Housing Roulette was an absolute trash idea.

[Joven]

It's actually a decent example, but their absence was actually probably just something that translated well into Japan, so they complained about it there as well.

It was plain from the female viera reveal that they weren't going to get away without releasing the male varient. People just made noise because they didn't get them immediately.

Yeah alright. As if you weren't just making light of owning one in the first place earlier. They didn't have to go to a foreign DC to own one if all they got was a small anyway, so maybe it wasn't that smart after all.

You're right, they didn't HAVE to go to get a house since they already had a couple larges on Aether already. They WANTED to go because there would be even more larges they could get. Also, I was just thinking since the idea of transfering to another data center is such an anathema to you: you do realize you can create an alt over on another data center and see how well everything plays out right? Even scout the housing wards to weigh your odds.

Prenup. I take everything. The small just gets 3m or something. Or nothing if I go to Dynamis.

Prenup is null as you were caught around town "checking out" other houses behind Small's back.

You can pay 15$ a month to continue playing even after the expac comes out whether you buy it or not, so that's a weird example; since it's an extra, seperate purchase.

But you don't have access to the content the expac contains is the point, whether you keep playing or not.

If they opted to make instanced houses seperate I'm sure people would pay for that.

If they did that they'd never hear the end about how they're scamming the playerbase. The mogshop is already a point of contention as it is.

If this is the vision, the creator is blind and a sadist.
Also no, a neighborhood feeling is something that sounds great in theory. I can actually understand why they'd want to make something like that because on paper it sounds comfortable. Unfortunately, that's as far as it goes. Like describing a fire as warm, until you find out its burning your house to the floor, no pun intended.

Good vision, poor execution. It can work but they should have waited.

The small doesn't suffice, whether you secure one or not, that's the argument and the reason they're going unpurchased.

Once again, if people really wanted a house, like desperate to have one as most people here seem to be then it wouldn't be an issue.

It's not a privilege to pay for something just because some people can't afford it. The playerbase doesn't need to be grateful, the creators should be grateful there's a playerbase. That's how they can also afford to waste it elsewhere.

Being able to afford things others can't is a privilege and as far as being grateful, it's a two way street. The playerbase should be grateful the developers released something they can enjoy and the developers should be grateful the players enjoy it.

[Amenara]

Sure it's equal, bots or people buying gil and winning your desired plot. Great system.

You're right, restricting newer players from buying houses and going back to first come first serve will definitely make it so that isn't an issue. /s

At least now I know I am not competing against 10 placard spam bots and have no chance at all of winning a house and I can just throw my bid into the pool and see if I come out on top.

Two words less and this would've been ideal. I'll keep saying it till it gets through. Housing doesn't have to suck.

There is no solution to this that pleases everyone outside of letting people purchase whatever house they want in whatever nation they want. You'll see a lot less in ward competition if your ghost town is so much more important to you than it is to just have the appropriate size and decoration limit. Either way, it is absolutely an acceptable alternative to the fact that without the in ward spot, you simply can't decorate anything of that size in the backdrop you'd prefer. Like running a dungeon with NPCs is an option for people who don't or cant play with other players. It doesn't need to suck. People have every right to be upset, and people don't need to get upset either if SE would work on it or confirm that they are. They have the fucking money and ability to do it.

They make small instanced areas you can only move around a little in with beautiful backdrops constantly. Literally just look at the dungeons and trials. They know how to do it.
I can own 2 apartments. Just like anyone can. You cannot be outbid for an FC or regular apartment. 1 FC apartment, and 1 regular apartment. That's 2. 1 interior, 1 exterior. It doesn't have to suck.

I have been 100% supportive of completely revamping the housing system to fix supply issues since forever, if I remember correctly those same issues is why I went ahead and made a forum account. That being said, the person I was talking to wanted to restrict housing even more by making it so newer players can't buy houses because older players have been playing longer, which is antithetical to your points.

