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.

[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.

[SlickPaws]

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.

We also wanted Square to double-check their code and not allow for jank like the lottery rolling a 0. Missed out on upgrading my FC house when I was the *only* participant on the plot I wanted. Went from being a sure thing with 100% chance of me getting it to a coin-toss based on some broken code. 6.1 has turned out to be an absolute mess between changes nobody asked for, a janky lottery system that doesn't work as intended, visual bugs and glitches up the wazoo and no real end in sight beyond "we're sorry for your inconvenience." I've been playing for years and I've never seen any mid-expansion patch have such a negative effect before, but I suppose there has to be a first time for everything. My only hope is that the devs can sack up and deliver the fixes pretty soon because the way things are going, I don't think I'm going to renew my sub when the time comes.

[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]

We also wanted Square to double-check their code and not allow for jank like the lottery rolling a 0. Missed out on upgrading my FC house when I was the *only* participant on the plot I wanted. Went from being a sure thing with 100% chance of me getting it to a coin-toss based on some broken code. 6.1 has turned out to be an absolute mess between changes nobody asked for, a janky lottery system that doesn't work as intended, visual bugs and glitches up the wazoo and no real end in sight beyond "we're sorry for your inconvenience." I've been playing for years and I've never seen any mid-expansion patch have such a negative effect before, but I suppose there has to be a first time for everything. My only hope is that the devs can sack up and deliver the fixes pretty soon because the way things are going, I don't think I'm going to renew my sub when the time comes.

Yeah, when talking about my grievances with the system, I wanted to focus on the housing system as a whole. The bug indeed does suck, but it wouldn't technically have been an issue if there was supply. That being said, I hope you get your house!

[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.

[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.

[StarkeRegulus]

Well, sadly, over half of my FC quit because we've been trying to get an house for ages and the old system was beyond garbage and now this happens. I know for most of you this shouldn't be a reason to quit but it's an adding up of situations and honestly my group of friends just wants to move on at this point.

People were already frustrated about a lot of stuff and honestly this was just the straw that broke the camel's back for many of them. Some people went out of their way to be up at dawn, some were playing on a Saturday when its "family time" for them and, all for nothing. At this point we were just angry but then Yoshida releases a boilerplate corporate speech with "Welp, sorry, we'll do better next time". No, you won't, there won't be a next time, people got fed up with "sorry's", don't be sorry be better or compensate for the losses you caused. It's not too much to ask. If people ran on their own for a house and lost, give them the damn house! We deserve better than a boilerplate corporate speech!

It's too much shit at this point. Adding to all the personal issues everyone has with the game, there's the ones that were bad for everyone. Server massive login queue that had people waiting for hours to play (you know, people that were paying subscriptions and only had those few hours to play to begin with) which at some point was almost impossible to get in on a weekend due to all the anti-AFK scripts, then they closed the server which meant if we wanted to get our friends to come try Final Fantasy, we couldn't because it was closed for 2 months, and then there was the "data center coming soon™" debacle which by "patch release estimates" we're only getting 4 months from now for visits within same areas (IE europe: chaos, light) and all over the globe not sooner than next year, if we're lucky! All of this in the span of a few months. It's too many sorrys and not actually getting stuff done and right the first time around. Sorry does NOT make up for messing up.

And above all, I know most of you see Yoshida as a God, but almost everyone I know is tired of the levity at which he answers some stuff. Shrugging his shoulders and rolling his eyes every time someone asks "IS HOUSING GOING TO BE FIXED?" feels like a taunt at this point, because he goes "Uugggh, this question again, every time", YES, every time, because you haven't fixed it the first 30 times, what do you think it's going to happen the 31st? PEOPLE ARE GOING TO ASK. What kind of dev never addresses a problem and expects it go away? Maybe you should wonder why people keep asking instead? It's because people care about it and they are tired of trying to get a house due to your crappy system and you refuse to fix it. Lo and behold, a light at the end of the tunnel and BAM, "sorry kids, we'll do better next time, good luck with your even lower odds of getting a house now."

Getting really hard to justify to my friends why they should keep playing this "amazing" game every time Squeenix messes up royally.

Also, the "complicated code we need to check" excuse? Coooome on. You can BS any layman with such a sorry excuse, but understand that some of us actually are coders and devs ourselves. "Complicated system that we need to through" for a raffle? Please... Either the code is basic and you're lying (my guess) or the code is unnecessarily complicated which means you need better coders which doesn't make me feel any more at ease.