Lottery is a joke.

[Zedix]

This new lottery system is a joke, it is certainly better than before but having every single player be on the same level when it come to the lottery actually feels terrible.
Bidding against 150+ other people is a joke, .75% chance at best on just about any house.
Getting a house before you were click warring against like 20 other people, which means about 5% chance (given all players were equal).
The lack of effort/camping effectively increased real demand while real supply has not changed, in fact, real supply decreased with the locking of more wards to FC only.
I have a few ideas that may help remedy this issue and I will list them in the order of what I believe will work best.

• 1. There should be priority given to people just trying to move house location instead of leaving it wholly open.
  If I move my house there will still be an open house for those people to bid on, effectively leaving real supply unchanged.
  If someone wins who didn't have a house it further decreases the already constrained supply.
• 2. Limit the number of people who can actually bid on a house.
  Locking it to 100 people would increase the odds of winning in nearly all cases.
  This increase would more likely reward people who are dedicated to getting a house.
  Would likely decrease real demand on a per house basis while still allowing plenty of people to engage with the system.
• 3. Limit the time-frame that players can bid.
  Leaving it at 1 week means people who only slightly want a house can more easily bid.
  This drives down the chances for players who would otherwise dedicate time to look and try for housing.
  This change could lower real demand by allowing more dedicated players to log on daily for a chance at more frequent bids, leading to an elevated chance across larger time spans.

[Amenara]

having every single player be on the same level when it come to the lottery actually feels terrible.

It is called fair. It feels bad because you don't have an advantage anymore. All your ideas make the lottery not fair and defeats the purpose of adding it.

[SXTC]

It is called fair. It feels bad because you don't have an advantage anymore. All your ideas make the lottery not fair and defeats the purpose of adding it.

Lets put things in perspective here. Before you had to compete with gil sellers that wanted to get as much houses as possible to resell and all of them used scripts... however several other people also used scripts so they wouldn't have to be behind their pc to get it (those scripts press plaque's faster then you can). When lottery came... the use of a script became absolute so SE took care of that true... however we are forgetting those gil sellers have a vast amount of accounts & subscriptions they use to play in the lottery which still gives them an unfair benefit, especially with the housing shortage. I think this problem can only be solved SE made instanced wards in which case no one would still want to buy a house from a gil seller knowing houses would become infinite (but you could only have 1 for private use and 1 for FC use per character). How this would work? I'll make a post about it now.

[UkcsAlias]

Lets put things in perspective here. Before you had to compete with gil sellers that wanted to get as much houses as possible to resell and all of them used scripts... however several other people also used scripts so they wouldn't have to be behind their pc to get it (those scripts press plaque's faster then you can). When lottery came... the use of a script became absolute so SE took care of that true... however we are forgetting those gil sellers have a vast amount of accounts & subscriptions they use to play in the lottery which still gives them an unfair benefit, especially with the housing shortage. I think this problem can only be solved SE made instanced wards in which case no one would still want to buy a house from a gil seller knowing houses would become infinite (but you could only have 1 for private use and 1 for FC use per character). How this would work? I'll make a post about it now.

The real solution here would be being far more active at taking care of bots. Housing is not the only area where they matter. Currently the detection on this is pathetic. Spam bots for RMT can spam for hours while their messages should be detected within minutes, indicating even a simple lack of checking.

The other issue is excessive grandfathering mainly benefitting those resellers as it means they have less accounts to maintain with cash. The more accounts they need, the more money they at least bring in. And with proper bot detection, those accounts will have to be inactive for quite a big amount of time (because otherwise after detection they will also lose the house). While the money costs can be compensated into their RMT pricing, it still makes it less likely to sell as prices have to go up significantly (instead of 1 account owning 8 houses, if it owns only 1, it means 8x the sub costs already. and their RMT price has to go up equaly). This makes even less people likely to buy, and can hurt their sales.

The more money those botters have to spend, the more money SE gets, which motivates their team to become even better at detecting, to get more money out of it again. Botters wont stop, unless the costs become too high to maintain. At which point SE basicly won. The measurements then will last for a while, and once botters found a way again, the cycle repeats.

But the real problem is, as long as botting isnt truly a problem, they essentialy just generate money. And currently as SE is barely reacting, it feels like this is the case. The other advantage of delayed bans is that it makes it harder for botters to find out what the detection pattern is. But at the same time, botters already have dump acounts, since its much cheaper to have a bot paid for 1 month, and have the trial month for free, and then ditch the bot and making another one catch up. They can just transfer the gil to the next one (in a less efficient way to avoid detection, but it still passes on the value).

[SXTC]

The real solution here would be being far more active at taking care of bots. Housing is not the only area where they matter. Currently the detection on this is pathetic. Spam bots for RMT can spam for hours while their messages should be detected within minutes, indicating even a simple lack of checking.

The other issue is excessive grandfathering mainly benefitting those resellers as it means they have less accounts to maintain with cash. The more accounts they need, the more money they at least bring in. And with proper bot detection, those accounts will have to be inactive for quite a big amount of time (because otherwise after detection they will also lose the house). While the money costs can be compensated into their RMT pricing, it still makes it less likely to sell as prices have to go up significantly (instead of 1 account owning 8 houses, if it owns only 1, it means 8x the sub costs already. and their RMT price has to go up equaly). This makes even less people likely to buy, and can hurt their sales.

