An end to the camping timer. An end to resale. A return to...

[Jojoya]

I think the best solution to housing shortage is a return to ARR pricing. A small house used to cost 40 million or so. It would then devalue a couple million per day, until it was cheap enough for someone to decide they wanted it.

Benefits:
-It kills the camp. You know exactly what time the house will be the price you're willing to pay. Come back then and buy (or find out someone else wanted it more)
-It stops the resellers. That house is wide open. If no one is paying what it costs right now, you won't make any money at all trying to buy it for resale.
-It rewards players the most invested in the game. Farmed 40m for your personal? Your FC of eight people put in 5m each? The house is yours, no waiting.

Detriment:
-It pulls housing out of the price range for people who are on trial membership and for people who have only been playing a few months.

If SE leaves house pricing where it is, they need to make enough for everyone (~80 wards total or instanced housing)

If SE is going to leave supply where it is, they ought to price the houses accordingly.

Especially if it will stop flippers and end camping.

The best solution to the housing shortage is to implement an instanced housing system as most of the other MMOs with housing use so every character can own one or more houses depending on what the player wants that character to have.

Increasing prices won't reduce demand. The player base has become far too large and there are too many wealthy players with nothing to spend that gil on. If anything, it will encourage RMT among the less wealthy players because there's no real risk to gil buying.

It doesn't kill the camping. The camping goes away only if the timer is removed.

It won't stop the resellers. They'll continue to flip for profit as they always have. Someone willing to pay 100 million gil for a house is just as likely to pay 120 million to the flipper who got to the plot first.

Gil is a bad way to measure someone's investment in the game since not all game activities reward gil equally based on time investment. Are omnicrafters more deserving of a house than the players who love to PvP or run roulettes? No, they aren't.

Players on the free trial have gil cap of 300k and are not allowed to own property so doesn't affect anything they have access to. New players bypass the impact if they go the RMT route.

If SE is going to stick to the ward system, boosting up initial pricing is not going to put much of a dent in demand. If you really want to put a dent in demand, attach a recurring monthly fee to house ownership. Someone who's not going to use the house is pretty unlikely to buy it if they know it's going to have a long term cost. Someone who has bought a house but is no longer using it is a lot more likely to relinquish rather than keep wasting gil month and month.

[Catstab]

The best solution to the housing shortage is to implement an instanced housing system as most of the other MMOs with housing use so every character can own one or more houses depending on what the player wants that character to have.

That'd be the ideal. Next best thing would be 80 wards. Best thing for the current system, I still think, is this price increase.

Regarding 'it doesn't kill camping':
It does, though. I'm proposing an end to the housing timer, along with this price change. These 40m smalls, 150m mediums, and 500m larges would be walk-up-and-buy.

Regarding 'It doesn't kill resale':
It does, though. If a reseller purchases a small for 40m, he now has to find someone willing to pay him significantly more than 40 million and then also pay the placard another 40 million.

The price you gave may just be wall-spaghetti numbers, but no one is paying 100 million gil for small houses. Mediums do sell for that, but in this case mediums would be 150m at the placard. So a reseller would need to find someone willing to spend 330m+ to get into a medium house.

[Jojoya]

Regarding 'It doesn't kill resale':
It does, though. If a reseller purchases a small for 40m, he now has to find someone willing to pay him significantly more than 40 million and then also pay the placard another 40 million.

You didn't say anything in your original post about removing the timer, only increasing the pricing.

Yes, removing the timer would end the camping. That's obvious.

I still don't agree it would remove the reselling. A reseller doesn't have to make double the purchase price for it to be worth their time and effort. Someone who really wants a house will pay the price if that's the only way to get one.

[Catstab]

A reseller doesn't have to make double the purchase price for it to be worth their time and effort

I didn't say double. My math had a reseller making a 30 million gil profit on 150m spent if they could convince someone to spend 330m to get into a medium house. The money the buyer spends does not all go to the reseller, it accounts for placard price. The buyer pays more than double because they pay the reseller and then they pay the placard. The seller would have to receive, say, 10% of what they put forth to make a reasonable profit.

So you think people will spend 84 million+ for small houses, 315 million+ for mediums, and 1,050,000,000 or more gil for larges? ok.

Based on your confusion over my math, and your thinking that people would spend 84+ million to get into small houses, I don't think you know enough about the resale market to know how this would change it.

[Jojoya]

I didn't say double. My math had a reseller making a 30 million gil profit on 150m spent if they could convince someone to spend 330m to get into a medium house. The money the buyer spends does not all go to the reseller, it accounts for placard price. The buyer pays more than double because they pay the reseller and then they pay the placard. The seller would have to receive, say, 10% of what they put forth to make a reasonable profit.

So you think people will spend 84 million+ for small houses, 315 million+ for mediums, and 1,050,000,000 or more gil for larges? ok.

Based on your confusion over my math, and your thinking that people would spend 84+ million to get into small houses, I don't think you know enough about the resale market to know how this would change it.

What else are they going to spend their gil on in a game that lacks any significant gil sinks to drain gil back out of the system?

As for the resale market, right now the purchase timer hinders it but not stop it. If there weren't enough players willing to deal with resellers through the limitations currently imposed by the system, the resale market would have shut down by now. Since that hasn't happened, we know the resale market is healthy enough even with the current limitations.

Remove the purchase timer and the resale market blows wide open again because those limitations disappear. Anyone with the gil could be the buyer instead of just those who already own a house or who are willing to buy a FC to get one.

