Housing Credit System

[sharlim]

Proposal for housing credit system with the following features:
- equal opportunity housing availability based on the amount of effort players are putting into the game
- scale outpaces housing demand and ensures ample supply

Approach:
Players accumulate land use credits by a combination of crafting, combat and time, with the goal of ensuring players stay active to be rewarded. To discourage grinding or botting, this is capped daily, similar to the offline xp buff to balance casual and hardcore gamers.

Land use credits redeem for a small, medium or large land token. Instead of purchasing a lot and construction permit directly with gil, users purchase using tokens. Since increased player activity directly correlates to increased active number of subscribers (ref), the time to acquire a token has a net positive effect on subscriber income. This provides a control variable (average time to produce token) to correlate with the necessary hardware investment for increased housing.

FAQ:
Q: How is this any different than grinding for gil and how will this increase my chance of getting a home?
A: Take for example a group of 10 players who all start playing the game at the same time. In the current system, in a fresh server, the first of these players to reach the minimum gil requirements for land are likely (by some percentage) to purchase and build homes. Lets say the server can currently accommodate 1 home per 1 active players (my current math indicates this is true per yoshi-p on max 5k FF concurrent user per server divided by homes per area * areas ~50*30*5~6k). In the current system, each of these players are eligible. This idea of land for every one active player causes shortages when exceptions occur and inactive players are granted land for extended periods. By creating a higher barrier for entry which is not purely monetary and instead is merit based; obtaining a house becomes a rare, challenging and rewarding accomplishment.

Q: There are alot of assertions and guesswork in the math and statistics. How can we have confidence this would actually work?
A: Even if I had access to the raw data to do the math, there would be alot of guesswork because the system is built on human behavior and we have yet to create a universal economics model to account for all human behaviors (or if you have, you are working on wall street/HK and keeping it to yourself). One of the ways we can test if players will like new ideas is A/B testing. For example, launch a new server with some incentive such as gained XP but at the caveat that housing uses an experimental system. If the experiment is successful on this server, you have gained hard data on the value proposition.

Q: What about FC homes?
A: One simple solution using this approach is to require N members to provide tokens for the FC home purchase. All members providing tokens could use a system similar to the one for forming the FC which required multiple signatures to create it.

[MilkieTea]

I'd like to point you to the Fix Housing Megathread ^.~

It'll make it easier for SE to see our housing requests if theyre all in one place.

[sharlim]

Thank Milkie, added to megathread.

[Catstab]

Crafting, combat, and time also produce gil. I still think the fix is putting ARR prices back. 40m small, 200m medium, 500m large. Those were the original prices.

Players: Please, cheaper!
Yoshi P: The rich will buy entire wards, then
Players: Please!

We literally begged devs for the system we have currently. This suggestion seems sort of in spirit with bringing the prices back up, so that essentially players 1-5 months old aren't competing for houses with 6-18 months old players. Unfortunately, I don't see an entirely new housing only currency being programmed in, any more than an instanced housing system.

[sharlim]

Crafting, combat, and time also produce gil. I still think the fix is putting ARR prices back. 40m small, 200m medium, 500m large. Those were the original prices.

Players: Please, cheaper!
Yoshi P: The rich will buy entire wards, then
Players: Please!

We literally begged devs for the system we have currently. This suggestion seems sort of in spirit with bringing the prices back up, so that essentially players 1-5 months old aren't competing for houses with 6-18 months old players. Unfortunately, I don't see an entirely new housing only currency being programmed in, any more than an instanced housing system.

New currencies are programmed in all the time, this piggybacks off the token system we have for every new raid tier, trial etc.

The benefit of the token system over gil is the rate which you make gil is not directly related to your time investment. This system would be similar to the "hunt log" and "craft log" except reward you with a token.

[Catstab]

New currencies are programmed in all the time

FC credits, gil, tomestones, etc has all existed for years. Now if you're saying "like raid tokens" then you mean an actual inventory item? That sounds like a mistake "Oops I left my housing tokens on my retainer"

[sharlim]

FC credits, gil, tomestones, etc has all existed for years. Now if you're saying "like raid tokens" then you mean an actual inventory item? That sounds like a mistake "Oops I left my housing tokens on my retainer"

Yep, you got it. Personally to me it sounds exclusive and fun.

[Rofel]

Yep, you got it. Personally to me it sounds exclusive and fun.

"Exclusive and fun" lol

At least you wrote personaly, which is an important detail: you're sugesting an activity log based on stuff YOU think are relevant in a game that caters to a multitude of playstyles. And the devs themselves recognize this, having differences in playstyle reason enough for a vote kick.

So, yeah. By making the system worse you're just hiding the problem, not addressing it at all. Hard pass.

[Divinemights]

Not only your idea is unpractical and encourage botting; you don't understand the fundamental issue is supply (hardware servers) is unable to meet the demand (rapid player base growth)

New players will never be able to get a house because they will never be able to compete with old players; therefore, no, not a great idea

[sharlim]

Not only your idea is unpractical and encourage botting; you don't understand the fundamental issue is supply (hardware servers) is unable to meet the demand (rapid player base growth)

New players will never be able to get a house because they will never be able to compete with old players; therefore, no, not a great idea

This idea addresses the fundamental problem, in this case the economics priciple is price elasticity of demand.
"Price elasticity of demand is a measurement of the change in consumption of a product in relation to a change in its price."

When you make the good or service more expensive (more difficult to attain), then the supply available is not consumed as quickly (with variable coeffecient for luxury goods). When new housing is released in Ishgard, in the current system, to your point, new players will have less chance of attaining unless they have the minimum gil necessary and/or already have a home (assuming the transfer mechanic will still be in place). If all players at the time of release needed to complete some set of "hunt/craft/X logs" with diminishing returns outside of the "offline xp" buff, the resulting purchase tokens will have a competitive rush where all players have an opportunity to attain it.

This is not an impractical idea since it applies the same token approach to housing that we already have for weekly gathering and raiding rewards. It doesn't encourage botting unless you have a bot that you can do all of your crafting/gathering/combat for you, in which case, you will have the same chance as someone who is not botting due to the offline xp buff which discourages continuous back-to-back grinding.