The Housing System In The Eyes Of A Newer Player

[Sunhwapark]

Too many people want a large/medium only.
At least it seems that way on Chaos/Light DC, the nearby small plots that I live near haven't been bought for well over a year now, however I am in the goblet and from what I hear it's the least desired place to have a house for some.

The lotto system isn't 'better' than how it was in the past, but it's more healthy for how players can approach it and not risk their health and comfort for some pixels.
I say this as someone who did spend hours and hours without rest interacting with placards.

[DiaDeem]

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.

[Skivvy]

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).

Instanced housing doesn't necessarily have to mean solo-instances only. In Wildstar, your default housing was a solo-instance situation, but they also had the option to create a community island that you and 4 other friends shared together. Each player still got their own personal (huge) design space, but it was all in a single-instance.

And of course friends could still visit. Or you could go exploring random houses/islands like you can in XIV.

I can't speak for others, but I would much rather have a shared instance with my friends vs. the mostly dead neighborhoods that we have now.

I know you didn't say this, but instanced housing doesn't have to be a basic square room. It can be soooo much more, and far superior (imo).

[LilimoLimomo]

At the core, the issue is very simple: you've got a resource that is limited in supply and high in demand, such that for every 1000-ish people that want it, only 1 person gets it. It doesn't matter what that resource is; it could be Beanie Babies or Theatre Tickets or houses in an MMO. The question is simple: what is the best way to distribute these limited resources?

First, we have to decide what we mean by "best". Personally, I think we should strive for a system that is fair and compassionate.

And with that in mind, I think a lottery is probably the best that can be done given the current circumstances. You apply to the lottery, then you move on with your life; that's compassionate (you'll see why later). You'll probably lose the lottery, but you have the same chance as everyone else, so it's fair.

It used to be worse. It used to be first-come, first-serve. So people who wanted a house would literally sit clicking for hours upon hours, sometimes days, just to hopefully be the first person to get the house. And this was a huge problem, because it clearly incentivized players to waste their time, sacrifice their health, and burn out. This alone was more than enough reason to change it.

But beyond that, it was a much less fair system, because some people have more free time that they can spend on clicking without stopping, while others have much less or can't do it at all. A trust fund kid without any responsibilities can click all day without a care, but someone who works for a living has much less bandwidth to do that. And that means that people with less real-world responsibility are statistically more likely to get a house, which skews the odds in favor of a certain demographic of players at the detriment of other demographics of players.

Hopefully that demonstrates how much better the current system is. By not adding additional pain to the process and fairly distributing resources, it's a system that's as good as it gets.

The only way to genuinely make things work any better isn't to change the system of distribution, but rather to change the supply and/or demand. Because at the end of the day, not getting what you want and knowing you're unlikely to get what you want will always suck.

[Jeeqbit]

In Wildstar, your default housing was a solo-instance situation, but they also had the option to create a community island that you and 4 other friends shared together.

Hmm an instanced island is a good idea. It's unfortunate that SE couldn't do, well, exactly that with Island Sanctuary, and couldn't even get a personal house in it or at least a longer afk timer on it and an aetheryte to it that would create the instance upon teleport like when you click the NPC.

[CaptainLagbeard]

The lottery system is definitely better than the old one, as that was basically whoever got logged in and past the queues first got the house whenever new ones were added.

But I think the best way to do it would be to go back to the original system and just add in automatically new wards as housing slots fill up, rather than making them artificially limited.

[Bibine_Bine]

Letting people own multiple houses was a huge mistake considering they didn't have enough houses for everyone to begin with.

Restrict houses to 1 per character and 1 per FC, people who already have multiple houses have to choose which house to keep and the others get refunded and furniture gets put into storage. Only FC leaders can post a bid for their FC house so that they can't game the system by just having more people bidding for it.

[Skivvy]

Hmm an instanced island is a good idea. It's unfortunate that SE couldn't do, well, exactly that with Island Sanctuary, and couldn't even get a personal house in it or at least a longer afk timer on it and an aetheryte to it that would create the instance upon teleport like when you click the NPC.

Yeahhh. I was cautiously optimistic that IS could have been made into something to bridge the gap, but alas, it is what it is. X;

It used to be worse. It used to be first-come, first-serve. So people who wanted a house would literally sit clicking for hours upon hours, sometimes days, just to hopefully be the first person to get the house. And this was a huge problem, because it clearly incentivized players to waste their time, sacrifice their health, and burn out. This alone was more than enough reason to change it.

Sliiight correction. Originally it was 100% first come, first serve. You could buy a house as soon as you walked up to it if it was available. This obviously led to a lot of house flipping for crazy prices. Flipping does still happen, but it's FC only now and takes some extra steps/time.

Then they changed it and added a hidden timer to newly vacated properties. This would essentially block people from being able to purchase the home until the random timer expired. IIRC, this could be anywhere from 30 minutes up to 15+ hours. This is when you'd see huge groups of people just camped out at placards, mindlessly clicking for hours. Also saw the rise of placard botting using auto-clickers.

[Reinha]

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.

There was house trading between players but it was not necessary to do that in order to get a house. I was able to buy more than one house from the placard when the first-come-first-serve housing system was in place. Whenever a housing patch added more wards, all I had to do was login as soon as the servers opened, wait in the login queue, use the aetheryte to pick an empty ward and run around it to pick a plot.

Back when we couldn't relocate, I manually demolished my first house and did the same thing again to get another house. Even later after the placard timer was added, one could buy a house without a timer in a newly added ward where plots had no previous owners.

I don't think logging in on patch day was a terribly demanding requirement to get a house but people wanted total randomness so here we are.

[LordMcMutton]

The ward housing system is holding them back in so many ways. There are so many cool places throughout the game and its expansions where they could add some really creative instanced housing. Personally, I'd love my own sky pirate base in the Sea of Clouds like the one from the HW alliance raid quests or my own wing of the Il Mheg castle so I can spend more time near my most wonderful branch. Heck, if they wanted to charge for it, I'd rather spend $2 a month extra for that than for a retainer any day.

I think that's a really cool idea, though I wouldn't want to pay extra for it