For the love of god, add a priority system.

[Jojoya]

Youre not making ward housing appealing, by making it an objective worse version then a instanced house. For 20 outdoor slots and crossbreeding, you too can be "encouraged" to perma subscribe and if you leave longer then 45 days, you will have all your time and effort destroyed and if youre gone too long, you wont even get your items back.

Again, what is "appealing" is subjective. Different individuals are tolerant of different degrees of risk and while some are susceptible to sunk cost fallacy, not all are. I wouldn't be bothered about starting over from scratch in housing if I had to -I've already been through it once and at that time I didn't have the hundreds of millions of gil I've since accumulated.

I can agree with you if you were to say "most players". I can't agree when you say "nobody".

Even if you are correct and "nobody" would want a ward house if a solid instanced housing system was implemented, then it doesn't sound like the game would be losing out on anything. It could very well attract more players to the game that are only interested in housing and not other game content, individuals who currently don't bother because of perception that it's impossible to get a house (even though there are plenty available on Dynamis, Materia and some random worlds).

[Frizze]

S.E only lets that free income walk away in certain circumstances, they dont just shut the timer off on a random Tuesday just because they feel generous, they do it from natural disasters, or the coved-19 pandemic. And even then the timer keeps running. If they arnt back by the time S.E turns back on the demo timer, their house is gone the moment the switch is flipped. SO its best to check in once a month anyway so when they do flip the switch back on, your timer would be partly reset.

Also, im like 95% sure youre wrong about this. When they pause the timer, they pause the timer. If you were at 16 days and 13 hours, then you stay at 16 days and 13 hours. If you enter the house once during that pause, it should reset to 0 days. This is why every time they unpause a timer, the big load of houses show up on the market 45 days later. Historically, its always been a handful of houses spread out over those first 6 weeks then one big lot all at once.

And Jojoya is 100% correct that some people would still want a ward house if instanced houses were upgraded. I wont speculate on the percentage or their mental state, but those people are real. There are people who would want it for the outdoor amenities, there are those who would want it because its always loaded in the world, and there are those who would want it just because not everyone can have it. Do not underestimate that last category.

[Stormpeaks]

Also, im like 95% sure youre wrong about this. When they pause the timer, they pause the timer. If you were at 16 days and 13 hours, then you stay at 16 days and 13 hours. If you enter the house once during that pause, it should reset to 0 days. This is why every time they unpause a timer, the big load of houses show up on the market 45 days later. Historically, its always been a handful of houses spread out over those first 6 weeks then one big lot all at once.

And Jojoya is 100% correct that some people would still want a ward house if instanced houses were upgraded. I wont speculate on the percentage or their mental state, but those people are real. There are people who would want it for the outdoor amenities, there are those who would want it because its always loaded in the world, and there are those who would want it just because not everyone can have it. Do not underestimate that last category.

A majority of people would still want ward housing, that person you quoted lives in some kind of a dream world in which people wouldnt mind being put in an entire ward alone with pre-decorated houses all around them completely soulless, instanced housing in any way it's provided would be a subpar housing system and ward housing will always be superior, there is no buts about it, it will always be, you have an actual world out there, with actual people, you have a proper garden that you can show others, they dont need to go through 3 loading screens to get to your so called "instanced house" which as I mentioned above is just a "nice looking" house in an absolutely soulless area full of pre-fabricated houses.

People are already alone/lonely enough in this game, this is not needed, I am pretty sure it will never happen, and I'm happy that it wont, it would also ruin the prestige of housing, especially S-tier plots such as LB41,S30,M35 amongst a few others.

[NekoMataMata]

Feel like too many people read priority in relations to subscription time, when in reality it'd probably be based off of how many weeks you've been consistently placing deposits down on houses without winning.

Basically bad luck mitigation.

Think of it like this: 30 people lose the roll and don't get their house. If they place another deposit the week after on a house that's the same size or bigger, then they have +1 priority where everyone with higher priority rolls before everyone without. People with priority that lose the roll gain +1 up to a stack of 10. If you go a week without bidding then you lose 1 priority, and you lose all your priority if you win the house but don't accept it.

Or if you don't want to make it difficult for first time bidders then change it so priority only removes a certain amount of lower rolls. +1 priority forces your rolls within 10-100, +2 forces it within 20-100 and it goes up to +10, with increments of 10 at each priority, except +10 where it's only 95-100. Same rules apply about having to bid every week on a house the same size or larger, and about losing priority for each gap week and losing all priority if you win the house but decline it.

This wouldn't not make it luck based, but it would give you some advantage for consistently putting bids out there week after week and not winning.

[Toutatis]

Or if you don't want to make it difficult for first time bidders then change it so priority only removes a certain amount of lower rolls. +1 priority forces your rolls within 10-100, +2 forces it within 20-100 and it goes up to +10, with increments of 10 at each priority, except +10 where it's only 95-100. Same rules apply about having to bid every week on a house the same size or larger, and about losing priority for each gap week and losing all priority if you win the house but decline it.

