Housing: Purchase Timer - Alternative Idea

[TovahWulf]

The Placard situation has gotten worse as time has passed. More players have joined, and with the limited housing, it’s like the only way to get a house now is by Placard Spamming. This has been going on since April in Coeurl, and I just lost my first house to someone who was using a macro to spam the placard. It’s definitely not fair. I believe both housing needs to increase and the RNG timer needs to be replaced with something else.

Maybe there should be a timer implemented on how long someone can get a house after leaving one behind? (Possibly a few days/weeks to deter bots. Transferring not included.)

[GU099]

Straightforward, what if SE used a lottery system rather than an invisible timer (which seems to be set to at max of 22 hours) to buy a house (maybe only for post-addition of residential districts)?

The same people who are suggesting this lottery thing are the same people who suggested the timer the first time around. It's just going to be the same problem in a different flavor.

[Serret]

A lot of people don't want to or are unable to do placard spamming. However entering a lottery is near zero effort. This means that on highly populated servers the competition would drastically spike upwards due to the sheer ease of competing for a plot. It's not difficult to afford a cottage these days. Almost anyone without a house could enter the draw if it's a cottage.

And as I already said in another similar thread, players with multiple accounts or groups of people who want to share a house will have a higher chance of winning with a lottery system.

The current system needs serious improvement but expanding the influence of rng is not the way to do it. We need more houses. Not more dice rolls.

You are absolutely right.
But at the lack of a better solution (more houses) I believe the current system is too painful. I've seen people sitting over 24h camping places only to miss them when they have to go to the bathroom... this repeated several times.
Their effort was not rewarded.
A lottery system while not ideal would be a considerable improvement over the current solution.
There's no question, we need MORE houses. But therein lies another question, there are people hoarding houses over several FCs in separate chars either to resell or whatnot, presuming more houses are added, shouldn't there be an additional system to prevent this? Otherwise more houses will not be sufficient as people will hoard "villages" just because they can...


What needs to be done in my opinion:
- More houses needs to be added
- Scalability, add more wards depending on server population
- Abuse prevention system needs to be readjusted (1 house per account/server limitation is not sufficient, people are still hoarding abusing FCs to do so)

Even with these 3 suggestions there might be cases where housing is still difficult to get.
As such either an RNG lottery system or a BID system would be better than the current: sitting for 24h for a house only to miss it cause they blinked their eyes. (in any case at this point it's never fair, but I would say either of the first 2 options I suggested are better than what we have now)

[touya]

Instead of a lottery, why not put in place a limit like they do on transferring your GC on your character. You can only buy 1 plot every 30-60 days. This would prevent house flipping because the timer would start from the time you vacated the plot. In terms of FCs, well, even now you can't stop that, so that will be forever there. But you can stop personal house flipping or at the very least, curb it so it wouldn't be profitable to really do, because selling at max 6 houses a year, you really wouldn't do it. Then there is no need for this silly timer system (i'm sitting at a placard with others as I write this btw). It's just.....a horrible game play experience that can really turn players off the game.

Yes I know the argument could be made that "personal housing isn't mandatory to the game." And you're right, MSQ housing is not there. But it is nice to experience the whole game. Some people prefer to do the crafting/gathering/decorating instead of hardcore 60 hours a week savage raiding. But if i'm sitting here with 25.9M Gil, I should be able to walk up and buy this 3M Gil small plot and continue to enjoy the game, not waste weeks (it's been weeks and still no house yet) that starts to make me wonder if they will place other timers like this on future content. They most likely won't, but at present, this leaves such a sour experience that I honestly have told people who asked me about this game that they might not want to come here to play as their paid sub mmo since I know what they would like in an MMO.

It's...disheartening that they do this to a loyal fan-base of their game instead of implementing a better system for buying.

/endrant and back to clicking placard. Shout out to Miso Wizel who is sitting here clicking against me :P