Please remove housing lottery and make some other way of house acquisition.

[Alicie]

Do you people really want to live on that ugly ass island?

Maybe just make it not ugly then...

[UkcsAlias]

2) Auction system

• System that is more controversial but still is something that is better than rigged random.

First of all, there are already known auction systems that prevent abuse. And these go like this:
- Entries are blind, you will not know the current winning bid until the auction is complete
- You have to put in the gil you are willing to pay, and this is your maximum!
- At the end of the auction period. The top 2 bids are considered, if there is only 1, its an automatic minimum bid win. The winner is the one who did bid the most, but the price he pays is what the 2nd highest did bid +1.
- If there are 2 winners, normaly the first is considered, but in this case, random would be fair, but ofc in this case it will always force you to pay the max (yes, bidding gil cap can result in you paying that cap, but it requires a 2nd bidder to do the same)

This way, if someone did bid 400m, and the 2nd only 150m, the winner pays 150000001 gil. The reason its deemed fair is because you always paid more than the 2nd place, but also didnt pay more than the minimum what was needed to win.

I dont see any reason for the once per year rule. Going for more bids just costs more gil, i dont care if you then pay 500m for 3 houses, thats your choice. Going upward in plot quality just costs more than directly winning.

What can be done is:
- bidding period gets increased to for example 1 month
- your bid can be considered for many entries (you just need to sort your priority), and also enable you to set 3 bid values at once (small, medium, large. you only need to put the gil into it for the large plot, as this always resolves for the other 2).

Then when the bids are done, it will follow the order of: large to small, most demanded to least demanded house. As long as there is a clear bidder who set the plot as favorite, its instantly passed. If someone wins that didnt have the plot set as highest priority, that player's favorite is checked next. If he wins that one, then his bid on the current house gets ignored and the next one goes on. If not, the next one in his list gets checked, until the current house is reached. This way we ensure that a favorite bid is prefered over another. And only after that the actual price to pay gets checked. So even if you set 500m as offer, and the most popular house had 400m as second place, yet your favorite only had 200m, you will pay just 200m+1 gil and get that favorite.

[IOwn92FCHouses]

I also vote for the auction system. Mostly because it'll make it literally impossible for the average player to afford any house ever again. What? Little Timmy thinks his 100m on a small is going to be enough? Hah! I have billions in purchasing power. Sorry Timmy. I'll 600m just so I can add to my collection.

An auction system where max value wins is blatantly flawed. Much as I'd love to see it exist.

[Regis_Paran]

... (snip)...

I can only imagine people raging when they lose and would be trying to "find out why", with all those stipulations to consider....

[UkcsAlias]

I can only imagine people raging when they lose and would be trying to "find out why", with all those stipulations to consider....

Very simple: someone had a higher bid than you.
The only way you will win is when you had a higher bid than everyone else, or the ones above you were given a higher priority house that they won at.
You might want to read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction

Note that the 2nd portion is an addition we can make, and isnt mandatory. It makes things more complex, but its managable in this game because of a limited supply, even with maximum recursion happening, it only considers all houses in all wards at the same time. Something a computer can easily handle, especialy when you give it a bit of time (and even then, a good algorithm has this resolved in seconds).
And to make it easier, we can also make it just consider the highest overal bid first, and then most popular plot. It makes only a little diffirence in this.

Its not a random idea that i gave as how an auction can work, its an already used system

EDIT: also, i woudnt want this acros all wards, but maybe having like 4 wards that use this system could be decent. Especialy when there are a few FCs wards are allowed to stack bids, making it far more likely for big fcs to win due to sheer number of players that can increase the bid value

[Selsix]

1. Queue System
This is honestly worse than a lottery. People will make alts to fill the queue.

2. Auction system
Again, worse than a lottery because you're just rewarding the super rich and people who engage in RMT.

3. Pseudo-RNG
This once again is going to be worse than a standard lottery, as people who use mass alts will get exponentially more rewards in the "pity system".

Is the lottery perfect? No, you can still make alts for multiple entries of course, but there really isn't a better way to handle this in an environment with limited housing. If you ask me, they shouldn't be trying to change the lotto system and instead they should be cracking down on alts and people who own entire housing wards. Limit accounts to 1 house per server, period, if you currently have more than that? They get scheduled for demolition and you will be reimbursed.

[Themarvin]

Current situation is absolutely horrible.
You bid. You lose. You bid. You lose. You bid. You lose. You bid. You lose. Weeks go by. Months go by. Years go by. You still can not get the house.
Everything is let to pure random. You play for years, you pay sub for years, and yet 4-member FC with level 30 character gets your dream plot just to sell it on RMT website later.

