Housing Distribution Idea

[IkayaTia]

After doing some house hunting today and getting sniped by players who had gotten there a long time after I had, I thought there has to be a way to make housing distribution more fair.

People looking for a house should sign up for the plots they are looking for. When that plot becomes available, the first person who signed up for that plot and has the gil to pay the plot should be notified and have x amount of time to claim it. If they don't claim it or decline it, the next person in the list is chosen and so on. People without housing should also have priority over people with housing (for obvious reasons).

This would mean finding a house would take longer in general, but would be using a system that isn't based on random elements that kill someone's day.

This is just a suggestion, and an opinion. Looking for feedback to see what other people think as well because the current housing system is a travesty.

[Mew_FC]

We already had a first come/first served system. Players on this very forum couldn't handle that someone has to put in a certain amount of effort in order to acquire a house so here we are

[ShinShimon]

Just do a lottery system.

[Elamys]

We already had a first come/first served system. Players on this very forum couldn't handle that someone has to put in a certain amount of effort in order to acquire a house so here we are

God help me, I don't know why I'm even bothering to respond to you, but neither the super expensive system you champion nor the system pre-placard spam worked.

The first one priced too many people out of owning a house and therefore the wards were ghost towns.There is no point in making a part of the game so expensive that that few people can access it. SE doesn't want housing to be accessible only to the richest few, they want the median player to be able to access it as well. You think they really just reduced the prices down on a whim because of complainers on the forums?

The second one allowed people to flip too easily (I know flipping is still a problem but since it's not as easy now given the FC or relocation requirement it isn't as frequent) which inflated prices even higher beyond what SE had themselves decided would be the price. No, it is not fair nor should it be encouraged for players to sell plots in this way.

Now we have this stupid third go around, where we have people wasting hours clicking a placard over and over because they want to participate in a part of the game that is advertised to them.

We can try to address the problem any way we want, with stupidly expensive plots, with placard spam, with a lottery system, with a sign up sheet, any numerous solutions that I've seen proposed on this forum, and it doesn't change the fact that the reality is that there are not. Enough. Houses. There will never be enough with the ward system. It doesn't matter how many hoops you put in place to jump through to get a house when there isn't enough to align with their design goals.

SE wants housing to be something achievable by a moderately dedicated player. They want (personal housing, at least) to be affordable. They want (presumably all) FCs to be able to access houses to use things like airships and subs. And yet they also want this stupid neighborhood system where the number of plots are limited. They do not work together, you can't want housing to be accessible to as many people as possible and then lock it behind a ward system. Either SE needs to change what their goals are, and design decisively towards that goal, or they need to change the system, and right now they've been wringing their hands since housing was added, mumbling apologies about why they can't fix it.

Even apartments weren't a perfect fix. For a long time on Gilgamesh and Balmung at least they were full too. We have enough to meet demand for now but you can't deny an apartment is terrible compared to a house.

[Mew_FC]

God help me, I don't know why I'm even bothering to respond to you, but neither the super expensive system you champion nor the system pre-placard spam worked.

The first one priced too many people out of owning a house and therefore the wards were ghost towns.There is no point in making a part of the game so expensive that that few people can access it. SE doesn't want housing to be accessible only to the richest few, they want the median player to be able to access it as well. You think they really just reduced the prices down on a whim because of complainers on the forums?

The second one allowed people to flip too easily (I know flipping is still a problem but since it's not as easy now given the FC or relocation requirement it isn't as frequent) which inflated prices even higher beyond what SE had themselves decided would be the price. No, it is not fair nor should it be encouraged for players to sell plots in this way.

Now we have this stupid third go around, where we have people wasting hours clicking a placard over and over because they want to participate in a part of the game that is advertised to them.

We can try to address the problem any way we want, with stupidly expensive plots, with placard spam, with a lottery system, with a sign up sheet, any numerous solutions that I've seen proposed on this forum, and it doesn't change the fact that the reality is that there are not. Enough. Houses. There will never be enough with the ward system. It doesn't matter how many hoops you put in place to jump through to get a house when there isn't enough to align with their design goals.

