The Housing System In The Eyes Of A Newer Player

[ToxieDrop]

I'm sure its been said before but its mind breaking to me that this lotto system is better that what was.

Cause I'm gonna have to start week three and it already feels like I'm making job applications.

Iv heard stories of how bad it was but is there no real way to make it any better than what it is now???

If i need to put a proper Question in this post, My question is what would you do to change the housing system if you could remake it however you wanted?

[Brynne]

I would implement instanced housing for personal houses. If I could redo everything, I'd have never put personal housing in the wards at all. If I were working with what's already in, I'd put instanced housing in addition to the wards, so you could either have a ward house or an instanced house. Instanced houses would have the benefit of not being lost when you can't log in for more than 45 days, and you could also upgrade them up to large size with gil.

If I were going to make minor changes to avoid development costs, I'd put an entrance to workshops outside of housing (maybe at the grand company, maybe at Cid's workshop in Mor Dhona) and allow FCs to unlock them without needing a house. This would at least free up a tiny bit of space in the wards, hopefully. Then I'd work on apartments, making them upgradable to medium and large interiors, and if possible, add a balcony where a small garden plot could be placed.

[SannaR]

I would implement instanced housing for personal houses. If I could redo everything, I'd have never put personal housing in the wards at all. If I were working with what's already in, I'd put instanced housing in addition to the wards, so you could either have a ward house or an instanced house. Instanced houses would have the benefit of not being lost when you can't log in for more than 45 days, and you could also upgrade them up to large size with gil.

If I were going to make minor changes to avoid development costs, I'd put an entrance to workshops outside of housing (maybe at the grand company, maybe at Cid's workshop in Mor Dhona) and allow FCs to unlock them without needing a house. This would at least free up a tiny bit of space in the wards, hopefully. Then I'd work on apartments, making them upgradable to medium and large interiors, and if possible, add a balcony where a small garden plot could be placed.

They actually want to be able to increase the size of the apartments. Maybe that'll happen after they finalize the ability to hide (remove) the pillars inside houses. I have firmly believed that they need to allow people to be able to cross breed plants inside their apartments. And to somehow allow for alts to share a house. Do those two things and let FCs without a house some way to access the workshop and a lot of woe should go away.

[Jeeqbit]

It stems from the fact that there are wards where you can have next door neighbors and visit their houses. If it were instanced like other MMORPGs, you wouldn't be able to see someone next door.

These wards are actually separate area server programs. So if they add new wards, they have to manually set this up and set aside the appropriate resources for them to run constantly.

Now, there is actually instanced housing. You can buy a room in a private or FC residence. Or you can buy an apartment. There are caps on this, but they are very high and it's instanced.

The drawback of rooms and apartments is that the rooms are small. I think they are considering about possibly making these bigger, but I don't know if it'll end up happening or not.

I think that bigger room options for residence and apartments, more wards and trying to share wards across worlds would be things I would think of. Or move them over to a cloud server which are better designed for scaling resources (they use physical machine racks btw not cloud services).

[Oizen]

It stems from the fact that there are wards where you can have next door neighbors and visit their houses. If it were instanced like other MMORPGs, you wouldn't be able to see someone next door.

Good. Get those ugly Paissa Carbuncle Candy houses out of my sight.

Would demolish my house immediately if instanced housing was added, and it should be added.

[Skivvy]

It stems from the fact that there are wards where you can have next door neighbors and visit their houses. If it were instanced like other MMORPGs, you wouldn't be able to see someone next door.

These wards are actually separate area server programs. So if they add new wards, they have to manually set this up and set aside the appropriate resources for them to run constantly.

Now, there is actually instanced housing. You can buy a room in a private or FC residence. Or you can buy an apartment. There are caps on this, but they are very high and it's instanced.

The drawback of rooms and apartments is that the rooms are small. I think they are considering about possibly making these bigger, but I don't know if it'll end up happening or not.

I think that bigger room options for residence and apartments, more wards and trying to share wards across worlds would be things I would think of. Or move them over to a cloud server which are better designed for scaling resources (they use physical machine racks btw not cloud services).