[Renathras]

I guess my issue here with all these complaints is three-fold:

1) You don't like the lottery system but preferred having to log on as soon as the servers were up and stay online for 18 hours clicking a placard hoping you'd be the one to click it when its timer opened for sale despite being surrounded by a dozen bots and a half-dozen other players, and if you got up to get a drink or go to the bathroom and it opened right then, you lost it and all those hours were totally wasted? That was a better system?

2) People saying they can't get a house when what they mean is they can't get a Medium or a Large, or even worse, when they have a Medium or a Large, it's just not the specific one they wanted - they and everyone else.

3) People insisting that instanced housing is the solution. Not only would it not work with the server architecture - as many have mentioned - but it wouldn't scratch the itch. People wanting specific houses with specific views as "their" house? But if they were instanced, how would that work? Your specific plot house would have to look like every other, there'd be no exterior customization since the exterior wouldn't be instanced. Or if it was like Island Sanctuary where you teleport to it, then you'd be stuck with the ONE view and ONE location that is given. Maybe your favorite house is plot X of housing district Y, but instanced housing wouldn't give you that. It would be either you teleport directly into your house from an NPC, and thus have no exterior to do anything with, or the housing districts would exist, it'd just be one district for show and you'd go to the door of your uncustomizable exterior to zone into the interior just like you do with Apartments. Ignoring all the technical issues involved, that's still not a system people wanting housing would be happy with or want.

.

As further problems, note that housing is kind of a niche thing. Despite some people saying it's one of the "main draws" of the game, I think is how it was worded, that's ridiculous. That'd be like saying PvP is one of the main draws to the game. While these things have their devouts, neither is a core component or crux of the game. Certainly not to the level of spending the resources on them that people are proposing to "fix" the problem - which again, likely wouldn't work anyway. They shouldn't throw half the game's budget into fixing a problem that affects probably less than 10% of the playerbase. Especially since they've already created some options (such as Apartments and FC Chambers) and the complaints are people wanting not only specific sizes but also specific plots, which nothing short of making thousands of Wards would actually solve.

People can get housing. They can't get the specific housing they want guaranteed. That's a problem that will exist until there is unlimited housing. Instanced housing won't solve that, and is likely far to expensive vs the small size of the housing community. Any other fix would likely cause even more alienation. Reducing housing to 1 per person would create alts to get around (though I think that restricting it to 1 per person/FC going forward would be wise), and likewise, they could make housing FC only, but then you'd have 1 person FCs unless there was also some requirement there that it be over a certain size, then you'd be alienating small family FCs. You could limit people allowed to buy to having played the game for so long, but not only would that be arbitrary by definition (shall we start with ARR? Shall contests always be "whoever's character was created earlier"? I bet I have most of you beat starting in 2014...), it would alienate new players and prevent them from getting a house through no fault of their own.

No matter how they do it, there's no GOOD solution, and any solution they employ is going to harm and alienate people. That's why they stick with the status quo since it probably is harming the fewest people, probably is the least taxing on the servers and game back-end, and because the inertia of "this is how it is" means people who are harmed aren't as angry as they would be if they were harmed by a new system - where they would blame the new system. We already see that with this thread. Tons of you who lost the lottery would also have lost the placard war. Instead of realizing that, you blame the new system as if the old one would have done you better. If they make any change, especially sweeping changes, and it didn't work, then people would be blaming the new system - rightly or wrongly - for their misfortune instead of chalking it up to the status quo.

They should introduce a Sharlyan themed Aetheric hydroponic planter so people can use those in Apartments and call it a day. And they shouldn't make ANYTHING IN THE GAME exclusive to airship or sub missions or needing an FC workship unless Apartment owners can commission those. It'd be better for those to simply allow more gathering of the materials, not exclusive access to them.

