The housing system is trash!

[Tuxaroni]

There was no need to make so many FCs wards.

[Ayan_Calvesse]

Honestly there are plenty of houses - even on busy servers.

There are a "few" exceptions like Balmung.
Its because people will not settle for a small; they want medium or bust and so they act like they cannot get something that is going to take a long time to achieve in general.

That said now that shell FC's are a common practice SE is going to have to do something about that before long. Because now that "FC's" are competing for private homes it means that the odds of getting a private estate you want are dropping significantly due to you competing with peoples alts.

Until the issue of shell FCs which are taking property and thus violating the ToS; they really should drastically reduce the wards that "FCs" can bid in. I would love to see the data SE has on how many 1 account FC's are bidding on houses as it now seems to be common practice.

[Battler-Ushiromiya]

But in my opinion, the *ONLY* way to fix the housing system is to remove the ridiculous artificial scarcity.

Literal skill issue lol

The scarcity is the only thing that makes housing appealing. If you remove the scarcity, nobody would bother. It would be dead on arrival. The furniture market would die too since everyone would have a home instead of new owners cycling through.

[Jojoya]

Literal skill issue lol

The scarcity is the only thing that makes housing appealing. If you remove the scarcity, nobody would bother. It would be dead on arrival. The furniture market would die too since everyone would have a home instead of new owners cycling through.

The scarcity is what makes it appealing to you. You don't get to make that claim on behalf of others.

I absolutely would bother without the scarcity because I enjoy housing.

The furmiture market dies when no one is able to get a house because of the scarcity. If there is always an influx of new owners, there is always more gil to be made. In addition, the more owners there are the more that will want to redecorate on occasion, creating more demand for furnishings.

[Shuuli]

There is 9 that never got bidded on the ward I am in now.

Must be nice to not have friends to just move to a different data center by yourself. Very brave. Good luck for you.

Anyway,

For those who do have friends and connections and years built of other things in their existing FC and linkshells, we will get our house eventually, in approx 10 years. I believe.

[Estrid]

Literal skill issue lol

The scarcity is the only thing that makes housing appealing. If you remove the scarcity, nobody would bother. It would be dead on arrival. The furniture market would die too since everyone would have a home instead of new owners cycling through.

Speak for yourself man, people have been wanting houses for YEARS now! The demand will always been there.

Hell if anything removing the scarcity and implementing instanced housing would allow the furniture market to grow even more since you'd have a constant flow of people buying houses every week/month. Like Jojoya said the market dies 2 months in when all the plots are taken up and everyone has either-

A. exhausted their fund to decorating their new home
B. Decorated there new home and now have no incentive to decorate it further.

This leads to the furniture market dying out expect during year round holidays when a few new housing items are added to the game. (Since people enjoying buying seasonal items every year.)

[Elevin]

Speak for yourself man, people have been wanting houses for YEARS now! The demand will always been there.

Hell if anything removing the scarcity and implementing instanced housing would allow the furniture market to grow even more since you'd have a constant flow of people buying houses every week/month. Like Jojoya said the market dies 2 months in when all the plots are taken up and everyone has either-

A. exhausted their fund to decorating their new home
B. Decorated there new home and now have no incentive to decorate it further.

This leads to the furniture market dying out expect during year round holidays when a few new housing items are added to the game. (Since people enjoying buying seasonal items every year.)

Quick ventures also help kill the market. The amount of items that have no crafters on them because they came from quick ventures break the supply/demand on the market. With auto demolition at least, there will be a constant supply of houses now every week rather than the odd few that were given up willingly.

[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.

[Oldschoolegamer38]

The scarcity is what makes it appealing to you. You don't get to make that claim on behalf of others.

I absolutely would bother without the scarcity because I enjoy housing.

The furniture market dies when no one is able to get a house because of the scarcity. If there is always an influx of new owners, there is always more gil to be made. In addition, the more owners there are the more that will want to redecorate on occasion, creating more demand for furnishings.

When a group of players with multiple accounts buys up wards and sit on them on purpose is a problem. I do suggest 1 person per plot regardless of how many accounts they have, via an account verifying system. it would put an end to folks having multiple plots. and if the "Muh privacy" issue comes up that is an invalid excuse to exploit the housing system the way folks do...

[Boldprint]

you want to know that absolute worse thing about this system and its the same thing they have been doing for years. people who already have houses can keep bidding. its like WTF!!!!!!! i have been trying to get a house for 8 years, 8 YEARS!!! 2490 days subbed. I quit for a year because of housing. this time i bid on a house far away from the mb and aetherite, was the only bidder. was so excited standing by it though finally, then this A ho come buy and bids on it as 8:58, they win, laugh at me and don't even buy the house. same thing this week, was 1 of 2 and lost and they still haven't even bought that house. its horrible, if you already own a house, you shouldn't be able to bid on other plots period. if you want to move, then you should be required to abandon the plot. prior to the entry time slot.