Go Balmung!

[Shibi]

So proud to be a part of the thousand man walk of shame later

Woot, I will hope you win it!!

[SweetEquity]

So proud to be a part of the thousand man walk of shame later

You're on Balmung, you know no shame.

[LaylaTsarra]

Pretty sad. Really with a new DC it's about the only option for awhile cause i double we're getting more wards anytime soon.

[Sindele]

Average time-to-win of over 18 years at that number of entrants. Nice.

[fireflydreamer]

1049 and counting ... I so wanna live in Shiro but this is maybe the last time I participate in this height of silliness, can't even snag an apartment .. perhaps we can all have a giant beach party later to celebrate the ridiculousnessnessness though hah hah

[Pablomaldito]

The bids on that house alone would be more than enough to instantly fill up every personal house in a new district at the current 3/8 FC to 5/8 personal split. XD

[Themarvin]

Maybe people should move server?

[Pablomaldito]

Maybe people should move server?

There's nowhere to go in NA. Personal houses are all taken, and what little comes up in each lottery round ends up with a lot of bidders. Balmung is an extreme case, but in every server in NA houses are getting a hundred or more bidders per lottery round. 1% or below chance of winning is typical. Of course there are exceptions if you have a couple Goblet plots while several other wards' houses are available. Then you may get lucky and only have to bid against 50 other people for the less desirable plots. Now your chance of winning is 2% . So yeah, transferring servers within the NA region to improve your chances of getting a personal house isn't really a reasonable plan. For leaving your friends and FC behind, your reward is an upgrade from near impossible to extremely unlikely.

Personally, I just leveled some alts in the Oceanic servers as well as one of the new Europe servers. I can't visit them on my main character, but at least they're in fantastic locations. For NA, however, the only decent chance of getting a house may be to start a shell FC in one of the less crowded servers and hope that FC houses will still be available in a month.

[Oizen]

Oh I agree, the system desperately needs a permanent solution and not another bandaid.

[Pablomaldito]

By adding wards, are we talking about adding a new residential district or just adding more wards to the existing districts? If it's the former then yeah, that is quite different from the demand for a house. If it's the latter, well, it is basically the same thing as demand for a house with the way the housing system is implemented. Personally, I would love to see the option for instanced houses without a hard limit, but it doesn't look like that's happening any time in the near future if ever.

I also don't really see them doing much to alleviate the housing supply issue on current servers until the recently released and planned servers in EU and NA are filled up. Right now, I would advise any EU player who wants a house to immediately transfer to one of the new servers. You are guaranteed a house without having to leave your datacenter. You're just a city aetheryte away from the world you left. This chance will not appear again for a long time. The other new worlds in the pipeline will be on new datacenters. Access to the communities and economies of established servers will be possible thanks to datacenter visit, but it's nowhere near as seamless as those new worlds that were added to the existing EU datacenters.

Of course, maybe if the Japanese player base becomes vocal about a need for more housing, something may be done. My understanding is that they have more servers for a lower population. I don't know the state of housing there, but if it is also undersupplied with their lower population density then hopefully the housing supply will be addressed before waiting for NA/EU population redistribution into servers that don't exist yet.

tldr: Players are screwed while they remain in established servers.