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

[MayuAmakura]

Housing lottery is definitely a bad system and made because square has no other way of solving this. Their usual reply is: "this is stressful for servers and we can't fix it sorry" in 2025 yeah. It's just another mean of having you sub till the end.

Individual houses are hard to get as there can be around 80-200 people on one plot so good luck winning that. FC houses are even worse due to many RMT FC's that have 20+ chars with millions so they can bid and win every single time unless you somehow get lucky with your ticket. No restrictions house, the worst one. Then you have FC's that always massively bid on large houses so they can sell it to next person via trading websites. That's a fun thing.

Workshops are one of the causes why people want to take every plot and district for themselves. It generates infinite money and RMT. I only won large house because I was on one of emptiest servers and many many people left this game and their large houses as they aren't interested in this mess anymore. That just shows how many people square lost. So around 100 larges opened and even then it was extremely hard to get one.

So how about not defending this system and call it good.

[Shistar]

Only thing really holding me back is not really knowing WHERE I would go because I don't know much about Aether/Primal/Crystal beyond them being "the raiding/PVP/RP data centers" respectively, or how due to congestion a lot of worlds regularly end up being blocked as a transfer destination so I couldn't just go wherever I wanted when I wanted. I'd rather not pay for a transfer only to end up regretting the place I ended up even more than Maduin, lol.

This is the time to begin your investigation, then! Check out FC listings on the lodestone and see if anything catches your eye, if you have any friends in other DCs ask them about their world/FC and see if someone can take you in. Go talk to strangers and see what they can tell you. Channel your inner nosy adventurer lol I find that most people are surprisingly happy to have a chat and some might even invite you to their FC straight up. If I was you, I would aim for a lively DC (not congested, but not absolutely dead) that still has a little opportunity for housing. If you don't care about housing at all, going to the most populated server you can will net you the most possibilites at finding an FC to your liking or creating your own and recruiting others. I wish you the best of luck!

[SicariusSeven]

I dislike the lotto but the old system was really bad. It was either a group of people camping the sign and then spamming to buy it or if it was a new ward, whoever logged in first after maintenance. So now we are at the mercy of lotto RNG as it was the only solution that was technically fair. Keep in mind that it was also BROKEN when it was first implemented and that didn't sit well with players. I don't know if we'll ever get a proper solution. Who knows, maybe if a certain rival MMO blows them away with their long awaited housing, we'll see if Square actually does something meaningful.

[Vrankyl]

So how about not defending this system and call it good.

So far I haven't seen anyone defending the Lottery system, but rather pointing out that it is better than what we had previously by quite a bit and still better than the 'options' the OP offered which were frankly outright terrible. Unfortunately the Lottery system is going to end up remaining the best choice for us so long as SE clings to the current Housing set up.

The ironic part about all of it is that Blizzard is proving you can have the Neighborhood set up without it destroying servers. Every account will be guaranteed 2 houses that all your characters on said account can access regardless of server or Faction. One private neighborhood house and one public. It seems the way they are handling it is technically each plot is sort of pseudo instanced since you can control who is allowed on your yard and those who aren't are blocked by a wall of mist and cannot even see it.

Though it would likely require SE to redo the housing system from the ground up I think they need to bite the bullet and do that. Even more so since there are rumors that the initial housing code is terrible because it was originally outsourced rather than done in house. Of course there's no proof of that, but if true it would explain a lot.

[Basteala]

How many people here remember the hours of clicking?

[Selsix]

How many people here remember the hours of clicking?

My wrist has PTSD.

[Yodada]

How many people here remember the hours of clicking?

I even remember the time before placard clicking

[Kytrin]

I even remember the time before placard clicking

Heh, so do I. Housing was the wild west back then...

[Kaurhz]

IMO

Lottery with pseudo-RNG (Increasing each time you lose a lottery) is the best approach..... Ideally they would just stop with the scarcity/ward approach entirely though, so that way we don't have to worry about any of this....

We had the original system which was the wild west, and facilitated for buying and selling of houses between players rather than leaving them open book... With the exception of when they were naturally demolished or just didn't care.

We then had the abysmally designed system of placard spamming accompanied by a hidden RNG timer on when the house was actually available... At this point you were basically just asking people to either sit their and train their wrists into fatigue or use third party auto-click.

Then we have this... Not without problems, but it did solve the point of buying and selling houses between players, in addition to the fairly unhealthy gameplay that it promoted with placard spamming.

[Nyastra]

My wrist has PTSD.

May I never experience this in my life ever again including the nights where I fell asleep with my laptop in bed trying SO HARD to stay awake in order to have a *chance* at winning the plot. Spoiler alert, I never did win the plot during these times.