Just Another Housing Complaint

[Silverbane]

On siren, your server, 852 people are bidding for smalls in this round.

Not quite. A person can place one bid with each qualified character they have. So 852 bids may represent less than 852 people. I know this because in the last round of the lottery, my spouse entered three bids (using three characters) for one small lot.
And won it, BTW.

How many players are using this strategy to increase their odds of winning, only SE knows.

[Edit: I currently have three characters on Faerie qualified to enter the lottery, and I am leveling three more.]]

[Shibi]

Not quite. A person can place one bid with each qualified character they have. So 852 bids may represent less than 852 people

This is quite true. But I was trying to keep it a bit simple.

[Fybrile]

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I mean, you're right, it would be simple to find the information I described in the part of my post that you quoted.

Could you not make it even simpler by just taking the number of personal plots x wards x districts x servers (150,300 plots) and then dividing it by the number of player accounts (39 million) or active players (2.2 million) to get your percent for all players since release (0.4% of players have a house) or just currently active players (6.8% of players have a house)?

That should be it unless I'm missing something? Is that misrepresentative somehow?

And while, granted, it may not be a perfectly accurate statistic with which to make important business decisions costing millions of dollars, it does seem to indicate a woeful lack of housing. Even if my math is wrong by a couple million players, the numbers are not even close to equal. No reasonable person would be happy with content that 50% of players are immediately and irrevocably locked out from, let alone 93 out of 100 ACTIVE players as those figures would suggest.

Allow me to overextend myself for a second:

Those numbers would mean that players have the rarest obtainable mount in the game at a RATE of almost twice that who are even able to buy a house (and that's not taking into account that one district, 20% of the plots we're using for this math, is only a month old. A few subscription payments ago, this statistic was 20% worse.

I think we can all agree that a house should not be twice as rare as the rarest RNG mount in the game.



But, it was the following four points that were the data points I was really interested in seeing. Interest, attainment, opinion. Essentially, how "satisfied" are players with the system, either pre- or post-auction system. It would help illuminate how many players WANT a house, but can't get one - which is at the heart of the complaint of this thread. While I think your focus on the number of currently-bidding players is interesting, I don't think it's a very accurate one (as there are a number of variables that could make this auction cycle not very representative of how many players would try to get a house if they wanted one.

And, also, the fourth data point was also interesting to me: how many gatekeepers would also want to learn this information. I'd genuinely be curious how many people currently trying to guard the artificial rarity of houses would overextend themselves into blocking access to information as well.

Which would connote that, at least on some conscious level, they'd know their position is petulant.

Don't get me wrong, it's fair for them to feel undeservedly proud of their rare trophy. I just don't think SE ever intended housing to function as ultra-rare drops, and I'm happily looking forward to the day when houses work as intended.





A few additional questions and points -

1. I saw the 35k number for Siren as well. Is that the population of players, or the number of characters? When I saw it, I thought it was the number of characters on the server. I myself have 3 characters on Siren, so if it's the latter, your estimate would probably be low.

2. The number of personal plots is 1,440 on a server now (isn't it?). On a server of 35,000 (I'll assume players), that's only enough houses for 4% of them. Surely you'd estimate that more than 14% of players are interested in getting a house. (based on the 4% with houses I've guesstimated, plus the 10% you've guesstimated are interested in it). Does that really sound right to you? I'd have guessed a third really want one, a third won't say no to one, and a third don't care about one.

3. I would bet that the "remainder" variable: "some will have thought it still too hard and not bother" - is much higher than you're giving credit for.

[LaylaTsarra]

2. The number of personal plots is 1,440 on a server now (isn't it?). On a server of 35,000 (I'll assume players), that's only enough houses for 4% of them. Surely you'd estimate that more than 14% of players are interested in getting a house. (based on the 4% with houses I've guesstimated, plus the 10% you've guesstimated are interested in it). Does that really sound right to you? I'd have guessed a third really want one, a third won't say no to one, and a third don't care about one.

There are 7200 plots on Siren and only recently have wards been adjusted and that remains to be seen if they'll stay FC only and how the distribution will be handled when they begin to make adjustment or add additional wards. So really trying to use the 1440 is a bit disingenuous don't you think given many of those 7200 plots are already personal. I suspect they'll be no adjustments to the FC distribution until 6.2 but we could be surprised. In addition I suspect a lot of people are making small FC's to by pass the restrictions and in fact buying personal FC houses.

In addition a good number of people have alts on Siren (I have 5) and a good number of my friends have them as well and given the 4.2 rules only one of them can buy a house now on the same server. How many alts are there I don't know but I bet there are a ton of them. There are also people who are new and can't buy houses and those who don't even want a house and many of those 35000 characters aren't active unless the 35000 figure represents active numbers and I'd love to see a link supporting that.

I don't disagree that ward housing isn't sufficient and in lieu of massive additions instanced housing alongside wards would be a better solution. SE has to have a better handle on how many want houses given the lottery numbers and hopefully will begin to take actions to address the imbalance.

[Amenara]

It's not hard to work out approximately. Lucky Bancho gives a fairly good idea of population. The number of houses are fixed, paissahouse shows how many are available and the housing census shows how many are FC/Personal.

But it's also not really useful. Of more use is how many people are currently in the lottery.

On siren, your server, 852 people are bidding for smalls in this round. So that's a pretty strong indication of the people who desire a house. We know the population is about 35,000 so, ~2.5% of people on Siren currently want a home. The other sites show 8.8% have one.

Of the remainder,
* some will have homes,
* some won't be interested,
* some will have stopped playing in the last two months, and
* some will have thought it still too hard and not bother.

Errors in the Bancho numbers make up the rest.

I think ~10% interested in housing sounds about right tbh.

SE can make these people happier, mostly. Well as much as people can be happy.

My more hypothetical question is if housing were guaranteed, how many of the people who aren't participating would be interested in getting a house? I think the lack of "interest" in housing is more of a housing supply problem then a potential want for a house problem. I get saying ~10% of players are actively trying to get a house or have one, but I believe the want for a house is much higher.