So, what now? Lotteries with 150+ bids until... when?

[Jojoya]

Pretty much all this.

Housing systems usually come in two flavors:

1) Instanced and everyone gets one, but it's not in the world itself.
2) In the open world, but has a limited supply.

FFXIV combined the two systems, but literally chose the two negatives. FFXIV housing is both instanced and has limited supply.

Other games have been combining the two better than SE does for over a decade. Their housing is fully instanced but that instance is a copy of a portion of the game world. Sometimes you enter from the same spot within the game world, sometimes you can teleport there from other locations.

Let's just go back to first come first serve, and turn auto demo back on. Houses can be relinquished then bought immediately. Yes it made a grey market, but people are buying them with gil/rmt anyway, difference now is that those houses go unused for longer. At least with the first come, first serve, the phantom guilds with 10 people who are all alts can't get an edge bidding.

Okay, demolition resumes. Your world gets an additional 36 houses going up for sale. They get purchased. There are still 1900 players trying to get a house.

What now?

[Padudu]

This! I've said this before and I will say it again: I started playing in 2019 and camped my first cottage as a Sprout totally alone, literally no one else showed up! I got the plot without competition after a few hours and I didn't even have to spam-click the placard. There were PLENTY of other available plots!! The problem is that the playerbase got bigger but we barely got new wards! The lottery will never fix the supply & demand issue.

This particularly sucks for new players though lol, never had the chance to placard click and never will, so the only option is the lotto (asides from apartments ofc)

[SturmChurro]

This particularly sucks for new players though lol, never had the chance to placard click and never will, so the only option is the lotto (asides from apartments ofc)

Placard clicking was better. I never thought this system would end up good, just for the early adopters, or people on low pop servers really.

[Espon]

Placard clicking was better. I never thought this system would end up good, just for the early adopters, or people on low pop servers really.

I clicked on a placard for over 13 hours and didn't win in the end. I don't want anyone to have to experience that just to try and get a house.

[SweetestLily]

Placard clicking was better. I never thought this system would end up good, just for the early adopters, or people on low pop servers really.

Lol. The people who camped a placard for 10 hours to lose to someone who showed up 2 minutes earlier disagree.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Placard clicking didn't suck that much tbh. I got my personal without botting, and honestly there was no need to camp plots for several hours like people say, as long as you were informed enough about it. Sure it was shit, but lottery is worse. Those who REALLY wanted a house and were willing to put some effort had a huge advantage.
There's only one real fix to this now: instanced housing.

Hahaha...no....it clearly wasnt. Placard clicking was absolutely horrible and I'm speaking from experience where me and some of my FC mates had to battle even with the knowledge we had. Not once did we ever managed to get a house due to all sorts of factors, let alone the odd schedules with us having to stop playing this game to play mouse clicker simulator. Take the rose tinted glasses off my friend, those were dark times.

The funny thing is, my FC actually managed to win their house with the lottery. It was a lot less stressful and painless than having to fight numerous people and bots. My only hope is that they soon open the rest of the wards for both FC and personal housing and when they have the resources open more plots. Or better yet, with the upcoming Island Sanctuaries I hope this lessens the value with plot housing, if you're allowed to customize and garden just like before.

[DiaDeem]

Placard clicking didn't suck that much tbh

Don't...

You can make as many arguments as you want as how bad lottery is, and you can also push the Instanced Housing argument as far as you'd like, but Placard Click was that bad and should be in no way remembered any better than the horrible experience than it really was. Have people already forgotten about the horror stories?

Well, I've got mine for you.

First (Personal) House:
My first house was in Behemoth, and I stayed awake camping my plot for more than 24 hours, taking 10 minute naps and only clicking when people tried to come and contest the plot. It hurt both physically and mentally and though I got the house, it was a horrible experience that had me physically ill for the next couple days. I abandoned the plot when I moved over to Leviathan.

Second (Personal) House:
New house in Leviathan. This was the "easy" one, as I had to camp for only seven hours competing against not very many people. I was glad it wasn't as horrible as my Behemoth plot, but...

Third (FC) House:
Last year we set out to get a house for our FC. The process of hunting plots, chasing open spots and mass clicking took a little over three months, with fights over about 30ish plots that we lost to other players, and it was two (up to three sometimes) of us clicking on the f*cking thing. We had eight hour sessions deep into the night, jumping from plot to plot, checking if something had just opened to go click again and again and again. We stayed up until early hours in the morning sometimes, completely ruining our next day and being able to do little more than manually clicking the placard over and over. We got good, and a couple times we even got the "Can't complete purchase" message because someone else bought the plot literally a second before we did. We clicked against as little as 6 people and as many as 20+ and many of them were bots that kept clicking after they completed their purchase. We then learned that we should only click about eight hours into the timer, and engage in the so called "Prime Time" that lasted about four hours. How would you know this? The only way I had was by joining a Discord that kept a close watch on timers, so we could kinda aim to get there on Prime Time. Finally, we did get out plot. A small place in The Goblet. Once again, this was both physically and mentally draining and exhausting. Our whole FC can attest to how horrible the whole process was. We've since moved to a medium in Empy.

It's very nice that you didn't have to struggle as bad as I or my FC (or countless others) did to get your plot, but your argument is as good as someone saying... "Well, I only had three bids in my plot and won first try, so the system isn't as bad as everyone says". Even with the house I got "lucky" I still wasted 7 hours that I could have used doing literally anything other than clicking a placard.

Do I prefer lottery? Yes, simply based on the fact that it's not literal physical torture. Is the system as good as it should be? No, far from it. I believe they need either instanced housing, or just invest in server capacity for at least 100 wards per world, if not more.

I'm sorry, but I get kinda fired up when people say "Oh placard clicking wasn't as bad" because yes it was.

[Sheriyana]

snip

Agreed. I see red whenever people start defending the absolute torture the placard spamming was. That system should have been some sort of human rights violation for what it made paying customers go through to enjoy a feature of the game.

[Misplaced_Marbles]

...

Jesus christ, at that point you need to ask yourself why you're choosing to torture youself.

Anyway, instanced housing is the only solution. Stop half-assing it, SE, and just do the right thing.

[Stormpeaks]

Jesus christ, at that point you need to ask yourself why you're choosing to torture youself.

Anyway, instanced housing is the only solution. Stop half-assing it, SE, and just do the right thing.

Anyway, instanced housing is the only solution. Stop half-assing it, SE, and just do the right thing.

No thanks, housing is fine as it is, no need for some instances of houses, there are other games if that's what you're looking after. Housing in FFXIV is perfectly fine, it just needs more wards added.