SE wants housing to be something achievable by a moderately dedicated player. They want (personal housing, at least) to be affordable. They want (presumably all) FCs to be able to access houses to use things like airships and subs. And yet they also want this stupid neighborhood system where the number of plots are limited. They do not work together, you can't want housing to be accessible to as many people as possible and then lock it behind a ward system. Either SE needs to change what their goals are, and design decisively towards that goal, or they need to change the system, and right now they've been wringing their hands since housing was added, mumbling apologies about why they can't fix it.

Even apartments weren't a perfect fix. For a long time on Gilgamesh and Balmung at least they were full too. We have enough to meet demand for now but you can't deny an apartment is terrible compared to a house.

Finally, someone who dares to use logical thoughts over emotional beliefs on this forum. It was about time...

First of I'm glad you separated every housing system we've had, even though people commonly talk about two. I cannot speak for any other server but Gilgamesh and by the time personal housing came out, the wards were mostly full on here. Some FCs even had multiple houses in the same ward. <Aeth> in Lavender Beds comes to mind, despite being a shadow of what they used to be.

Do I think 600m/300m with devaluation is a lot for a Large house? I would say no. Especially not with how much gil is in circulation right now.

Is 50m/25m with devaluation for a large house too low at this moment? Considering that these get taken the moment they are available without getting past one tick of the devaluation timer, I would say yes.

I wouldn't support slapping the old price chart back on every server as some have obviously gained in popularity while some have taken a step back. But ultimately, does it really matter? Square-Enix has made it so that gil can freely move within a data center. I think instead of having specific server prices, we should be getting fixed prices per data center. Somewhere between what we have right now and the highest prices on that 2.1 chart. After all the servers with the highest prices had a much steeper price point due to having a lot of leftover gil from the 1.0 era.

I have never stated that the prices we have now are due to whiners on these forums. You are either putting words in my mouth or you misread. I can appreciate someone who writes a lenghty post with well thought-out ideas so I'll just let it slip

I did state that the first come/first served system saw it's downfall due to whiners on the forums. Players didn't like how more opportunistic players could sell plots around the 2.1 prices. Even though, some players did acquire the houses, they were trying to sell, when they were expensive.

We could debate about prices on the trade market all day long, but ultimately it comes down to this: Convenience. You really can't complain about prices when someone else is doing you a favor. Besides, did SE intended players to sell instanced content? I really don't think so... nor do they seem to care even though groups are frequently asking for money.

Now, if prices did go up, you wouldn't see as many players camping for every plot that comes up. And if they did, it wouldn't be because of the hidden timer, but because of the devaluation timer. That's definitely a more sane approach than a system that caters to the lowest common denominator.

I have one fundamental problem with your statement regarding house availability. It might be true for servers like yours and mine, but there are plenty of unclaimed plots on other servers, free from the grasp of the hidden timer. Therefore, there is enough plots. Players simply want to have it all...

I think we can agree that SE wants FCs to have their own little piece of land as they've granted them 2 weeks ahead of aspiring homeowners back in 4.2. I think we can also agree that SE wants personal housing to be affordable (despite claiming that the prices would be different, but that's another story). But was it the right decision to nerf one of the two gil sinks this game has?

At this point, I think it's safe to say that wards are here to stay, as they've doubled down on the concept multiple times already. Asking for anything else is a waste of time because having instanced housing and the wards doesn't look sustainable from a business perspective. Given the grandfathering history with personal housing, getting SE to entirely ditch the wards for instance housing isn't gonna happen either.

So basically, we're ****** and SE is pretending that everything's fine while the roof keeps burning.

There was indeed a shortage of apts. I haven't heard about anyone complaining that they couldn't acquire an apt for eons though. I think for the price and the fact that they are permanent, they are great. After all, you're getting the equivalent of a small house when housing came out...

[Elamys]

To my understanding, there are no more servers with available housing on the NA data centers. It appears most of the free housing is on the JP data centers. NA not having enough resources to deal with its population is its own problem, to be sure. I don't think it's really reasonable to expect someone to transfer to a server that majority speaks a language they may not know where they may have very high ping to access housing. That was an applicable thought prior to the split, but since Crystal was added and the data center was split, the population has evened out for NA a lot.