You seem to be overlooking that there won't be 5760 plots available for sale on each world if your proposed change is implemented. Most of those plots already have owners and SE is not going to charge their owners retroactively for any purchase price increase. It's going to be the relatively small number of plots that are demolished or voluntarily relinquished and their new buyers that would be impacted by the price increase.

How many houses per NA world were becoming available each week prior to the suspension of the demolition timer and independent of the ward additions. My guess based off what I can remember from previous discussions would be about 6-8 a week. That would add up to about 400 houses available for sale each year, again independent of any decision by SE to add more wards.

When active player populations on the NA worlds are estimated to be in the 20-25k, do you genuinely believe there won't be at least a few hundred out of the 15-20k "homeless" players willing and able to pay the reseller's fee on top of the purchase fee for at least smalls and mediums?

Resellers might not get their hands on every house that becomes available but they'll be able to get their hands on enough for reselling to remain in the game unless SE changes the system so supply meets demand.

Responding to a post that's no longer there, suggesting I was supporting resellers with this change:

Right now, people pay resellers up to 40 million gil for small houses. If you can buy something for 3m and sell for 40m, it's worth selling. If you can buy it for 40 million and sell it for 40 million, it's not. Upping the placard price kills the profit, kills the market.

No longer worth it to you, perhaps. But there is always someone who will grasp any opportunity for profit. And removing the timer would remove some of the headaches resellers currently have, like creating new shell FCs from scratch.

(edit: want to clarify that I'm not trying to imply you currently are or ever have been a reseller, only that in your mind it would not be worth it if it was something you had been considering)

Ultimately, we're back to SE needs to fix the system. There is no good reason to make housing a limited resource exploited for profit by those out to make profit whether it comes in the form of reselling or creating multiple FCs to run workshops and gardens. Ownership of a house should be an opportunity for every player in the game.

Let's stop dreaming up ways to make certain a broken system stays broken.

[Catstab]

What else are they going to spend their gil on in a game that lacks any significant gil sinks to drain gil back out of the system?

Well, if every small house sale pulled 40,000,000 out of the economy, each NA world would have been sunk an average of 31.6 billion gil in the past year. That's not even counting the considerable added value of mediums and larges.

(My math is 19,000 house purchases in NA during 2020* divided by 24 worlds equals roughly 790 purchases per world at 40,000,000 each)

As for the resale market, right now the purchase timer hinders it but not stop it.

Well, prior to the timer it was popular to purchase a house for 3m and then offer to relinquish for 20m+ to a prospective buyer. That is no longer possible at all, so in that way the timer did stop it.

My proposed change would bring houses closer to what people are willing to pay for them, and hopefully make the timer unnecessary. I honestly don't think even a handful of people would pay 84 million gil for a small house, and certainly no one is paying 315m for a medium (I mean, maybe for the medium). Keep in mind this is for resellers who want to make a modest 10% profit, not the ridiculous gouging that occurs presently.

[Buying for 40 million and selling for 40 million is] No longer worth it to you, perhaps.

40 minus 40 is 0. No one is going to do business just to break even. Right now you can spend 3m for a house and sell for 40m, 1300% profit. Spending 40, you'd have to sell your small FC for 520 million to make the same profit. With placard cost brought in line with demand, it's far more likely for the FC to come upon a house available at placard price than it is today. People are unlikely to pay any price that would support a market.

Ultimately, we're back to SE needs to fix the system... Ownership of a house should be an opportunity for every player in the game.

Sure, originally my post started out "If instanced housing or wards 25-80 are coming in 2021, then this is all moot" but I decided to move it to a footnote (my edit on the OP). I moved it mostly because it disrupted the post flow, but also because my suggestion is being made with a mind toward housing as it is now, rather than housing as it should be. My suggestion is coming from a place of "If only 1 in 5 players gets a house, how do you we pick which one?"


*source: https://i.imgur.com/PJfSdux.png courtesy Y'shtola Cat

[Jojoya]

40 minus 40 is 0. No one is going to do business just to break even.

If resellers are successfully getting 40 million for a 3 million gil piece of property right now as you say, what makes you think they won't be able to successfully get 60 or 80 as well if the property price increases?

People always complain about how much things cost - then they turn around and pay the price because they still want to have it.

My suggestion is coming from a place of "If only 1 in 5 players gets a house, how do you we pick which one?"

We don't. It's not up to us to decide who does or doesn't deserve to have a house. Housing is part of the base game package. That makes anyone who is paying the subscription fee deserving as long as they meet the requirements for the content, same as any other content.

If SE is not wiling/able to solve the supply issue, it should remain opportunity RNG like so many other items in the game that are effectively limited in quantity due to scarcity (like the Night Pegasus whistle, as an example). You're in the right place at the right time, and you win the roll or have the gil to buy immediately. Maybe you get lucky. Maybe you miss out because someone else got to it first.

Does SE need to adjust the purchase timer? Yes. A range of 2-4 hours is sufficient to let the available property come to the attention of multiple players so a reseller can't just "hand over the keys" to a new buyer.

Does SE need to stop suspending the demo timer? Yes. The compassion for those struggling in real life situations is appreciated but it's being applied in the wrong fashion. Do things that positively impact their real life situation in the moment instead of leaving that expression of compassion in a game the player may not return to for months if at all.

Does SE need to re-evaluate the use of shell FCs for obtaining housing for personal use? Yes. If there's a requirement for FCs to purchase, then there should be a requirement to retain ownership. Truly active FCs aren't going to have a problem. Inactive FCs shouldn't be treated any differently from inactive players. When it's down to one active player, you no longer have a Free Company. You have a mercenary for hire. That solo player shouldn't be getting the benefits intended for a group of players.