Dead from Plot hunting and I ask YOU a Question

[Yshtola]

I was gonna parrot the popular "just have a housing raffle" idea, but HOLY COW YSHTOLA!
THATS SOME GOOD INFO!
Thanks so much for making such a helpful and informative post. I'd shower likes on you if I could.

Though, if there were a more effective gill dump, wouldn't that increase RMT because people wouldn't have the gil to buy houses?
Wouldn't this just lead to a bigger bot problem?

Also, how did you get all this great information?

The "real" players are the driving force behind RMT. "Real" players always sell gil to resellers or other players. It's impossible to get rid of RMT, but you can drain the pool. More here: https://library.gwu.edu/sites/defaul...%20MMORPGs.pdf

Stats are compiled by myself:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing
https://mewfc.com

Does it make sense to consider the primary purpose of housing to be a gil sink/anti-RMT tool? Even if we say that there are three, four, or five times as many players as there are available plots, that also doesn't mean every player is looking for a house either. Instead of drastically increasing the cost-to-entry, doesn't it just make more sense to increase the number of wards, and add new housing locations? When Ishgard is made available, for example, it will presumably come with the same number of wards as all current districts. Beyond that, the only other ways I can see to increase availability would be to either breakup congested servers or force people who own multiple houses to give them up somehow. A gil increase only prevents new players from entering the system, it doesn't do anything to actually make new space.

There's already a mechanic to compensate for poor players, it's called the devaluation timer. I would suggest to read my post.

[Veloran]

That doesn't really address most of my points. If base housing prices are heavily increased, how does the devaluation timer help poorer players? If anything it helps the richer players by ensuring the price range of the plot remains well above affordable for many while still easily being purchasable by people who have many millions to spare. I mean forgive me if I'm majorly misunderstanding your profile tag, but you own like 48 plots, right? So you have more than enough gil to buy houses left and right. Meanwhile just to buy a small as a newer player I had to borrow like 2M on top of what I already had. So if these higher prices had been in effect at that time, a player like me couldn't have gotten a house at all, while a player like you easily could have gotten their 49th house. So I don't really see how this actually opens up the market, especially when the alternative of just adding more plots overall already exists.

[TwistedTea]

If base housing prices are heavily increased, how does the devaluation timer help poorer players? If anything it helps the richer players by ensuring the price range of the plot remains well above affordable for many while still easily being purchasable by people who have many millions to spare....So I don't really see how this actually opens up the market, especially when the alternative of just adding more plots overall already exists.

There's a limit to how many houses a single service account can own on a server: 1 personal house and 8 FC houses.

In order to own more, a player would have to get more accounts and pay the subscriptions.

~70% of the houses on NA servers are owned as personals.

Secondly, the majority of gil rich players are not motivated enough or have the time to grind out the gil and other requirements to owning that many houses.

Right now we have a situation where any new player fresh from MSQ with 3-5m can buy a small house.

Meaning the pool of competitors for a small plot is vast. If house prices were higher, there would be less people camping. The people who can't afford a house can wait for the devaluation timer to reduce the price and grind out gil in the meantime.

Adding new wards does not solve the problem,it merely kicks the can down the road; there are not enough houses for every individual player in NA servers especially if player populations keep increasing.

Upgradeable apartments for gil with balconies for gardening/delinking the FC workshop from ward housing would go a long way in reducing the demand for ward housing.

[MsQi]

The best solution would be an instanced plot system alongside the current ward system. It would give most people everything they want out of housing while leaving the few to squabble over limited plots in the wards.

Upgradeable apartments for gil with balconies for gardening/delinking the FC workshop from ward housing would go a long way in reducing the demand for ward housing.

That would satisfy a lot of people, though some would still like to have a house they can look at even if it's not in a neighborhood. I've said before it would be nice to have multiple apartments, no more than one per district, or allow apartment owners to have alts as tenants.

