[Suggestion] Housing Realty System

[Leyza]

Realty-Lottery system

What is it?

In place of camping houses/relying on luck of the draw (particularly on large servers such as Balmung and Mateus), the Realty Lottery system allows for players to go to an interface and input their housing preferences, such as size, grade-range, and housing area (Mist, Lavender Beds, etc.) to have a house drawn up when it is available and they are chosen for them to buy.

How does it work?

Players will go into the housing menu and select the system, then they will check off:

Preferred locations
Housing size
Grade range (allowing them to select a max grade and a minimum grade, so they can set their budget and minimum expected grade)

Dream Home System

Players can also select certain dream homes. For instance, if you want the Lavender Bed 29 small, you can choose it as a “Dream home” (though also set it as optional, but ideal if it does become available) This system is intended for those who may have specific houses in mind and would rather not do a blanket search of “Small, Grade 3 through 1 Lavender Beds houses.” If you want to try to catch a house next to a friend, or only one maybe two of the LB smalls, a certain goblet medium, or one specific Mist small and those are uncompromising selections, it will specifically enter you in for those if they become available.

What Happens Next?

When they select all of their preferences, the players will pay the max price out of their preferences to put their request in, and when it becomes available they will be notified in-game and via email when the RNG gods favor them. If, for instance, their grade-range was Grade 3-1, and the house they received (and accepted) was a grade 2, the remaining gil from them paying for a grade 1 will be refunded.

Before it goes through, they are given the opportunity to view the house before accepting or rejecting it if it does not meet their standards. They are given up to a certain amount (perhaps 3 days?) to accept the house. If they do not, it goes back onto market.

[Leyza]

Why the Realty Lottery?

I wanted to come up with a way to allow players to house hunt and not fight with the randomized timer and not have to camp houses in the hope of getting one. However, the timer was placed in the game to combat RMT’s that buy up houses to sell, so I needed to design it with that in mind. The goal is thus:

Players can enter their search parameters to get as close to the exact house they want, remove the camping and praying from house hunting and the frustrations of not getting the house by moving the process as far into the background as possible. The issue with a pure lottery, I believe, is that you are still watching it and it has the sting of luck not always being on your side when you’re still having to set aside time to hunt and hope. So, this allows you to enter exactly what you want, with as specific or as vague of desires as you want, removes the abuse potential RMT’s could find (as best I could), and moves it into the background so that unless you either get a house or want to change your search parameters.

[Eldevern]

If they have ressources to spend on housing, I would prefer they upgrade appartments (three sizes as for houses) with greenhouse for everyone. One locked again system behind RNG, it makes no sense for QoL. Thanks but I will pass.

[Solarra]

This just seems to be a proposal to change the present unfair system to a different unfair system that doesn't do anything to solve the underlying issue.

We need more quality housing. Apartments are great for storing items you don't want to lose, but they're too small and too limited to appeal to many people as a primary residence. I'd much rather see the devs increase the size of apartments and add some way of gardening (cross-breeding plants), or even introduce instanced housing as long as they can make enough for everyone.

Changing the way people get a house, without doing anything to increase the supply, would be a waste of resources in my opinion.

[Seraphor]

1. Upgrade Apartments
Standard: Size they are now
Dulpex: Size of a small house
Penthouse: Size of a medium house
Maybe an option for a large house sized apartment? But that seems a little out of place and frankly I've always found 'mansions' to be far too big even for some FCs.

2. Instanced gardening in some capacity.
Allegedly already working on this but we haven't heard about it in a while.

These two would allow for all of the functionality of housing, without needing to buy a house plot itself. Making houses simply a convenient way of combining the two and more of a status symbol, or more appropriate for FCs. This could allow for them to raise the prices of housing plots, make them more exclusive, and therefore lower demand because people have alternatives.

[Eldevern]

...

Mansions are never too big, especially for FC's and RP. I want my Haukke (or even my "Fairy" castel ).

More seriously, if you start to make collections and/or have some imagination (Illuminatis or Vampire's themes, there are plenty of possibilities), you can easily fill mansions (it even goes too fast).

[Rymm]

Lottery idea for houses isn't new. It's about as old as the housing wards, in fact. I'd rather they actually do something to fix housing than waste time and effort on what is, at best, a side-grade to our current situation.