Quote Originally Posted by Illmaeran View Post
This may not be a popular opinion, but I'm just fine with the lottery/raffle mechanism. I gave placard camping a serious go a few times and said "stuff it" when relocators took them after many hours of clicking. I haven't had a house since Stormblood released and have found that not having one hasn't significantly reduced my enjoyment of the game. Yeah, it would be nice to have for all the reasons they're nice to have, but an apartment scratches the majority of those itches.
My big complaint is they're just changing the "flavor" of RNG that controls the limited access to houses instead of addressing the access to houses. It should have been clear to them when houses first sold out on most worlds back at the end of Heavensward that the ward system would never be able to keep up with demand as the player base grew. That was almost 5 years ago. Certainly I know that development of systems in MMOs can be very time consuming but they already had the backbone of a housing system in place to work from. We should be seeing more at this point than just "here, have a lottery".

The changes at least make it more difficult to flip houses but they won't prevent it unless they make the new member period an excessively long period of time (like 6 months or more) and I don't see them doing that because it could cause problems for new but legitimate FCs starting out if the FC leader has a real life emergency. They may have been better off setting a waiting period for new FCs to purchase a house since getting to rank 6 for the purchase entitlement can be done in a few hours. Not that I disagree with the new member period in general - that will be a help when it comes to FC theft due to account compromise if SE can't get the rank permissions straightened out.