House Raffling

[EaMett]

You don't see other MMOs with all this housing drama because they were smart in creating their housing systems. They make sure every player could have at least one house if not more. The only thing standing between a player and their dream house is the player's willingness to farm the currency needed to purchase it. It doesn't matter if another player already had that same house location because it was all instanced so every player could have that same location if they wanted.

I have no skin in this but comparing FF14's pvp based housing to that of other games' pve based housing is fallacious. Yeah, they're both housing, but that's where the comparison ends. It's like complaining that you can't get into starcraft's platinum league because the difficulty level is higher than solo pve campaigns in other RTS games. It, for one, doesn't even make sense to compare them. But regardless of that, if you take a step back, that's the point, it's by design. The limited access is a feature not necessarily a flaw.
It's like the ishgard restoration competitions. There are only 12 spots at the top, for the 12 most dedicated players. There's only housing for 30%-50% of the most dedicated players. The difference in housing is that the mechanics also allow for people with a life to get a chance against no life players, which the ishgard competition doesn't.

Now you can argue all you want that the former (lack of access) is either too hard, or whatever. And maybe SE will go back on their initial design. But you can't use the latter as an argument. I could, for example, argue that instanced housing is boring because everyone can eventually get one if they play the game for long enough. And that's not something worthwhile to strive for. Neither you nor myself are right, it's just different flavors. SE already made the choice of their flavor.

Likewise, instanced housing for 500M gil would achieve what? You might as well buy a plot from a house flipper right now. The same people would come and complain that the price is too high.

The reality is that some people are finding it hard to compete for the current housing, and those people just want "easy" access to the feature. It doesn't matter what flavor of housing you come up with, the second you make it a hard achievement people will flood these forums to complain.

The current housing needs tweaks to the placard and some improvements in UI to make people realize that camping 15h straight on a plot is the least effective strategy in getting a house. With that + the occasional addition of districts and wards at the same rate they've been currently doing it (keeping housing at 30-50% active pop) should be good enough.