Either solution would probably remove enough players from the market so that those that want a ward house could have it without much fuss.

[Stepjam]

There's little point in house hunting right now with demo timers suspended.

[lolicon09]

The only thing they need to do is give apartments a section to place outdoor furnishing (and increase the price of course). Unlike plots, you'll never lose your apartment no matter the amount of time passed without visiting It, and they are way cheaper than a small plot (currently)

[Enla]

The only thing they need to do is give apartments a section to place outdoor furnishing (and increase the price of course). Unlike plots, you'll never lose your apartment no matter the amount of time passed without visiting It, and they are way cheaper than a small plot (currently)

Also give them 'upgrades' to sink gil into. I'd happily grind out millions to expand my apartment and 'earn' the right to extra space + a garden area. I also wouldn't mind if they sold us apartment 'layouts' that included an indoor garden area, kinda like a smaller version of what LOTRO offers.

[Varilyon]

I started on Ragnarok in 2012 and played on one of those legacy worlds. Neither I or another german player had such amounts of money.

November 2012 was the last savestate for ARR and I accumulated about 6 Mio Gil by Farming the one and only FATE Atomos and playing the game. The effort to acquiring money was the same as today. Furthermore SE took away 90% of our money in ARR for deflation purposes. So I only started with 600k (not much in comparison of housing- and marketboard-prices)

In 2.3 where housing was implemented, only the richest could buy small houses. Therefor the reduction of the prices were liked by the playerbase (at least what I can tell).

The "real" players are the driving force behind RMT. "Real" players always sell gil to resellers or other players. It's impossible to get rid of RMT, but you can drain the pool. More here: https://library.gwu.edu/sites/defaul...%20MMORPGs.pdf

First of all, thank you for all your time in investing such amount of time to gather all these information.

Your idea was to increase prices as a gilsink and to lower the amount of housing-buyers.
I agree that we need a gilsink.
In my personal calculations I don't use dark matter as a sign for Inflation. I like to use the prices for RMT as a factor, because our real World currencies are way more stable and there is always an demand for ingame currency.

But I don't share the second part: increasing prices to lower the amount of housing-buyers. True is that plots will be left to buy if they are too expensive. And someday they will be bought by the most wealthy players.

Did you read your linked article? I did and he wanted to show us, that using RMT isnt cheating but instead a way of thinking outside the box by comparing worktime investment in real life and in grinding (boring stuff). Using RMT is a way to decrease the time wasting in boring content and instead skipping right into the fun part of the game.

If we use this explanation of ppl using RMT we can safely assume that owning and using a house is kind of the fun part and collecting all those money the boring part. Increasing prices would only increase the boring part and make it way more incentive to buy Gil via RMT.

We don't want to increase problems, we want a better game. Thats why other ideas would be better.

Personally (and as an owner of a privat house) would wish, that playerhousing should be in an own instance for each home. Owning a house would only increase the space in the database because not every instance must be loaded at all times. With this Update ppl could buy more than one house to decrease their money.

There was another cool Idea:
You could buy a simple plot and upgrade it like in Animal Crossing. So everyone could get at least a small patch and wealthy players can upgrade it into a mansion or castle. The Elder Scrolls Online showed us what some engines can do with instanced housing.

PS: Sorry for late editing. You still cannot edit on Smartphone...

[Eldevern]

Personally (and as an owner of a privat house) would wish, that playerhousing should be in an own instance for each home. Owning a house would only increase the space in the database because not every instance must be loaded at all times. With this Update ppl could buy more than one house to decrease their money.

There was another cool Idea:
You could buy a simple plot and upgrade it like in Animal Crossing. So everyone could get at least a small patch and wealthy players can upgrade it into a mansion or castle. The Elder Scrolls Online showed us what some engines can do with instanced housing.

+1

You can add Wildstar housing.

[Roda]

+1

You can add Wildstar housing.

God this is my dream *o*