Rework the housing system

[tdb]

Not trying to say it should take any specific amount or type of effort to be able to get a house. I'm just pointing out that the competition for available plots will increase rapidly as the amount of effort required is reduced so someone's chance of obtaining a house will actually decrease significantly, not remain the same as it is now.

Well, yes. And I fully expect that not everyone would be happy with it. In one of these threads there was a person who seemed outright disgusted that someone would get a chance at a house by just showing up. Though apparently it's fine if you do it in the new wards right after the servers open.

What about FCs? Is it one ticket per FC as well or would every unique member of a FC be able to buy a ticket on behalf of the FC?

There are arguments to be made for both sides (are larger FCs more deserving of a house because it would benefit more players?), but I think limiting it to one ticket per FC would be the best way to avoid gaming the system.

Being present doesn't necessarily prevent a player from entering multiple raffles at a time unless you're going to require the player to camp the placard from the moment the ticket is purchased until the winner is drawn (and I thought the point was to remove the camping?). Better (and probably easier) to just limit how many house plot raffle tickets a player can hold at one time just as we're limited on the number of Cactpot tickets we can have.

The idea of having to be there (and I mean at that particular placard) at the appointed time was born from the feedback that a buy-and-forget system like cactpot (well, you do have to go back later to check if you won) would make it too effortless to enter. Having a 5-10 minute window for the raffle would at least require setting up an alarm. Can't have someone getting a house without putting in a full day's work for it, apparently.

I'm also not sure there's really a point to preventing a player from entering multiple drawings at the same time since their chances of winning any drawing would be very low, and they wouldn't be able to buy a second house once they won and bought the first.

The idea with concurrent raffles was that if there's X amount of players looking for a house and Y plots available, not everyone would be entering the raffle for the same plot. You'd have to choose if you want the one you think is best, or if you'll try for one in a less optimal location but also less competition. Of course this works best if there actually is some turnaround with the plots. I remember that some time ago there was several tens of small plots free on my server across all housing districts. The last I checked a week ago, Lavender Beds was completely full - but then again the demolition timer has been suspended for a long time and only resumed very recently, so there may not have been any new demolitions yet.

Players are already frustrated with a 4 to 22 hour cooldown before a plot becomes available. What happens when it stretches to days before the game decides there are enough plots available that it's time to hold the concurrent drawings?

The raffle time would be announced in advance. One possible algorithm would go like this: if there's already an upcoming raffle and it's more than 17 hours away, then a newly freed plot will use that same time. Otherwise the raffle time will be set at 23 hours from now. (Odd times in order to get raffles to happen at varying times of the day.) It is my belief that it would be a lot less frustrating to immediately see that you can't make it at the appointed time, than spend several hours clicking the placard only to have to go to bed and in the morning find out that someone else got the plot.

I'm not saying a raffle can't be done but there would still be considerable work involved in designing, coding, testing and implementing the system. As I said above, it's still not going to make players any happier in the long run.

Is the effort worth it when it will neither solve the core problem of supply nor make players happier?

It would take some amount of effort, that's true. But I haven't really seen a lot of concrete suggestions being thrown around, aside from the instanced housing utopia. While that would of course be the ultimate solution, I think we can agree that it would also take a lot more effort. The only other solution I've seen (recently at least) is to increase prices by a factor of 10, which would naturally prevent most of the player base from getting houses since they don't have that kind of gil. It would certainly solve the demand vs. supply issue, but the sentiment of only rich people being able to get houses is not one I agree with (even being moderately rich myself).

I can't speak for the player base as a whole, but I personally would be much happier with a raffle system than the current timers. If I didn't already own a house, that is.