Housing Timer why x.x

[Brynne]

If you have 100 acres of land in real life, then I move to your town and am homeless, should the town force you to sell me some of your land so I can build a house? (That's basically what you're asking SE to do, force people to give up their plots (land) and house.) That's not how things work.

This is one of the reasons I don't think SE should remove grandfathered properties from multi-home owners (the other is development time being wasted on this effort when it won't actually fix anything and I'd rather they look into real solutions with that time). You must be able to empathize with the homeless person in this situation, and why they're frustrated with the multi-home owners, right? In the same vein, I can empathize with the average multi-home owner (I consider the guy who comes here to troll the forums every so often an outlier) who has either spent hours decorating those homes and/or leveled up airships and submarines within them, and has built up an attachment. People are coming with pitchforks at them and demanding that they nullify those hours they spent using SE's system exactly as it was designed, all because SE's design choices were so flawed.

I would be in favor of incentives for multi-home owners to leave the wards rather than brute-force taking away people's virtual possessions. I've been saying this for ages now, but we'd probably see a lot less of the undecorated houses that people love to complain about if FC workshops and crossbreeding gardening were accessible outside of housing. Improving apartments would be another step in the right direction, and adding some form of instanced housing that includes a full outdoor area is probably the best solution.

A short message of 'hey we hear you, housing is in a flawed state, we do plan to work on a fix when there is capacity to do so, please hold on a little longer' would really help on SE's part. They are in crunch time for ShB right now, so I guess this isn't exactly a priority for them, but I expect we'll be seeing a lot more of these threads as the game's population continues to grow and no end to this problem is in sight.

[Penthea]

I'm not convinced they have run out everywhere.

I didn't say this, I don't know the state of every server but everyone knows there are servers out there that were dead, house hoarders took advantage of the situation, and then the servers became very active and now have a lot of people wondering why one player can have 30 houses while they can't even get 1.

And just because new people move into your home world, does that mean you should have to give up things that you've had for years?

I have said so many times before, I would prefer to not do this. There are other ways to address the housing shortages but lets be serious here. SE are not interested in other ways. They have never shown even a scrap of interest in other ways. They are only interested in tweaking the ward system. So then players ask for ward adjustments because it's actually possible. And unfortunately if we're going to strive for a more even distribution of houses, then grandfathered players will become targeted.

In an ideal situation it would never happen, but SE refuse to present us with an ideal situation, so then of course people's eyes will then fall on to players who knowingly and needlessly make a bad situation worse.

If you have 100 acres of land in real life, then I move to your town and am homeless, should the town force you to sell me some of your land so I can build a house?

This comparison doesn't work because you can just go to another town and take everything with you. You can't in FFXIV. Going to another ward won't help if all the wards are full. Changing server won't help if it means losing most of your gil due to the gil cap. If I transferred to another server I would lose more than 90% of my gil. In real life I wouldn't lose 90% of my money just from moving to another town. You also can't take fc progress with you, but irl if I was part of a club...well the club isn't automatically disbanded or handed to someone else just because I move to a new town. Nor would I be automatically kicked from it.

Also a lot of countries have laws about how much property an individual can purchase within an area, to prevent monopolisation and exploitation by landlords. You mentioned only land. In FFXIV land and housing are one and the same given you can do literally nothing else with the land. So in a real life situation, depending on the location, an individual may be unable to hoard houses in the manner that they can in FFXIV.

The only good answer to all of this and to 99% of the threads in the housing forum...is instanced housing. But SE don't appear to be interested in this at all

[mjorge1991]

I can say right now that i created three characters in three "preferred servers" just recently and even those have no houses.

[Dyvid]

The old system was bad because it encouraged RMT. The new system is bad because it encourages camping and cheating bots.

SE, you need to be smarter.

1) After house is relinquished, place a 15 day window until it can even go back on the market
2) After 15 days has passed, it's can go on the market randomly between day 15 and 30.
3) Have the plot advertised and placard selectable only when the land is available for purchase, not before.

These would stop the current problems we have but it's not a perfect solution. It would discourage RMT and Camping however.

[Annakajima]

The old system was bad because it encouraged RMT. The new system is bad because it encourages camping and cheating bots.

SE, you need to be smarter.

1) After house is relinquished, place a 15 day window until it can even go back on the market
2) After 15 days has passed, it's can go on the market randomly between day 15 and 30.
3) Have the plot advertised and placard selectable only when the land is available for purchase, not before.

These would stop the current problems we have but it's not a perfect solution. It would discourage RMT and Camping however.

Extending the timer wouldn't solve the camping problem, it would make it worse for first time buyers and those killing themselves staying at plots waiting for the moment it unlocks

[Dyvid]

Extending the timer wouldn't solve the camping problem, it would make it worse for first time buyers and those killing themselves staying at plots waiting for the moment it unlocks

If you can't click on the placard and doesn't show up on the listing, how would that make it worse than current RNG? Without some kind of waiting period, players will sell their house outright and encourage RMT. the only other option I could see it just have a 30 day waiting period until the plot is listed without RNG.

[Annakajima]

If you can't click on the placard and doesn't show up on the listing, how would that make it worse than current RNG?

People would still hunt for free plots, then they would still wait for the second that placard did become available, as I said, extending the timer would not prevent them camping and spending too long trying to get a home.

We've seen the lengths players go to to buy multiple homes, create scripts to beat the timer, buying a crappy home first to relocate easier, again making the home randomly unlock between 15-30 days would just make a pretty bad situation worse

Edit: Your second point then making it unlock after 30 days just makes it easier for people to flood a plot if they know when it's becoming available, and those with scripts/relocating will benefit more rather than those just trying for their first home

[Dyvid]

People would still hunt for free plots, then they would still wait for the second that placard did become available, as I said, extending the timer would not prevent them camping and spending too long trying to get a home.

We've seen the lengths players go to to buy multiple homes, create scripts to beat the timer, buying a crappy home first to relocate easier, again making the home randomly unlock between 15-30 days would just make a pretty bad situation worse

Edit: Your second point then making it unlock after 30 days just makes it easier for people to flood a plot if they know when it's becoming available, and those with scripts/relocating will benefit more rather than those just trying for their first home

Okay, what then? If you list it the moment it comes up, player will sell their plot at insane price leading to RMT plague, SE will never go for that. They changed to RNG just because of that reason.

[Annakajima]

Okay, what then? If you list it the moment it comes up, player will sell their plot at insane price leading to RMT plague, SE will never go for that. They changed to RNG just because of that reason.

Was in no way implying the old system worked, was debating your suggestions. You said your method would solve RMT and Camping which I don't think it would.

Instanced housing at the end of the day is the best way to solve this housing crisis, with each problem the ward system SE has tried to solve, another one has sprung up in it's place, it's broken and been exploited too many times in the past, it is a beautiful idea at it's heart but sadly not feasible

[Dyvid]

Was in no way implying the old system worked, was debating your suggestions. You said your method would solve RMT and Camping which I don't think it would.

Instanced housing at the end of the day is the best way to solve this housing crisis, with each problem the ward system SE has tried to solve, another one has sprung up in it's place, it's broken and been exploited too many times in the past, it is a beautiful idea at it's heart but sadly not feasible

Agree but we have to work within the system we have, we means improving our instance interior space we already have. We need to improve apartments to make them more attractive to player so they don't feel an out right need to own a house.