just so frustrating that there is a way everyone could get what they want, but SE doesn’t seem to want to go in that direction. Hence my somewhat futile campaign for instanced housing. Just add it on so those of us who can’t win a lotto can still have a house, or the house we actually want.

[Nepentha]

I remember them saying when they first introduced the lotto that some wards could still be FCFS in the future, but that hasn’t happened. And if would be a nice experiment, if they did true FCFS instead of the invisible timer BS they had before. Literally you get there first, it’s yours.

The trouble with those rose colored FCFS glasses is at the time they instituted lotto, it was virtually impossible for people to /get/ to those houses before someone with a bot came along and snapped it up. By the time they killed instant relo and then introduced the lotto, bots were sophisticated enough that 99% of houses that demo'd were being snapped up by RMTers and resellers.

Bots could auto run, auto pop sprint, auto use mounts, auto pop speed abilities. RMTers were also using hacking tools to just teleport to the placard in question. Ask anyone who's been involved in housing on Balmung about the infamous chick/bun botter who made sure they were the only person getting large and medium demos. Or the RMTer who got 5 out of 6 houses that demo'd in a month period and sold them for hundreds to thousands of dollars in real money.

There were bot developers selling keys to use their software, an entire underground of them cropped up because people didn't want to placard click. (And I can't blame them, SE turned players into a living psych research project with that one.)

They've released more property, and that's great. But until they figure out a way to have a surplus rather than a deficit of housing, lotto is really the only way to give players a shot at housing. RMTers and resellers will still win, but they can no longer sway the odds in their favor via third party software anymore.

Of course, instanced housing would help a great deal. And I will continue to push for it over going back to FCFS.

[Sindele]

I should have specified that I meant initial ward releases, not autodemos, which are a very different thing altogether for the issues mentioned. All ward releases coincide with significant patches, which renders bots effectively a non-factor due to one of the rare few security measures this game does have.

[Divinemights]

This one. Plus as a schoolteacher, I never was able to be at any of the placard openings on new wards.

Is that really difficult to set alarm 15 mins before Maintenace is over?
Log in and get a plot, it roughly takes 30 mins top.
I have a 9 to 5 job and i need to get up early too but i still got plots before lotto

[Jojoya]

I remember them saying when they first introduced the lotto that some wards could still be FCFS in the future, but that hasn’t happened. And if would be a nice experiment, if they did true FCFS instead of the invisible timer BS they had before. Literally you get there first, it’s yours.

I don't see FCFS ever being implemented again unless the game gets to the point that dozens of plots in the personal wards on most worlds end up vacant and we're still a far distance from that happening.

Why not in the FC or mixed wards? Because it's too easy to acquire multiple FC houses on the same service account. FC only wards could be converted to mixed if the FC demand is that low but the personal and mixed wards have filled out.

Even if they did bring back FCFS, it will never be true FCFS. That made things too easy for RMT.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

I remember them saying when they first introduced the lotto that some wards could still be FCFS in the future, but that hasn’t happened. .

Emphasis on "could". They thought about it, saw the lotto system was being hailed as the better option by most of the feedback they saw, and stuck with it for all wards.
Not to mention FCFS has a whole ton of adverse issues tied to it anyway:

-Effectively DDOS'ing the login server by tens of thousands of players all slamming against it when the wards had FCFS, meaning your ability to get a plot was already effectively a lottery on whether or not you'd get in quickly enough without being 2002'd.
-Extremely unhealthy player habits spamming placards for hours upon hours straight for any houses that opened past the initial rush
-Extremely easy to exploit with perfect navigation bots & teleportation hacks as Nepentha mentioned
-Way too exploitable by RMT
-Basically screws over anyone not wanting to get up at ungodly hours and/or people that don't play the game 24/7

Whereas the worst that happens with the lottery is that the person loses and goes to pick up their bid. it's easy to see why they didn't care to ever make any wards FCFS, it's a much worse system overall. Not to say lottery is perfect or even a good system, just better.

[Khryseis_Astra]

Oh I know… I was just responding to what was brought up. There’s all kinds of bad points with every system… which is why I’m trying to focus on something that can benefit everyone without taking anything away from anybody or causing any more inconveniences. I’ve been around for both systems, and they both suck, just in different ways. lol

I’m just hoping eventually enough people will pester SE for instanced, or at least show them a large enough chunk of their player base is interested in it, so that maybe it might actually happen. I mean, the potential is there for everyone to be able to have their dream house. Instead of so many not being able to get any house, let alone one they really want. I’m an idealist, I just want everyone to be happy. lol

[Khryseis_Astra]

Just had an idea for a cute way instanced housing could be fitted into the storyline… contains spoilers for Endwalker and the Loporrits tribal quests…

When we meet the Loporrits in EW, it’s clear that their ideas of food, clothing and living quarters don’t quite match up to our expectations or preferences. And so many Loporrits are disappointed and even depressed that we won’t be coming to live on the Moon. But the moon could be the “portal” for instanced housing. We could have a conversation with one of the Loporrits (Housingway lol) to set up our instanced house. They could ask, so what does your ideal home look like? And then you pick an instanced plot based off of an existing plot from any of the residential zones. There could be a hub set up with a directory somewhere.

Just an idea I had while doing my daily Loporrit quests. lol I don’t really care if or how they’d work it into the story as long as they add it!

[Jojoya]

Just had an idea for a cute way instanced housing could be fitted into the storyline… contains spoilers for Endwalker and the Loporrits tribal quests…

When we meet the Loporrits in EW, it’s clear that their ideas of food, clothing and living quarters don’t quite match up to our expectations or preferences. And so many Loporrits are disappointed and even depressed that we won’t be coming to live on the Moon. But the moon could be the “portal” for instanced housing. We could have a conversation with one of the Loporrits (Housingway lol) to set up our instanced house. They could ask, so what does your ideal home look like? And then you pick an instanced plot based off of an existing plot from any of the residential zones. There could be a hub set up with a directory somewhere.

Just an idea I had while doing my daily Loporrit quests. lol I don’t really care if or how they’d work it into the story as long as they add it!

While it's a cute idea, it would restrict such housing to players that have completed the 6.0 MSQ because the existence would go rather deep into spoiler territory. The player at least knows Ishgard and Hingashi/the Far East already exist in the ARR MSQ.

On the other hand, SE did say they wanted to create a new MSQ starting point for new players to cut down on how much they have to play through to get caught up to veteran players. If the placed such a starting point in the timeline after we've been to the Moon and met the Loporrits so they're already part of the story for new players, it would work.