[Semirhage]

I already have a Medium I like. I don't want a Large due to furniture limits, but would want one if that changes. That said, I still see the lottery system as a downgrade. Oh no, so logging in early, the ONE piece of agency players used to have over this system, has been blown away in favor of pure RNG? Why is that a good thing? Now, the mitigating factor may not have been one that fits your schedule's favor, that much is true. But you think housing being pure random chance is a good thing? I'd think actually fixing the housing system so players can reasonably obtain housing would be a better solution, but sure. Wanting the system skewed because you can't be bothered to log in early on the one or two days a year a new ward gets released so you can be on an even footing with people actually willing to sacrifice something for it, ~☆equality of outcome☆~. Player agency bad. Love it.

[Packetdancer]

When IS was launched, everyone having an instance of it open as people made a mad rush at it completely shut down the instance servers for housing on practically every popular server for days during peak hours since there were linked, preventing the vast majority on those servers from going into their homes. (IS was likely hooked up to the housing server cluster to prevent this issue from taking out the combat duty instance server cluster instead, which would be 10000x worse for Square).

Rather belatedly... my own take is actually that I suspect the dungeon servers have no provision for persisting zone state, while housing servers do.

Combat instance servers, after all, do not care what state you leave a dungeon in. Did you skip those chests over there? Did you open those treasure rooms in Qarn? Well, none of it matters; when you leave that instance, it just gets thrown out, and when you come back in the next time roulette dumps you there, it's a fresh instance with default state.

Conversely, housing servers must persist state. You added decorations to the house, and then left? You changed the playlist on the FC house orchestrion? When that housing instance is torn down, all changes to the zone state (e.g. new decorations, new orchestrion playlist, different fish in the fish tank, whatever) must be persisted into long-term storage, so that when you come back to the house later, those changes are still reflected.

Island Sanctuary, obviously, needs to persist state. And while some of that state may very well be independent of the zone (e.g., what you have being made in your workshop) as they're only accessible to you personally, other bits -- what crops are growing, what minions are out, what you've built where, what pathway style you chose, etc. -- are functionally similar to housing; they're zone state that needs to be shared with any visitor to the zone (e.g., any friend who shows up on your Island Sanctuary while you're there).

Now, that's all guesswork. But if I'm right about all that, it would almost certainly be easier to stuff Island Sanctuary onto housing instance servers (which can persist zone state) than to try to modify combat instance servers to have that same capability.

[Reinha]

1) You don't like the lottery system but preferred having to log on as soon as the servers were up and stay online for 18 hours clicking a placard hoping you'd be the one to click it when its timer opened for sale despite being surrounded by a dozen bots and a half-dozen other players, and if you got up to get a drink or go to the bathroom and it opened right then, you lost it and all those hours were totally wasted? That was a better system?

Yes. You didn't mention the positives of the system, such as fcs having priority for a few weeks to get the bigger houses they want instead of these empty fc wards full of smalls that nobody is bidding on. Or the fact that you couldn't use alts to improve your odds because alts can't be logged in at the same time. Or the fact that when new wards were released there was no RNG involved and you would just buy a plot if you were there first. Or the fact that if you managed to get any plot you could relocate easily instead of being stuck in a region you dislike.

[Renathras]

I already have a Medium I like. I don't want a Large due to furniture limits, but would want one if that changes. That said, I still see the lottery system as a downgrade. Oh no, so logging in early, the ONE piece of agency players used to have over this system, has been blown away in favor of pure RNG? Why is that a good thing? Now, the mitigating factor may not have been one that fits your schedule's favor, that much is true. But you think housing being pure random chance is a good thing? I'd think actually fixing the housing system so players can reasonably obtain housing would be a better solution, but sure. Wanting the system skewed because you can't be bothered to log in early on the one or two days a year a new ward gets released so you can be on an even footing with people actually willing to sacrifice something for it, ~☆equality of outcome☆~. Player agency bad. Love it.

So you're saying people with jobs should just not show up to work and get fired to have a shot at a house? Not GUARANTEE, mind you, just a [i]chance[i/] of getting a house?

You think being able to log into a video game at 5-7 AM (depending on your timezone) is agency? Is "sacrifice" that should be rewarded? Is somehow effort deserving of award?

