The Housing System In The Eyes Of A Newer Player

[ToxieDrop]

I'm sure its been said before but its mind breaking to me that this lotto system is better that what was.

Cause I'm gonna have to start week three and it already feels like I'm making job applications.

Iv heard stories of how bad it was but is there no real way to make it any better than what it is now???

If i need to put a proper Question in this post, My question is what would you do to change the housing system if you could remake it however you wanted?

[Brynne]

I would implement instanced housing for personal houses. If I could redo everything, I'd have never put personal housing in the wards at all. If I were working with what's already in, I'd put instanced housing in addition to the wards, so you could either have a ward house or an instanced house. Instanced houses would have the benefit of not being lost when you can't log in for more than 45 days, and you could also upgrade them up to large size with gil.

If I were going to make minor changes to avoid development costs, I'd put an entrance to workshops outside of housing (maybe at the grand company, maybe at Cid's workshop in Mor Dhona) and allow FCs to unlock them without needing a house. This would at least free up a tiny bit of space in the wards, hopefully. Then I'd work on apartments, making them upgradable to medium and large interiors, and if possible, add a balcony where a small garden plot could be placed.

[Jeeqbit]

It stems from the fact that there are wards where you can have next door neighbors and visit their houses. If it were instanced like other MMORPGs, you wouldn't be able to see someone next door.

These wards are actually separate area server programs. So if they add new wards, they have to manually set this up and set aside the appropriate resources for them to run constantly.

Now, there is actually instanced housing. You can buy a room in a private or FC residence. Or you can buy an apartment. There are caps on this, but they are very high and it's instanced.

The drawback of rooms and apartments is that the rooms are small. I think they are considering about possibly making these bigger, but I don't know if it'll end up happening or not.

I think that bigger room options for residence and apartments, more wards and trying to share wards across worlds would be things I would think of. Or move them over to a cloud server which are better designed for scaling resources (they use physical machine racks btw not cloud services).

[DiaDeem]

its mind breaking to me that this lotto system is better that what was.

Imagine sitting at your computer/console for 12 hours straight (or longer if the system feels like it) doing nothing more than spamming a placard among 50 other people that want that same plot.

Wanna watch a show in the mean time or listen to a podcast? What if someone beats you to the click while you were pausing or changing the episode? Are you gonna risk it? Need to get food? Are you gonna risk going to the bathroom now? You wanna sleep? Someone else is gonna snatch your chance at the house, and don't forget you've already invested 8 hours into clicking. You're not gonna quit now, are you?

Then you lose anyway cause a bot was clicking 5 times faster than you ever could. Better go find a new plot to do it all over again.

Just the fact that you can do literally ANYTHING ELSE with your time while the lotto is running makes the new system better. They're both coin tosses, but only the old system literally chained you to your PC/Console while you were tossing that coin for 12 hours straight. So... don't get me wrong: The lotto system is far from being a solution to the housing problem, but placard spamming was way WAY worse.

[Oizen]

It stems from the fact that there are wards where you can have next door neighbors and visit their houses. If it were instanced like other MMORPGs, you wouldn't be able to see someone next door.

Good. Get those ugly Paissa Carbuncle Candy houses out of my sight.

Would demolish my house immediately if instanced housing was added, and it should be added.

[Eraden]

Imagine sitting at your computer/console for 12 hours straight (or longer if the system feels like it) doing nothing more than spamming a placard among 50 other people that want that same plot.
Wanna watch a show in the mean time or listen to a podcast? What if someone beats you to the click while you were pausing or changing the episode? Are you gonna risk it? Are you gonna risk going to the bathroom now? You wanna sleep? Someone else is gonna snatch your chance at the house, and don't forget you've already invested 8 hours into clicking. You're not gonna quit now, are you?

Then you lose anyway cause a bot was clicking 5 times faster than you ever could. Better go find a new plot to do it all over again.

Just the fact that you can do literally ANYTHING ELSE with your time while the lotto is running makes the new system better. They're both coin tosses, but only the old system literally chained you to your PC/Console while you were tossing that coin for 12 hours straight. So... don't get me wrong: The lotto system is far from being a solution to the housing problem, but placard spamming was way WAY worse.

Is TRUE! Vivian speaks truth. Lotto WAY betters than old system. Lotto is only solution for distribution of house, howevers. True solution requires ramping ups house supply....a LOT.

[DiaDeem]

True solution requires ramping ups house supply....a LOT.

We need like... three times the amount of wards we currently have, maybe some with a few more Medium/Mansions.

[Kaurhz]

The only real way to make it better than it is, is to significantly up the amount of wards available, or to reworking housing outright.

Under the initial system you were pretty lucky to ever see a house as most were done through transactions, e.g., buying and selling plot locations -- FCs can still do this, under strict circumstances, but personal plot owners cannot do it.

Then we had the "Let's give a random cooldown on when a house can be purchased from when it was relinquished or demolished. You could be sitting at a placard for 10 minutes, you could be there for several hours, and people absolutely would for houses.

Now we have lottery system which ultimately puts it to complete random chance for personal plot ownership. Same with FCs, but you can increase these odds by having several members bid on the same plot. IMO, this is probably the most balanced system we have, granted, the only thing I would alter is to do it on Free-Company chance e.g., only 1 member from a free company can bid on a given plot.

Housing has always very much been an imperfect system, due to a combination of factors. Some on the devs, and some on player valuation.

[Reinha]

They should just double the number of wards, that would be enough for every current bidder who doesn't yet own a house. Most bids on larges and mediums are from people who already have a house.

[Ryaze]

We need like... three times the amount of wards we currently have, maybe some with a few more Medium/Mansions.

Nah, this is only an “issue” on the most congested of servers, in which case. Welcome to MMOs, this is what you get for picking a congested server. There’s always some form of limited resources in MMOs. There’s no shared gathering node spawns, instead it’s housing. On nearly any server there’s plenty of available plots, whether it’s players or FC only.

But people want the “perfect house”. The perfect size, the perfect district, the perfect plot location. People used to complain about any housing being an issue, now the goalposts are moving that they can’t own a large.

Also funny that people always complain about this issue at the end and beginning of expansions but never the middle when people unsub and forget about their house and housing plots pop up like popcorn.