Dev Requests Housing Timers

[Milea]

House timer should be no more than an hour imo.

No use making a peraon wait 20 hours at a plot.
Sure, if they really want it, they might do that, but they also might not get it.

An hour is plenty of time for someone without a house who is going to spend 20 hours in game to get a house, to search through the wards and find it.

[Kalise]

I still don't understand why the timers have to be hidden.

Like, I get the idea behind why the timers exist, so that someone can't just sell their house when someone else is stood ready to purchase the plot right afterwards.

But... A visible timer would do that too. Since, a timer lasting 12+ hours will be picked up by people looking for a house and thus people will congregate at the plaque when the timer is due to run out, thus not guaranteeing the sale of the plot to a specific person.

So... Why make it so that the only people who can get houses are Bots that can keep clicking the plaque for all 24+ hours and people who put their health at risk to sit there for hours spam clicking in the desperate attempt to get a house?

Better yet... Put a visible timer on it and then allow people to place bids on it within the last hour of its remaining time and then once that hour is up, someone is randomly selected who then gets the plot.

That way, no-one has to wait around for obscene amounts of time. Botters aren't at an advantage. Spam clickers aren't at an advantage. Housing is then fair to access and no-one can sell to specific people still.

[JBee]

There are tons of ways they could improve the system; shorten or remove the timer, add instanced wards, increase number of wards, auto increase wards when all are full so there is always housing available, give preference to FCs of sufficient rank and active membership, add a lottery system you could throw your name into for a chance at the house, prioritize waiting lists, something.

Personally, I like the auto add additional wards option. That, or leave a 24 hour, VISIBLE timer, so people that want to crowd around and try for it don't lose days to trying!

The auto demo timer being off for so long coupled with the payout from moving house during this free transfer period for profit has turned this into a joke. It doesn't help some of the trolling that's been happening both in game and online in forums/reddit/etc.

Housing may not be important to everyone, and that's fine - it doesn't have to be. But neither does savage content. Or alliance raids. Or Eureka. Or glamour, even. It's a part of the content that a portion of the playerbase enjoys, and the current setup of it has just fostered a lot of ill will, unless you're willing to move. And there's been radio silence on what, if anything, they will do to improve it. Which makes me think there are no plans to improve it.

Sucks that something so small as housing in an online game is mismanaged to the point to turn some people into monsters. I don't blame the angry people who start emoting at me when I walk up to a placard anymore - they're trying too. We're all over this stupidity of trying for a house for hours, just for someone to walk up and click for 5 times or less and get lucky. But that's not their fault, or ours - it's the fault of the design.

Please - please make some concession somewhere and address this. I'm not going to leave my friends to move to another DC for a house and no one else should have to either.

[Moonlite]

With the world visit system does anyone think in the future this will fix the housing problem? Could they not move the wards to a separate server where the whole data center shares? We would still get the error message trying to enter a house when the game is to busy. But that is only a few days out of every patch. Allowing them to be stubborn with the housing system(immersion), but greatly increasing the quantity with out causing stability of individual worlds. If the housing system is causing strain on the data center they could disable it and people would still have a large amount of the game play.


Also a lottery while not optimal seems like the best choice under the current system. While not optimal they could make it simpler have timers off. Announce a demolition date have lottery simply small,med, or large and draw for the number of houses available. Giving "all" players the best RNG chance, over no lifing a a board.

[Kuo]

if a house is ready for purchase, would making the sell icon(mallet) red might be a good way to tell if its not ready.

[SummonerSenah]

The timer is supposedly random and the info I was given was that houses can go back on sale at any point between 30 minutes up to 24 hours after being demolished. But like 100% of the houses I've sat and waited for ended up falling in the long end of it. I've never seen the random timer stop under five hours, and many hit 15+. I honestly wish the random timer was shorter, even if it meant that I would have less of a chance to buy it. Losing it to someone who clicked faster doesn't feel as bad as not even getting a chance because you couldn't sit around the placard 24/7 until it became available for sale.

[Shougun]

Honestly if they want to keep it a random system, at least make this a lottery. We all pay the plot price up front, get thrown into a pile, and can get on with our lives while praying RNGesus favors us. If it does, hurray - we got a house without wasting our lives and playtime clicking a placard like mindless drones! If it doesn't, we get our money refunded and just try again at the next one.

I hate the randomness of this, but at least make it so we aren't wasting actual playtime trying for a chance at a house because SE refuses to make a better system. I'd be a lot happier with a lotto than this hidden timer BS.

I think this is a good patch even if it introduces a different type of stress (will you win or not...), since the stress of waiting at the board and losing to a sudden relocation seems to be quite a bit higher (investing hours staring at a placard sounds...... lovely.. lol). Core issue will continue to be housing system itself though, so we've just traded one type of stress for another. I do think a system that helps prevent reselling is helpful though so I don't want to see the placard thing go away at least until the housing system itself is at a point this doesn't need to be (so the lottery style might be a better replacement of the waiting timer placard).

Of course relocation needs to be on the lottery as well otherwise people enter and then later it's like "haha jk, nvm you didn't actually enter" lol.

To be clear this replaces the waiting timer, so if the lot has been open long enough its just an open lot.