It’s funny how people try come up with a bunch of non-sense intricate systems meant to eliminate competition. This skewed dice roll system could lead to interesting results to say the least. It would also encourage people to keep bidding every week on a plot at least as big (if there is even one), regardless of how desirable it is. Nah! Just keep it simple, current lottery works fine given the finite housing system: everybody interested in a given house has the same chance plus there is a guaranteed single winner…

If anything has to change, it’s the housing system itself so that everyone who wants a house should be able to get one without leaving their community.

[NekoMataMata]

It’s funny how people try come up with a bunch of non-sense intricate systems meant to eliminate competition. This dice roll could lead to interesting results to say the least. Nah! Just keep it simple, current lottery works fine given the finite housing system: everybody interested in a given house has the same chance plus there is a guaranteed single winner…

If anything has to change, it’s the housing system itself so that everyone who wants a house should be able to get one without leaving their community.

I mean the current system isn't anyone's first choice. Everyone outside of the house hoarders wants to see SE add further housing, preferably with instances so the competition disappears, but other solutions like building up apartments or improving IS would be nice too.

We all know they're not going to do that, so we might as well try to make the current system as good as we can. The only bad thing about using either of the band-aid fixes I suggested would be when SE inevitably screws up the implementation and we end up with a couple of weeks of broken housing rolls that no one wins.

[Toutatis]

The current system isn’t broken in any way. It is fair. Fairer than all the proposals I have read in this thread that would give an unfair advantage based on what the poster think could play in their favour. The only problem is that there are not enough houses on most servers, especially not of a certain type, and some people refuse to settle for anything else than their “dream” house.

[NekoMataMata]

The current system isn’t broken in any way. It is fair. Fairer than all the proposals I have read in this thread that would give an unfair advantage based on what the poster think could play in their favour. The only problem is that there are not enough houses on most servers, especially not of a certain type, and some people refuse to settle for anything else than their “dream” house.

Is a gamble really fair? Everyone seems to be equal footing, but inevitably there will be some people that get more favorable results than others through no fault of their own.

There's nothing wrong with add some degree of bad luck mitigation for the people that spend month after month throwing up deposits and reclaiming them.

By the way, it's not even bias on my part. I had a med for almost a year, and eventually moved into a large. It's just the logical solution if they want to keep the current system. We could probably even build on it to add a way to incentivize people buying up smalls while they wait to win meds/larges.

[Khryseis_Astra]

I mean the current system isn't anyone's first choice. Everyone outside of the house hoarders wants to see SE add further housing, preferably with instances so the competition disappears, but other solutions like building up apartments or improving IS would be nice too.

We all know they're not going to do that, so we might as well try to make the current system as good as we can. The only bad thing about using either of the band-aid fixes I suggested would be when SE inevitably screws up the implementation and we end up with a couple of weeks of broken housing rolls that no one wins.

True, it’s the lack of supply that’s the problem. So many of these arguments would disappear if we had a fully functional instanced option. Let those who think housing is some kind of prestige system fight it out in the wards, and let everyone else have the housing experience they want to have. If they can pull off housing mirage, that’s great for addressing lack of supply of different sizes, but it doesn’t help if you don’t have a house at all.

And yes, never forget the “winning number is 0” bug! lol I just think that any seemingly fair priority system isn’t really going to help anything, because the places where the number of bidders are highest and thus the more frustrating lottos, every loser on a 100+ bid property is going to go into the next round with the same priority. And they’ll most likely be bidding against each other in the next round, and the round after that, due to the limited supply, so I don’t see the benefit to anyone really. The only people it would seem to disadvantage is new people and those who can’t consistently bid every round. One could argue if you’ve been here longer you’ve been waiting longer and deserve it more, or that if you can’t manage to find 1 out of 5 days to bid, you probably won’t have the house long before it’s demoed anyways, but no matter what, someone will be upset.

[Jojoya]

Is a gamble really fair? Everyone seems to be equal footing, but inevitably there will be some people that get more favorable results than others through no fault of their own.

There's nothing wrong with add some degree of bad luck mitigation for the people that spend month after month throwing up deposits and reclaiming them.

By the way, it's not even bias on my part. I had a med for almost a year, and eventually moved into a large. It's just the logical solution if they want to keep the current system. We could probably even build on it to add a way to incentivize people buying up smalls while they wait to win meds/larges.

And when said bad luck mitigation doesn't lead to positive results for 90% of players because they're still pitted against hundreds of others in the same position?

Players will be just as unhappy as they were before it was added, just as players are now just as unhappy as they were before the lottery was added.

Adding more systems to try to create "fairness" when the underlying problem isn't fixed doesn't help.