The housing system is trash!

[KarinaTyrsdottir]

The biggest problem with a lottery system in the posts that I've seen is kind of a survivor's bias. Those who win (or aren't invested in getting a house) think it's fair and the people who have committed the ultimate sin of just being unlucky get more and more resentful every time. RNG is a lazy rewards system. It's easy to come up with rationale as to why the lottery system is good, justifying how it makes the economy stable (spoiler: it doesn't. Estrid's post explained that better than I could), and saying "just keep trying eventually you'll win" to someone who has spent 38 years of life on this earth and never at any time once won any kind of raffle or lottery--it can just compound that frustration. Yes, I get that someone as unlucky as me is an outlier, but manufactured scarcity + random admittance = the smallest population of people having feelgood moments as possible against the backdrop of an ever-growing horde of people having feelsbad moments. It is what it is, and honestly at this point I've just written off ever getting a house unless there's literally any other way of obtaining one that doesn't rely on totally arbitrary probability-based selection. I get that it's better than the old system, but being better than a system that sucked more doesn't mean the current one sucks less than it does. Lipstick on a pig.

It still just absolutely astonishes me that they went through all the work of making Island Sanctuaries and gave it absolutely no gardening or furniture functionality. Locking an entire component of your game behind an RNG wall (and yes, I'm counting FC houses, since those rely on the same lottery as everything else; not everyone has the luxury of just waltzing into a FC and getting a room on demand, same goes for apartment vacancies on some home worlds) seems like a very very very bad design decision that should have been better corrected years ago.

Are we salty because we still don't have a house and so many others and friends do at this point? Sure. Same as everyone else venting their frustrations in this thread. Does it mean those concerns are invalid? Absolutely not.

This is valid critique of a system that rewards the smallest percentage of people possible under absolutely arbitrary conditions and it's absolutely appropriate for people on the crap end of that stick to voice their frustration and criticisms of the system that didn't work for them. We all love this game and none of us want to be resentful of the people who did win a house. We are legitimately happy for you, and yeah, some of this anger comes from jealousy. But that jealousy didn't have to happen, and we're frustrated because we just want a better system that works for more players than just the lucky ones. Because the one we've got is still more likely to disappoint than to please, and it doesn't have to.