Why Housing Was Doomed To Fail

[Grimsalt]

First, I wanted to say if you were hoping to get a house and didn't, I am supremely sorry. I know it sucks, and it will honestly just worsen from here. You missed your one big chance to get a plot with manageable odds.

For those saying, stop crying, you wanted this, no, they didn't. Players did not ask for such a low supply of personal housing. They wanted a chance to own a house and didn't want to spend 4-5 hours at a time clicking a sign. Going from the world's worse system to this is NOT better. Your odds are still just as bad going forward.

For personal houses, SE released wards 19-24. Each ward has 60 homes, and on my server, after running around for a couple of hours, about ten people were bidding on a single house, and on some plots, that went up to 30 bids. We will assume a low number of 5 per house for our purpose. That is 360 houses trying to be split between 1800 people bidding. Of course, people are going to be upset. The supply is not there.

Then, to make matters worse, players cannot do anything about it. At least when we're clicking on the house, and you lost, often you could move to click on another one. Now you are forced to sit on your loss for nine days. This is split between having to wait four days to bid again, to which supply is far less going forward, so expect upwards of 50+ bidding on the house. Then you wait five days to find out another winner. With those numbers, you have about 40 attempts to win a bid in a year. Depending on the odds as we advance, that could be winning a 1 in 50 rolls, and it could be worse.

The entire issue is a lack of supply. There is not a system that SE could put in that makes such a low supply feel good to people. It just isn't going to happen. Far more people don't own a house than do own one, and while we don't have numbers on that, I could only assume that is pretty significant considering the sheer amount of bids.

To sum up my Ted talk, there isn't enough supply. Your odds going forward are much worse than they were at release. Yay! Housing got better! /s

[Wolfenrir]

Basically the current system is the same as before, you just don't have to spend your whole life clicking on the placard, system chooses who wins and thats how it is, back then youd have to keep on clicking and when the server decides that the house was available to purchase one lucky person gets the house, I honestly don't see much difference from this to the lottery system.

Except the previous one didn't screw up a lot of people with bugs.

Just making myself clear here that I'm not defending the old system, I'm 100% up for instanced housing.

[ssunny2008]

Basically the current system is the same as before, you just don't have to spend your whole life clicking on the placard, system chooses who wins and thats how it is, back then youd have to keep on clicking and when the server decides that the house was available to purchase one lucky person gets the house, I honestly don't see much difference from this to the lottery system.

The new one is worse.

Before you had atleast the chance to find a house here and there with noone on it, or atleast 2-3 players. Of course on highly populated servers it might´ve been like 10 players clicking 24/7 on it, but the new system? The more and more houses are gone, the more poeple will bet on the left ones. In the end you gonna have 100 or even 1000 bids on it.

I would actually prefer sitting a whole night here smashing buttons and having a tangible chance on a house instead of gambling with a 0,1% chance because i wasn´t able to get a house week 1, especially when you have to wait like 10 days for a new bid just to be mad at the end once again.

The chances to be together on the same ward with your friends / partner-fc decreased drastically with it too.


EDIT: Imagine they would´ve finally added an anti-cheat system against bots / clickmacros and other software. That combined with "you can´t relocate" and fc restrictions... it would´ve solved a lot much better than this.

[Grimsalt]

The new one is worse.

Before you had atleast the chance to find a house here and there with noone on it, or atleast 2-3 players. Of course on highly populated servers it might´ve been like 10 players clicking 24/7 on it, but the new system? The more and more houses are gone, the more poeple will bet on the left ones. In the end you gonna have 100 or even 1000 bids on it.

I would actually prefer sitting a whole night here smashing buttons and having a tangible chance on a house instead of gambling with a 0,1% chance because i wasn´t able to get a house week 1, especially when you have to wait like 10 days for a new bid just to be mad at the end once again.

The chances to be together on the same ward with your friends / partner-fc decreased drastically with it too.

This is what I wanted to point out. I am severely lowballing my estimates to make it seem a little better. But I expect that houses will have upwards of 100 bids on them going forward. And given that you only have about 40 tries per year, the odds are stacked against you.

[Succubusty]

Basically the current system is the same as before, you just don't have to spend your whole life clicking on the placard, system chooses who wins and thats how it is, back then youd have to keep on clicking and when the server decides that the house was available to purchase one lucky person gets the house, I honestly don't see much difference from this to the lottery system.

I'm not bashing the current system or defending the old one either, but there is one major difference. The amount of people entering. Before, the system sucked pretty bad so there were comparatively less people trying for a house because not everyone had the time/wanted to camp a house & click for hours. Now, it's easy to try for a house, so everyone and their mothers can just walk up, click a button, and walk away. More people are able to enter than before, and they have 5 days to do it as opposed to having to find the time in 1 day, so your odds in general are alot lower.

[Grimsalt]

SE didn't understand the problem they were trying to fix. You can't just throw a new system over the old one and expect things to change. There was never enough supply, not by half. They did very little actually to fix that. I am happy for the people who won but understand that hundreds more did not for everyone who did.

[Jojoya]

SE didn't understand the problem they were trying to fix. You can't just throw a new system over the old one and expect things to change. There was never enough supply, not by half. They did very little actually to fix that. I am happy for the people who won but understand that hundreds more did not for everyone who did.

They do understand the problem. They don't want to fix it.

They'd rather put minimal effort into mixing the system up to give the appearance of doing something over investing the resources needed to fix it. Now we're seeing the typical result of such an approach - new and bigger problems.

[Shazzinoth]

There was never enough supply, not by half. They did very little actually to fix that.

Just to address the understatement of the year - they actually made it worse by reducing the amount of personal housing.
25% of housing only for personals does not work, especially when on a lot of servers, most FC houses are just not being bought, and then saying it's only going to be addressed once every 4 months is... It's mind boggling how this was thought to be a good idea.

[StarkeRegulus]

Just to address the understatement of the year - they actually made it worse by reducing the amount of personal housing.
25% of housing only for personals does not work, especially when on a lot of servers, most FC houses are just not being bought, and then saying it's only going to be addressed once every 4 months is... It's mind boggling how this was thought to be a good idea.

How was that mind boggling? If any at this point it's what's to be expected, they are clearly underestimating how much they are pissing off the community regarding the housing issue. Maybe when they lose even more players to Lost Ark they'll wake the F up.

[Avenger]

Just to address the understatement of the year - they actually made it worse by reducing the amount of personal housing.
25% of housing only for personals does not work, especially when on a lot of servers, most FC houses are just not being bought, and then saying it's only going to be addressed once every 4 months is... It's mind boggling how this was thought to be a good idea.

I understand that the overall percentage of personal housing may have decreased, but hasn't the total number of personal plots on each server increased?

Or they actually shrink or re-zone the previously existing wards like the Goblet? I hadn't noticed that.