Remove the FC/Personal housing ward classifications for OCE?

[Jojoya]

Placard timer for 10-12 hours, then walk-right-up buy.

RMT won't be advantaged. There is no relocation, and with clicking first there is no guarantee of a S-Tier demo sale. There are enough of us on the housing discords to spot an LB11/41 for sale and then be there at the placard to click and confound any attempt of RMT if it's demolished.

RMT is always advantaged because they don't rely on the same resources that players are limited to using. The housing discords are only as accurate as those players who are willing to manually check and report what they find to them (which could be an hour or two after a plot becomes available). RMT makes use of bots and other third party tools for rapid scanning on a continuing basis.

RMT will locate new available plots almost immediately regardless of whether it's lottery or FCFS with FCFS giving them a major advantage when it comes to purchasing. Even if the purchase timer is in use, they'll go back to using their bots to swarm the placards. It's not a guarantee they'll win the plot but the odds are heavily in their favor.

But getting back more on the original topic:

The new EU worlds showed that SE did learn a little from the Materia opening though I think not enough. When all the wards are opened at once to what's going to be a small eligible population at first, players end up too spread out and no one really benefits from what wards are designed to accomplish. It would have been better to roll out half the wards first with a 50/50 FC/personal split then add in more wards as the initial wards started to fill up. I can understand the possibility that their system design requires all worlds to have the server capacity for the same number of wards but that shouldn't have to mean that all those wards must also be available for purchase on every world. Perhaps SE needs a third purchase method in their system that blocks all purchases (Reserved for Future Use or something similar).

I'm still not convinced that SE is able to implement a mixed purchase type designation for the wards anymore. If they could, I think it would have been mentioned in the update announcement just as they pointed out they're free to switch between lottery and FCFS or FC and personal as they feel there's need. On the other hand, it doesn't mean that they can't add one if they feel it is worth the effort since we know in the past there was no such purchaser restriction.

But I doubt they'll feel it's worth the effort. They've never promised players that they would be able to have their personal house in the same ward with their FC house and they're not likely to change that for the sake of a single data center. Switching most of the wards currently designated as FC to personal would have a similar effect. After a few lottery cycles, they could again be switched so those wards left as FC could become personal and some of the personal go back to FC. It's something they probably should be doing on a regular basis regardless.

edit: just thought of another possible solution though I'm not certain the system would allow it either. Make the main ward FC purchase and the subdivision personal purchase. It's got the convenience of being able to use the aethernet to move within the entire ward if a player wants to go back and forth between their FC house nad personal house.