Housing needs to be addressed.

[Jojoya]

The new ward is just going to have the same issues.

Which is why many of us are pushing for a fully instanced system for houses, not just apartments. Unfortunately, that would take a lot more time for SE to develop and implement compared to adding new wards.

Hopefully we get both - new wards as a temporary post launch measure then a new instanced system later in the expansion.

[Azurith]

Which is why many of us are pushing for a fully instanced system for houses, not just apartments. Unfortunately, that would take a lot more time for SE to develop and implement compared to adding new wards.

Hopefully we get both - new wards as a temporary post launch measure then a new instanced system later in the expansion.

I wouldn't say most. Quite a lot of people like myself hope *they never* introduce instanced housing. Part of the appeal of housing is the neighborhood, randomly walking around to look at people's houses etc. They have apartments which are pretty much dead, you never get random visitors. Thats what instance housing would do.

[Edax]

I wouldn't say most. Quite a lot of people like myself hope *they never* introduce instanced housing. Part of the appeal of housing is the neighborhood, randomly walking around to look at people's houses etc. They have apartments which are pretty much dead, you never get random visitors. Thats what instance housing would do.

I agree. Runescape had instanced housing and it sucked. It was so terribly isolating, it felt like I was never part of a community.

[Mew_FC]

Sorry to disappoint you, but from what I see on the forums is people disliking this system. This isn't a fix. It is a roadblock to 99.99% of the population. Praise to the .01% of unemployed people who love clicking placards all day, this system is for them.

Edit: I noticed your join date is Jun. 2019, I'm going to assume you're a forum troll now since you must be extremely new to the game.

99.99%... there goes your credibility...

I've been playing since 2.0 mind you. Just because this specific service account only started using the forums recently doesn't mean anything, but you must be extremely new to the forums so I forgive you.

Wanna compare playtime?

[Nivosus]

99.99%... there goes your credibility...

I've been playing since 2.0 mind you. Just because this specific service account only started using the forums recently doesn't mean anything, but you must be extremely new to the forums so I forgive you.

Wanna compare playtime?

Sorry I don't deal with trolls such as yourself.

[supergiz]

Sorry to disappoint you, but from what I see on the forums is people disliking this system. This isn't a fix. It is a roadblock to 99.99% of the population. Praise to the .01% of unemployed people who love clicking placards all day, this system is for them.

Edit: I noticed your join date is Jun. 2019, I'm going to assume you're a forum troll now since you must be extremely new to the game.

Yeah that's definitely a forum troll. Take a look at their post history.

Syste

[Solarra]

... Quite a lot of people like myself hope *they never* introduce instanced housing. Part of the appeal of housing is the neighborhood, randomly walking around to look at people's houses etc.

Ideally we would have instanced housing (I'm talking about something better than apartments) as well as the existing wards.

While I can see walking round the ward is a little more immersive than clicking to visit from a menu, I'm not convinced it outweighs the low outdoor furnishing limits and short supply of plots we have to suffer in consequence.
I'm also a little envious of those people who talk about seeing lots of people in their ward and getting random visitors because it happens so rarely that I ever see anyone near my house and most of my guest book entries are either from friends or just me messing around.

I sincerely doubt they'll scrap the wards as they've invested so much in them, so I don't see any harm in pushing for better quality instanced housing to go along with them.

[Myrasil]

Just stop giving the "mew" guild guys attention, they are professional trolls.

[Zetsumei_Tsunarashi]

I think the main issue right now is that people don't know when the timer will expire to allow the land to be purchased, so you just have to be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. The problem with this is people really want a house, so they will go to the extremes of camping out at a plot of land clicking it over and over until it becomes available. At some point however, people need to sleep, go to work, eat dinner, etc. etc ... So obviously this is not an ideal situation.

This was brought up in Gamerescape's E3 interview

Gamer Escape: Regarding housing… trying to get a plot is very difficult, and it takes a lot of time and there’s a random element involved because of the timer. Has there been any consideration to change how the system works?

Naoki Yoshida: This system is necessary to address RMT / gold farmers. We want to eliminate issues where they are farming for land as well, and if we were to remove this system then nobody will be able to buy land properly anymore. We wanted to make it so that it’s fair to everybody. So yes, luck is involved in that process unfortunately, but for the time being we don’t have any intentions of changing the system.

Also, and this is something of a happy problem to have, but there are so many players that are still joining us, so it might be getting to that point where we have to consider adding more plots of land. We’d like to launch Shadowbringers first and let things settle down and monitor how the different servers are populated and make out considerations from there.

So there has to be that random element to prevent land sellers from popping up again. I think something that would be a little better and at least would keep people from needing to camp plots of land, would be to either,

a) have a lottery system where after land gets auto-demolished, players can click on the house placard to be entered into a lottery to be able to claim the plot of land. The price of the lottery ticket would be the price of purchasing the land. If you won the lottery, the land becomes yours after the timer expires. If you lost the lottery, your money is refunded to you.

or

b) set up an auction system where players can bid on the land. The random timer becomes the time remaining left on the auction. When the timer expires, the player with the highest bid becomes the owner of the land.

In my opinion, option a) is the better option because it removes the need to camp the land all the time. There's an element of randomness involved which some players may find less appealing, but I think it's the least stressful option. With option b), players may still find the need to camp the land in order to ensure their bid remains the highest. Depending on how the auction is implemented, however, they might be able to avoid that situation. For example if the auction is blind and players can't see what the current highest bid is, then you would maintain that element of randomness, but players may feel they have a bit more control over the outcome (bidding very high).

[Firespark]

I hope that it gets a look at in 5.0 for sure. Been house hunting for about a week, and whenever I found two free plots across all the housing districts, it had people stand there and just spam already, or a crowd gathered later. I sadly don't have the 6+ hours to stand in one spot and click a placard, so naturally, all of them were bought out from under me when I did weird stuff like, eat, sleep, or work.

This is on Midgardsormr, Aether DC, by the way.