House Raffling

[Almagnus1]

One tweak to the housing system that would be a huge QoL improvement is for people to be able to buy a raffle ticket for a house that's got a timer up, and then the house is raffled off whenever the timer is up.

Here's how this sequence of events would play out:

1. The property goes on time.
2. Any player that can buy a house is allowed to pay the full purchase price for the house to purchase one (and only one) ticket for that house.
3. The timer ends for the house, and a new random owner is chosen from those that entered the raffle.
4. The new owner is withdrawn from all other raffles, and their ticket cost(s) are refunded to them
5. All other players for that that lost the raffle receive a moogle mail with a full refund for the ticket cost refunded.

Additional points:

• If a relocation (which is not impacted by this system) occurs, then all players involved in the raffle are immediately refunded the cost of their tickets
• Players can enter as many raffles as they wish (provided they have the gil), but only if they are currently able to buy a house
• A player can see the total number of tickets for a raffle, but not who bought the other tickets
• A player can withdraw from a raffle at any point in time.

Hopefully this will address the time spent clicking on the placard by allowing a fairer system to randomly assigning the house to players that wish to buy a house, and does so without forcing the player to sit at the placard for absurd amounts of time.

[EaMett]

This removes key aspects of housing. It removes a huge aspect of the pvp. And it no longer rewards players that put the most effort into it. Because of this it’s very unlikely to be adopted.

Honestly the placard spamming, although tedious and boring, serves its purpose. A quick fix they should make is to unlock plots every 5mn instead of every second (so people can chat and take small breaks), lock the house for 60s once a player is in the process of purchasing (so the first person to click has time to navigate the menu) and place a captcha to get rid of bots.

If they did that the system would be great. I think the only thing they could do better would be some changes to educate players that camping a plot for hours is the least efficient strategy... because a lot of people seem to fall in that trap. Maybe they can put information somewhere on how long a plot has been open for. And potentially a reminder from the placard that camping over an hour at a time doesn’t provide much benefit compared to spreading that time over several days and different plots.
It wouldn’t fix everything (People will still be dumb dumbs and camp shirogane plots) but It would be a start

[Seddrinth]

Aren't you the same person who suggested the super cancer invisible housing timer? Trying to top yourself?

[Almagnus1]

This removes key aspects of housing. It removes a huge aspect of the pvp.

Maybe you can clarify something, but if the housing system was part of PvP, why isn't it listed at https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...pguide/system/ ?

[EaMett]

Maybe you can clarify something, but if the housing system was part of PvP, why isn't it listed at https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...pguide/system/ ?

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here. I did use "the" in my initial post. But if it's still unclear, housing is a limited resource where players compete against other players for said resource. Hence why I mentioned the pvp (player vs player) aspect. Doesn't matter where it is or isn't listed.

[Mhaeric]

Maybe you can clarify something, but if the housing system was part of PvP, why isn't it listed at https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...pguide/system/ ?

The pvp of housing. Not combat pvp.

[Catstab]

House raffles get suggested every day, though people usually call it a lottery. They're a terrible idea.

The main trouble with this: You can win a house while offline.
So botters can log to one account, enter raffle, log to another, enter raffle, and keep going. You could enter a raffle with 8 FCs on the same account, giving yourself 8x the chance to win as any random first-time-personal seeker.

The current system makes sure you're at least running the client if you're going to win a house, and only lets you attempt on one character per account at a time. This suggestion looks to be a small quality of life upgrade on the surface, but after spending 10 seconds to actually think it through, it offers an obvious and massive advantage to exploiters and this would greatly reduce house availability to players.

[Jojoya]

Why are people still trying to come up with band-aids that don't fix anything instead of banding together to push SE into actually fixing the problem?

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.

That needs to happen here, and it needs to happen sooner not later.

Imagine:
No more black market sales, whether gil or RMT
No more purchase timers
No more demolition timers
No more shell FCs created or bought to get one or more houses for the player's use
No more disappointment that you couldn't get the plot you want because someone else got it first
Every character getting to own multiple houses of their choosing if the player is willing to put in the effort required

Players in most other MMOs with housing don't have to put up with those things. Why do we?

Stop suggesting more torn band-aids. Start requesting a real fix.

[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.

[TwistedTea]

...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...

I can see where you're coming from. But then SE needs to bluntly state that persistent ward housing is not for every player.