Fix Housing Megathread

[Hybie]

As much as I enjoy clicking on a placard for 8 + hours and not being able to purchase it, I would really prefer if housing just gets fixed in general, or add in more housing instances like discussed in this thread.

[Thorncraft]

Once a plot is relinquished 8-12 hours for relocation after that NO more relocation and it goes up for sale. Maybe instantly for sale or for a 4-6 hour window (something reasonable). It sucks waiting hours and hours just to have someone relocate because the "invisible timer" can take up to 24 ungodly hours.

[Catstab]

Once a plot is relinquished 8-12 hours for relocation after that NO more relocation and it goes up for sale. Maybe instantly for sale or for a 4-6 hour window (something reasonable). It sucks waiting hours and hours just to have someone relocate because the "invisible timer" can take up to 24 ungodly hours.

I see where they were coming from with the 24 hour timer. With a 4 hour time you could release a plot at 3 am and it would sell by 7, making transfers pretty simple. That said, I think the timer in general is a travesty. People pour blood, sweat, and tears into thousands of hours camping every day across the game. It's horrible. SE really needs to come up with a way to make the camping process fully passive.

Obviously their thinking was we would just walk up, check, no. Walk up 6 hours later, check, no. 4 hours later, check, yes! But in reality, you can click 36,000 times in those 10 hours, so players will click 36,000 times.

[Nepentha]

I see where they were coming from with the 24 hour timer. With a 4 hour time you could release a plot at 3 am and it would sell by 7, making transfers pretty simple. That said, I think the timer in general is a travesty. People pour blood, sweat, and tears into thousands of hours camping every day across the game. It's horrible. SE really needs to come up with a way to make the camping process fully passive.

Obviously their thinking was we would just walk up, check, no. Walk up 6 hours later, check, no. 4 hours later, check, yes! But in reality, you can click 36,000 times in those 10 hours, so players will click 36,000 times.

My college degree is in psychology, research specifically. In one of my freshman research methods classes, we did a study using rats to determine behavior with different delivery of food (reward).

Other groups got fixed ratio schedules (the rat would receive a pellet after a set number of bar presses). Or Fixed interval (the rat receives a pellet after a set amount of time has passed).

My team got the variable ratio schedule. (There's also fixed ratio which has similar results.) There was no set amount of time or number of bar presses. Meaning the rat had no idea when they would get a food pellet, no matter how many times it pressed the bar or how long it waited between bar presses. It was entirely random. Much like the clicking of a placard in FFXIV's housing savage.

Predictably, the other rats learned to either wait a certain amount of time, then go press the bar for a food pellet. Or press the bar a certain number of times to get a food pellet. Our rat, having absolutely no freaking clue when it'd get a pellet, never stopped pressing it.

Thanks to SE, players have been reduced to rats on a fixed or variable ratio schedule.

[Catstab]

Predictably... Our rat, having absolutely no freaking clue when it'd get a pellet, never stopped pressing it.

Yeah, I don't know what SE expected other than what they got. As you say, the results are predictable.

People need to be given information for their own good, or they hurt themselves learning the hard way. The timer is not explained in detail anywhere by SE, leaving first time house buyers to depend on veteran players for advice. Even the advice of veteran players is just "click or use a controller for 4 hours straight over and over again." And of course the more desperate players ignore that advice and continue to click closer to the full 24 hours of the timer, over and over again.

Yoshi P says they will consider a lottery, and I really hope they find a way to keep the bots from taking an unfair advantage from it. Barring that, and barring the "enough houses for everyone" hope- I'm starting to think the best suggestion rolling around lately is Themarvin and the "3 placard clicks per day" idea. It would force all of us to use the timer as SE intended. Check and see, come back much later. Even the bots would not be able to overpower such a system. I didn't love the idea at first, but I'm coming around.

[Thorncraft]

MMOs run into problems when they restrict access to content to a lucky few instead of making that content equally accessible to every player who is paying the required real money to play and meets the game play entry requirements for the content.

If limited resource content systems that only a few players get access to were so beneficial to MMOs, why don't we see more of them getting used?

When you want customers to keep returning to a theme park, you need to make sure they can get access to the content that interests them the most. If they can't get that access, they stop returning and your theme park is short the revenue it otherwise would have been earning. That's not a good business decision.

Agreed it's shows they don't care about the average player. If you don't buy on release day then you get punished by SE. So either get a third-party click program or suffer your mental and physical health and spam click every second for 24+ hours. This specific reason has prevented me from login into FF over some other game from time to time.

[Caitlyn]

I would like to buy/own a house. But not with a demolition timer forcing me to login every x days or otherwise I m gonna lose my lovely decorated house where I spent tens of hours and millions of gil in it. Nah... I m happy with my appartement ^^.

[Thorncraft]

This game gets boring for crafters if you literally don't allow access to one of the most craft heavy item in the game (it's houses). And it's you, SE, you won't allow the average player to buy a house. Either buy on release like a good player or you get punished. The average human can't spam click every SECOND for 24 HOURS but I mean hey at least PC players can have a program to do that for them. Also, I love that one FC can own a LITERAL block of a ward.
Show the timer make it reasonable for at a normal human. Like 4 or 6 hour windows. Allow relocation before the plot goes up for sale (10-12 hours) and if no one relocated after X time then NO more relocations only the new shorter window. Because that at least gives people a heads up that a plot will be available but also stops instant buying/selling. And the shorter window is beneficial for mental and physical reasons. We can't all be bots.

[Besame]

My FC placard says, "Owned by FC NAME".

[Thorncraft]

Plot is relinquished [placard does state for Relocation or Sale during their respective phases] > Invisible 10-hour-timer starts for Relocation (that's 42% of a real day to decide). Once Relocation timer is up no more Relocation and the plot goes up for sale > next 0-4 hours that plot can not be bought (that is minimum of 58% of a real day to login and see there could potentially be a plot up, given the relocation goes unphased) > 4-12 hours the invisible timer starts (like the current one) > invisible timer goes off or after 12 hours > the plot goes up for insta-purchase. The minimum amount of turn around time would be 14 hours from relinquish to purchase with max being 26 hours. Relocation still gets priority but timers favor a buyer. Lastly, the knowledge of a rough buy window with only an 8 hour spam window is priceless. What do you think?