House Raffling

[EaMett]

It's not. if they wanted it to be PvP housing, they would never have expanded the number of wards to the point we've had periods where most worlds had surplus housing available for the taking. In 2018, there were dozens if not hundreds of houses available on all but a handful of worlds. It was only when the player population exploded at the start of 2019 that all those available houses started disappearing.

This is simply incorrect. Just outright so.

• Oct 2014, patch 2.4 > 1440 plots available for an average user count of 3107 per serve(**), 46% availability (no before patch stats as this was the first time housing was open to personals)
• Jun 2016, patch 3.3 > 2160 plots available for an average user count of 4224 per server(*), 51% availability (31% before patch)
• Oct 2017, patch 4.1 > 2880 plots available for an average user count of 10 834 per server(*), 26% availability (20% before patch)
• Feb 2018, patch 4.2 > 4320 plots available for an average user count of 8957 per server(*), 48% availability (32% before patch)
• current > 5760 plots available for an average user count of 10489 per server(*), 54% availability (48% before patch). This patch was sold as compensating for lack of demo timers due to COVID19. So is likely to be outside of normal cycles.

* Average users per server follow the 80/20 rule. This means that 80% of the player base reside on servers with this average active user count. I am conflating character and user count to make up for the purchase of FC housing. (as per FFXIV Census)
** The information exists on LuckyBancho but is a pain to compile. If anyone wants to take a jab at it be my guest. Instead, I took a few deltas for specific servers which gave me a base population increase % and applied that to the other servers

As you can see this has been a thing for a long time. They have always tried to maintain housing around the 30-50% mark of the active server population. 2017 was the worst of it (though this may be due to a blip in census data) and current times are one of the best times for housing.

It's always been a limited resource as far back as the feature has been open to personal housing. The initial dev who designed housing (who's name I can't remember for the life of me right now) stated that they wanted housing to be difficult to get in order to get a sense of accomplishment from obtaining one.

Yes, plots were open on some servers years ago but that's just human psychology. If something is easy to get there's no value, no status. When something becomes hard to get suddenly everyone wants a piece of it for those same reasons. That's the entire point of limited availability design. Infomercials use this all the time "buy now, we only have 5 left", "only available for a limited time", etc.. etc..

The availability of housing hasn't changed over the years, it's just that housing became more desirable as it became harder to obtain. And this shift happened years ago for most of the playerbase.

If they intended it to be PvP housing, the demolition timer would never get suspended. It would remain on constantly to force players to stay active to retain their house.

This does not even make sense. They block timers because of natural disasters. As a form of relief to players who may be affected by them. They do this specifically because of the PvP nature of housing.

the concept of PvP with housing, while emergent behavior

As demonstrated above, there is nothing "emergent" about this.

People want houses because they're hard to get (normal human psychology, even if they don't realize it). People also complain about houses being hard to get, what you gonna do? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