Please rework housing lottery. First and foremost, it should not be a lottery at all. Here are few possible suggestions for rework:

1) Queue system.

• Instead of lottery, player can choose to pay deposit upfront and pick which houses in which wards they would like to get. As soon as any house gets freed up, player acquires house automatically.
• To prevent abuse, once you have got one house via queue you can not do it again for 365 days unless plot you got gets demolished (you can still join the secondary queue if you want to get extra house that is not wanted by anyone who did not yet got any).
• In order to remain in queue, you have to log in periodically and of course you can withdraw from queue at any point of time.
• This system favors players who played the game the most, and they can get nicer plots, while newer players will have to work it up from smaller plots. In my opinion, this system is much more fair than just the random.

2) Auction system

• System that is more controversial but still is something that is better than rigged random.
• The concept is pretty simple: houses are put on auction. Auction entries are non refundable to prevent abuse.
• Again, limit it to one auction participation per year unless plot player got via auction is demolished. Plots that were sitting for over 30 days unwanted can allow players who got a house via auction participate in a secondary auction over these plots.
• Of course, this approach will require that SE fights botting and RMT actively to ensure that houses go to players who actually put the most actual effort into the game.

3) Pseudo-RNG system[LIST]


4) SE's Own Solution
Of course, we all know that instanced housing is the ultimate solution that we need. But while we do not have that, please consider reworking current system.

Thank you.

Entirely irrelevant, you are merely fishing for a system where you got the advantage on it, with the lottery everyone get the same chance, and it works, any previous system has been waiting with auto clickers and before that you could just pay someone enough of gil and release building and get it right away... so nope

[NegativeS]

instead they should be cracking down on alts and people who own entire housing wards. Limit accounts to 1 house per server, period, if you currently have more than that? They get scheduled for demolition and you will be reimbursed.

It really is that simple, and to this day I don't know why people push back so much against the idea.

Imagine how many "IOwn92FCHouses" there are out there who actually own 92 FC houses. I wonder how many wards would become vacant overnight if GMs started going around hitting people with Eminent Domain sticks?

Sadly, SE will never do this, because the people with the means to do so are whales so big they're only rivaled by day 1 EVE players, and we can't forget the SE mission statement:

[IOwn92FCHouses]

It really is that simple, and to this day I don't know why people push back so much against the idea.

Imagine how many "IOwn92FCHouses" there are out there who actually own 92 FC houses. I wonder how many wards would become vacant overnight if GMs started going around hitting people with Eminent Domain sticks?

Sadly, SE will never do this, because the people with the means to do so are whales so big they're only rivaled by day 1 EVE players, and we can't forget the SE mission statement:

Square knows that it can't remove the system. They don't have a choice now. Submarine hoarders like me have several service accounts and are totally legitimately checking and maintaining every submarine on each account for all our service accounts each day (pinky swear it's all legitimate logging in and manually doing it for 28 hours, 8 days a week). What if subs were changed or housing was changed? Why... Maybe mass market manipulation the crafting bots could never dream of? Maybe we could spend all our totally legitimate hours of play on maps and destroy those markets for raw Gil? Maybe we could start selling content?

We won't simply go away if subs are rendered impossible. The bigger number = better mini game will continue. Square knows this and will never willingly release us into the world.

(I'm over 100 fc houses now BTW)

[Regis_Paran]

Very simple: someone had a higher bid than you.
The only way you will win is when you had a higher bid than everyone else, or the ones above you were given a higher priority house that they won at.
You might want to read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction

Note that the 2nd portion is an addition we can make, and isnt mandatory. It makes things more complex, but its managable in this game because of a limited supply, even with maximum recursion happening, it only considers all houses in all wards at the same time. Something a computer can easily handle, especialy when you give it a bit of time (and even then, a good algorithm has this resolved in seconds).
And to make it easier, we can also make it just consider the highest overal bid first, and then most popular plot. It makes only a little diffirence in this.

Its not a random idea that i gave as how an auction can work, its an already used system

EDIT: also, i woudnt want this acros all wards, but maybe having like 4 wards that use this system could be decent. Especialy when there are a few FCs wards are allowed to stack bids, making it far more likely for big fcs to win due to sheer number of players that can increase the bid value

So basically you want only very rich people to be able to have a house. Why not just limit it to RMTraders then? Will be easier.