Why is this not the solution?

[PredatoryCatgirl]

Purchase-based gil sinks don't do anything if the item the player wants to purchase isn't available.

So...houses never go up for sale?

SE would have to increase supply, and that by itself would cause prices to drop as houses (or whatever item) became easier to obtain.

Something something server shortage.

Except profit is still there in the currency that matters - real money - and that's always been handled outside of the game.

If you can sell someone gil, you'll just sell them gil. Way easier than selling an item worth an arbitrary amount of gil that you might take a relative loss on versus just selling them gil.

If you feel like it's nothing more than a sandwich with unsanitary ingredients, why are you wasting time talking about it?

Why would you randomly pick a number lower than maximum when you're trying to discuss maximum wealth potential?

Go be pedantic somewhere else.

What are you expecting them to buy from the marketboard that would cause the mega inflation? They're not going to sit there buying Mahogany Logs for 1 million gil each nor would all the players selling them list that at that sort of price.

Gil disappears or buy stuff at a higher price. Last I checked, something > nothing.

Any inflation would be purely temporary. It would disappear once the cap was lowered and prices returned to their normal patterns because all the excess gil was removed.

Just like with what I'm suggesting.

Where did I say capitalism is a problem? Neither capitalism nor the free market economy is at issue here.

I never said you did. I asked if it was.

[Jojoya]

So...houses never go up for sale?

You've got 200 players who want to buy a house and have enough gil to do so. There's only one house available.

There are 199 players your gil sink is ignoring. That is not a good gil sink.

Something something server shortage.

Wouldn't have been a problem if SE had gone with a fully instanced system in the first place. Doesn't change that it will be effective when the industry shortage is corrected and if SE chooses to fix the housing problem.

If you can sell someone gil, you'll just sell them gil. Way easier than selling an item worth an arbitrary amount of gil that you might take a relative loss on versus just selling them gil.

To sell someone gil, they need to have something they want and will be able to buy with that gil. Here we're talking about a house.

If someone else owns the house, there's no guarantee the player will be able to buy it. They may not be interested in buying the gil if they aren't certain they will get the house.

If you own the house and have a way to guarantee that player will get it (FC transfer, relocation or whatever), there's no need to involve the gil. You just sell the house for the real money.

Go be pedantic somewhere else.

You started it.

Gil disappears or buy stuff at a higher price. Last I checked, something > nothing.

Useless something is a waste of precious inventory space, and thus worse than nothing. Rich people rarely waste money on useless items. That's part of how they got rich.

Just like with what I'm suggesting.

Go back to the first point. The gil doesn't disappear when the player with the gil cannot buy a house because there aren't enough available.

I never said you did. I asked if it was.

Then you have your answer.

[Almagnus1]

It still failed even before because housing was so prohibitively nobody could afford them. Even if they only lowered the prices but never allowed Personals, people would just create dummy FCs like they do already. The neighborhood system was doomed to fail from the moment of its inception.

At the time, yes, but not so much these days.

That's also why the FC system needs to be locked down so it's harder to make the false FCs yet doesn't punish the legitimate ones - and that's been a very long running issue as it's got a bunch of RMT stuff tied into it (whether people want to admit it or not). Part of the problem here is that there's no auto-deletion failure state for the FC, among other things like a continual ownership check to see if the company is allowed to retain their house or if the FC house gets deleted.

[Dewslam]

At the time, yes, but not so much these days.

That's also why the FC system needs to be locked down so it's harder to make the false FCs yet doesn't punish the legitimate ones - and that's been a very long running issue as it's got a bunch of RMT stuff tied into it (whether people want to admit it or not). Part of the problem here is that there's no auto-deletion failure state for the FC, among other things like a continual ownership check to see if the company is allowed to retain their house or if the FC house gets deleted.

The only solutions I could think of that would really stop fakey-FCs for alts and RMT shenanigans would be to have a time delay, mandatory member minimums or increase the rank needed to get plots; but even that is barely a bandaid fix honestly. A plot was bought the other night by an FC that was three days old with less than ten members and was already rank nine or ten. If you put a hard limit on how old an FC has to be to buy a plot, then people are just going to squat on FCs until it's old enough and cycle them out via transferring leadership. If you increase the amount of points needed to get ranks then that's punishing smaller FCs for the abuses of specific people. If you make it mandatory to have X number of members to purchase a plot then people are just going to fill it with alts. Again and again the core problem largely seems to be that they just need to allow for individual instanced housing or stop tying housing to mechanics that lock people out of content and rewards.

[Almagnus1]

The only solutions I could think of that would really stop fakey-FCs for alts and RMT shenanigans would be to have a time delay, mandatory member minimums or increase the rank needed to get plots; but even that is barely a bandaid fix honestly. A plot was bought the other night by an FC that was three days old with less than ten members and was already rank nine or ten. If you put a hard limit on how old an FC has to be to buy a plot, then people are just going to squat on FCs until it's old enough and cycle them out via transferring leadership. If you increase the amount of points needed to get ranks then that's punishing smaller FCs for the abuses of specific people. If you make it mandatory to have X number of members to purchase a plot then people are just going to fill it with alts. Again and again the core problem largely seems to be that they just need to allow for individual instanced housing or stop tying housing to mechanics that lock people out of content and rewards.

IMO it would be easiest to force FCs to pass a nightly check of all FCs concurrently on the same server where the FCs must have four active subscriptions with at least 91 days of subscribed time - as you need four players to create the FC, you should also need that many to hold land.

At this point, SE has to either accept that they've got to screw over someone to fix holes in the system that should have never been there in the first place, or acknowledge that they're going to have inefficient usage of housing requiring more hardware resources because of player greed.

[zoranreyes]

IMO it would be easiest to force FCs to pass a nightly check of all FCs concurrently on the same server where the FCs must have four active subscriptions with at least 91 days of subscribed time - as you need four players to create the FC, you should also need that many to hold land.

At this point, SE has to either accept that they've got to screw over someone to fix holes in the system that should have never been there in the first place, or acknowledge that they're going to have inefficient usage of housing requiring more hardware resources because of player greed.

I have learned that if it really gets stressed you out so much, it's time to take rest and play other games.
It is what I believe I have to do after many days of camping... While my anxiety attacks with what if I am still unable to get a house for my FC in 6.1. OTL