The more money those botters have to spend, the more money SE gets, which motivates their team to become even better at detecting, to get more money out of it again. Botters wont stop, unless the costs become too high to maintain. At which point SE basicly won. The measurements then will last for a while, and once botters found a way again, the cycle repeats.

But the real problem is, as long as botting isnt truly a problem, they essentialy just generate money. And currently as SE is barely reacting, it feels like this is the case. The other advantage of delayed bans is that it makes it harder for botters to find out what the detection pattern is. But at the same time, botters already have dump acounts, since its much cheaper to have a bot paid for 1 month, and have the trial month for free, and then ditch the bot and making another one catch up. They can just transfer the gil to the next one (in a less efficient way to avoid detection, but it still passes on the value).

If the problem was that easy to solve they would have shut out bots already but scammers always find a way to take abuse. No point trying to plug a hole that is impossible to plug.
What SE could do however is adjust the beginner quests for new characters so they cannot venture outside of town until they do a quest first where they are given a random number that they have to answer manually to another NPC.
This forces bot owners to have to do the quests manually, making it harder for them to get their bots running in larger quantities. There are plenty of easy fixes to screw them over and discourage the behaviour.

[Jojoya]

The real solution here would be being far more active at taking care of bots. Housing is not the only area where they matter. Currently the detection on this is pathetic. Spam bots for RMT can spam for hours while their messages should be detected within minutes, indicating even a simple lack of checking.

You honestly think they're going to hire the amount of staff that would be needed to manually monitor every world's chat channels 24/7 for bot spam?

They've already got some auto-detection in place. That's why the bot spam messages are so strangely phrased. They're trying to bypass detection. Eventually SE finds something within the current phrasing they can add to auto-detection to clear the spam messages without impacting player communication. The bots then find some new phrasing to use.

Countering bots is not a simple matter. As programming gets more sophisticated, the easier it becomes to get bots to imitate actual player behavior. SE can't go too far in enacting counter measures or the game experience of normal players ends up impacted. New World has been a hot mess of examples of developers trying to fix exploits and counter bots without thought for the consequences.

Want to get rid of bots? Get rid of those who buy from bots. If they don't have buyers, they stop making money and have to give up to go someplace they can.

Most housing sale RMT has nothing to do with bots by the way. True that bots used to get used for placard camping but lottery has taken that out of the equation. They may even be used to spam advertising on RMT friendly Discords and websites. But any actual sale has to be handled manually. In the end, it's opportunists taking advantage of a highly desired but limited resource to make money and the role bots can play in the process is so small there's little point in using them.

There would be no housing RMT if SE went to a system where every player could get what they want without having to fight against other players. SE could increase the number of wards on every world to 36 and that should more than enough on every world to give every player who wants a house a plot (Balmung and Mateus being possible exceptions). We'd still have RMT in housing. Why? Because there would still be players who want and can afford the medium and large plots and there wouldn't be enough of those to go around. Because there are still players who will get multiple houses because the system lets them and there's gil to be made through gardens and workshops.

To all those who say improving the instanced housing to include houses is not possible or will not work, give us examples of the MMOs that use it where the the player base has the same drama we have here about access to a house. Give us links to their housing forums posts where players are angry that they can't get a house.

[Amenara]

I think this problem can only be solved SE made instanced wards in which case no one would still want to buy a house from a gil seller knowing houses would become infinite (but you could only have 1 for private use and 1 for FC use per character). How this would work? I'll make a post about it now.

You will find very few people who disagree with this statement. Instanced housing fixes all of the supply issues (assuming the instancing is setup so everyone can have at least 1 house) and removes the RMT problem in housing unless you want a specific house in a ward for some reason I suppose.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

As above, the whole point of lottery was to make it fair and give people who couldn't no life a placard a shot at a house even if small.

[Naoki34]

This new lottery system is a joke, it is certainly better than before but having every single player be on the same level when it come to the lottery actually feels terrible.
Bidding against 150+ other people is a joke, .75% chance at best on just about any house.
Getting a house before you were click warring against like 20 other people, which means about 5% chance (given all players were equal).
The lack of effort/camping effectively increased real demand while real supply has not changed, in fact, real supply decreased with the locking of more wards to FC only.
I have a few ideas that may help remedy this issue and I will list them in the order of what I believe will work best.

• 1. There should be priority given to people just trying to move house location instead of leaving it wholly open.
  If I move my house there will still be an open house for those people to bid on, effectively leaving real supply unchanged.
  If someone wins who didn't have a house it further decreases the already constrained supply.
• 2. Limit the number of people who can actually bid on a house.
  Locking it to 100 people would increase the odds of winning in nearly all cases.
  This increase would more likely reward people who are dedicated to getting a house.
  Would likely decrease real demand on a per house basis while still allowing plenty of people to engage with the system.
• 3. Limit the time-frame that players can bid.
  Leaving it at 1 week means people who only slightly want a house can more easily bid.
  This drives down the chances for players who would otherwise dedicate time to look and try for housing.
  This change could lower real demand by allowing more dedicated players to log on daily for a chance at more frequent bids, leading to an elevated chance across larger time spans.

You're just unlucky, man.

[Sotaris]

Works fine on my machine