Allow cancelling personal housing lottery bid - here's why

[Silverbane]

want better chances? wait til last day of bidding. walk around wards, and mark down which plots are getting the most bids, and avoid them.

And level an alt or seven. Although each account can own only one personal house on each world, you can place as many bids on a plot as you have qualified (level 50, 2nd Lt.) characters. My spouse placed three bids on a small plot in Shiragane last round (out of 50 total on that plot) and won it.

[I am not sure what happens if each alt bids on a separate plot; since you can't win more than one, it doesn't help your odds to do so.]

My own long-term campaign to get a personal medium has me:

1. leveling three new alts right now, in addition to the three I already have qualified, and
2. putting a hold on my spending on glamour, since I'll need the gil for the bids.

That last is important; I have single glamour plates that are worth more than a small plot.

Note however that whichever alt wins the plot will be the only one of that player's characters that can live in it: just as you can't send mail between alts, you can't make any of your other alts tenants of the personal house that one of them owns; this means that unless you open the house to the public, the non-owning alts cannot even enter it. So if your goal is to have a particular character own a house, multiple-bidding with multiple alts doesn't help.

However, it works for me, because I'm really getting the house for my spouse, and once I have it, the tenants will be four of my spouse's alts, who will have full privileges. I'll be a mainly-absentee landlord.

[Themarvin]

So people are just suppose to give up their friends and families on a data center because housing is available in new worlds? No, they need to fix this housing fiasco once and for all. It's been an issue since 2.0 and increasingly has become worse every expansion as FFXIV has grown a lot. I feel a lot of problems can be resolved if they swapped to instanced housing for personals and let FC's have wards since personal are typically used for private use if y'know what I mean... Anyways, that's just my take on it.

Having a house will or not will not affect your gaming quality and if your family and friends got one, why not become a tenant in theres and be allowed to decorate or whatever.

[Jojoya]

*nudge* *nudge*
Crossworld Travel, Crossworld Linkshells, Crossworld Groups. DC Travel in a few weeks.

What's the point of having a house on a dead world on a dead data center because everyone is using data center travel to be on a populated data center?

Can't visit your house when you're on the other data center. Can't check your retainers when you're on the other data center. Can't use FC chat when you're on another data center. Can't use linkshells when you're on another data center unless it's a cross world linkshell created on that data center. Can't sell items on another data center's marketboard.

On the flip side, can't talk to your friends on another data center when you're on your home world. Difficult to sell items on your home worlds because everyone is using data center travel to get to a world that has more supply and cheaper prices. Difficult to get a group together in party finder on your home world because everyone is using data center travel to get access to a more active party finder. Queue times for Duty Finder on your home world are long because everyone is going to another data center for faster queue times.

SE is making a mistake by not mixing new worlds with existing worlds when the new NA data center opens. I know many Materia players are unhappy with the state of Materia but they've got one advantage - lack of data center travel means they have incentive to work together and rely on each other to build up their community. Those players going to the new NA data center have no such incentive when they can use data center travel to get to the worlds that have the communities they already belong to.

What's the point of having a house on a world you almost never see because you're always playing on a different data center?

[free_magick]

It would be really nice to be able to cancel any housing bid, personal or FC, within the first 24 hours of it being placed and get a full refund of the deposit. That gives time for people to discussed the plot location, realize they've made a mistake and correct it, or to counter a malicious attempt to mess with an FC's housing location.

They could even issue you a certificate for the amount that can be placed on another bid during the housing period, and then you could wait out the lottery for the refund.

[Nepentha]

It would be really nice to be able to cancel any housing bid, personal or FC, within the first 24 hours of it being placed and get a full refund of the deposit. That gives time for people to discussed the plot location, realize they've made a mistake and correct it, or to counter a malicious attempt to mess with an FC's housing location.

They could even issue you a certificate for the amount that can be placed on another bid during the housing period, and then you could wait out the lottery for the refund.

Unfortunately it'd just be abused. Though I think it wouldn't be such a bad thing to allow a bid to be retracted within the first half hour to an hour after placing it. Just for the folks who steamroll through all the warnings and accidentally bid on an FC house when they mean to bid on personal and vice versa.

[Sindele]

Assuming a dead server - or data center - will stay dead forever is an assumption that has burned people countless times before in this game alone, and it appears that it's going to burn people yet again.

We know what queues look like during a highly popular expansion release. We know what DC travel looks like under high-load situations. We know SE will gladly leave servers locked for years if it meets their load balancing needs. And we know that the people who blink late during these scenarios tend to wind up with the least.

So envision the plausible worst-case scenarios: another year+ of the server being locked, another year+ of autodemo trickles being the only housing supply and even smalls being triple-digit bids - or even being frozen again!, the 6+ hour queues on your server when 7.0 hits potentially rising towards 12+ hours as people discover new tricks to stay connected, DC travel functionally impossible in *or* out for a month+ due to local load.

Are all your friends already with you on your server, much less your DC? Do you intend to bring anyone new to the game? Does any one of those worst case scenarios sound like something you don't really want to deal with or make you second-guess your decision to sit in place, especially with the lure of potentially owning a house uncontested on the table? Because the history of this game has shown one thing to hold true: if you think you're going to blink at all, it's in your personal interest to blink early.

[Themarvin]

Well only way can agree to cancel the bid is that you cancel it and you can't do another bid before next round is up, else you will see bids crowd surfing everywhere.

[Pratini]

I'm ok with canceling the bid as long its at least 48h before the end of the entry cycle.

[Reinha]

I'm ok with canceling the bid as long its at least 48h before the end of the entry cycle.

People would just wait until that 48h period to see which plots have the least bids after some of the bids have vanished. And at that point they can't withdraw their own bid anymore and we would see the same complaints.

The system is fine as it is. The generation that never read a single book cover to cover just has to gather some patience and read the pop up, the ward and plot numbers and the size of the house they are bidding on. Then look at the map one more time and make sure they are in the right ward/subward and the sunset is where they want it to be (west). Then place the bid, and write down the address and the end of the bidding cycle.