The people who liked the old system were the people who could do that with impunity. The new system is fair to everyone. It's clearly not "equality of outcome", since not everyone wins. So it's not socialism or Marxism or whatever you're trying to present there. "But it's only one or two days a year!" "...which are always weekdays when people have work, school, or family stuff. Yeah, let's tell people the only way to enjoy a video game is to not have a life."

The new system is fair to everyone and gives every one a shot. It doesn't play favorites, and it doesn't reward non-effort, unhealthy (and for many people, not an option) "sacrifice". It give everyone an even footing. That's the entire point of it.

And as people have discussed in this thread, there's no magic "fixing" to housing. No one has yet proposed anything that wouldn't be a massive money sink (for something that is a niche part of the game to begin with) and that wouldn't destabilize server systems or the game as a whole. Imagine not being able to do dungeons for a week because the housing "fix" crashed instance servers. I remember Raubaun Extreme and Pippin Savage. Without even going that far, I remember people being unable to enter their house when Island Sanctuary was released.

EDIT:

Yes. You didn't mention the positives of the system, such as fcs having priority for a few weeks to get the bigger houses they want instead of these empty fc wards full of smalls that nobody is bidding on. Or the fact that you couldn't use alts to improve your odds because alts can't be logged in at the same time. Or the fact that when new wards were released there was no RNG involved and you would just buy a plot if you were there first. Or the fact that if you managed to get any plot you could relocate easily instead of being stuck in a region you dislike.

I didn't mention the "positives" because any from the old system are prevalent in the new system. For example, a number of the last wave of new Wards released were FC only. And some after a wave or two were made personal if FCs were all passing them over. Unless you forgot about that. And people used alts (people that had more than one account) all the time. WORSE, the old system allowed house trading, so you could potentially buy one from someone, or have several friends aid you to increase your odds and then sell the plot to you. And there was RNG on the new Wards released when everyone bumrushed them at the same time. Where you the first? Maybe you THOUGHT you were the first, but that other guy's bot clicked on the placard before you. Oops! And the only benefit of the relocation was for the people who already had a house that just wasn't good enough for them, which I addressed in point (2). The only people that advantaged were people who already had a home, and it advantaged them over people who were still homeless. Which means it was WORSE than the new system - a negative, not a positive.

Got it?

Cool.

[ThaCa]

That's good for you but there 1000s of players who still haven't gotten a house since rng hasn't smiled on them as it has on you. You were lucky just like the ppl who got a house with the old system were lucky. As others said it's mostly a supply issue not really a lottery issue but that doesn't change the fact that the lottery is still a feelbad system. It's not fun looking for a lot week after week praying that rng god is going to bless you that day but when it doesn't you have to do the walk of shame to get your money back and watch as the lucky person enjoys their new house just bc they were luckier than you. The lottery is slight, only slightly better than the old system but it doesn't do anything to the main issue in 14 and that is there are still not enough houses of any type to go around. New ppl can't get a small unless they really lucky and ppl who have been playing for so long cant upgrade to a bigger house when they want a higher item cap. As someone with so many housing items, I could never go back to a small bc that would mean I would have to throw out the items I work hard to make or spent money on. Eventally everyone will want to upgrade to a med or large just bc they out grow the small and its really low item and inv cap.

I was the only bid on my house, there was no luck needed. Thankfully people were slow to transfer over to the new servers in EU, pretty much all of my friends got their houses without competition. Sure the servers were almost a ghost town for few months but they are plenty active now.

[Stormpeaks]

The problem is not lottery, the problem is that every cycle takes 9 days to complete, who in their right mind thought this was a good idea ? That's 3 chances to get a house A MONTH, make the cycles shorter for the love of god, there's no need for 5 days of bidding and 4 days of claiming

[Amenara]

I mean, the houses usually don't last much past the second lottery after new wards are added so they are gone within that first month. All making the bidding and claiming period shorter does is make it less accessible for people who work a lot and may miss the lottery period if it were shorter.