Instanced housing doesn't necessarily have to mean solo-instances only. In Wildstar, your default housing was a solo-instance situation, but they also had the option to create a community island that you and 4 other friends shared together. Each player still got their own personal (huge) design space, but it was all in a single-instance.

And of course friends could still visit. Or you could go exploring random houses/islands like you can in XIV.

I can't speak for others, but I would much rather have a shared instance with my friends vs. the mostly dead neighborhoods that we have now.

I know you didn't say this, but instanced housing doesn't have to be a basic square room. It can be soooo much more, and far superior (imo).

[Jeeqbit]

In Wildstar, your default housing was a solo-instance situation, but they also had the option to create a community island that you and 4 other friends shared together.

Hmm an instanced island is a good idea. It's unfortunate that SE couldn't do, well, exactly that with Island Sanctuary, and couldn't even get a personal house in it or at least a longer afk timer on it and an aetheryte to it that would create the instance upon teleport like when you click the NPC.

[Skivvy]

Hmm an instanced island is a good idea. It's unfortunate that SE couldn't do, well, exactly that with Island Sanctuary, and couldn't even get a personal house in it or at least a longer afk timer on it and an aetheryte to it that would create the instance upon teleport like when you click the NPC.

Yeahhh. I was cautiously optimistic that IS could have been made into something to bridge the gap, but alas, it is what it is. X;

It used to be worse. It used to be first-come, first-serve. So people who wanted a house would literally sit clicking for hours upon hours, sometimes days, just to hopefully be the first person to get the house. And this was a huge problem, because it clearly incentivized players to waste their time, sacrifice their health, and burn out. This alone was more than enough reason to change it.

Sliiight correction. Originally it was 100% first come, first serve. You could buy a house as soon as you walked up to it if it was available. This obviously led to a lot of house flipping for crazy prices. Flipping does still happen, but it's FC only now and takes some extra steps/time.

Then they changed it and added a hidden timer to newly vacated properties. This would essentially block people from being able to purchase the home until the random timer expired. IIRC, this could be anywhere from 30 minutes up to 15+ hours. This is when you'd see huge groups of people just camped out at placards, mindlessly clicking for hours. Also saw the rise of placard botting using auto-clickers.

[DiaDeem]

its mind breaking to me that this lotto system is better that what was.

Imagine sitting at your computer/console for 12 hours straight (or longer if the system feels like it) doing nothing more than spamming a placard among 50 other people that want that same plot.

Wanna watch a show in the mean time or listen to a podcast? What if someone beats you to the click while you were pausing or changing the episode? Are you gonna risk it? Need to get food? Are you gonna risk going to the bathroom now? You wanna sleep? Someone else is gonna snatch your chance at the house, and don't forget you've already invested 8 hours into clicking. You're not gonna quit now, are you?

Then you lose anyway cause a bot was clicking 5 times faster than you ever could. Better go find a new plot to do it all over again.

Just the fact that you can do literally ANYTHING ELSE with your time while the lotto is running makes the new system better. They're both coin tosses, but only the old system literally chained you to your PC/Console while you were tossing that coin for 12 hours straight. So... don't get me wrong: The lotto system is far from being a solution to the housing problem, but placard spamming was way WAY worse.

[Eraden]

Imagine sitting at your computer/console for 12 hours straight (or longer if the system feels like it) doing nothing more than spamming a placard among 50 other people that want that same plot.
Wanna watch a show in the mean time or listen to a podcast? What if someone beats you to the click while you were pausing or changing the episode? Are you gonna risk it? Are you gonna risk going to the bathroom now? You wanna sleep? Someone else is gonna snatch your chance at the house, and don't forget you've already invested 8 hours into clicking. You're not gonna quit now, are you?

Then you lose anyway cause a bot was clicking 5 times faster than you ever could. Better go find a new plot to do it all over again.

Just the fact that you can do literally ANYTHING ELSE with your time while the lotto is running makes the new system better. They're both coin tosses, but only the old system literally chained you to your PC/Console while you were tossing that coin for 12 hours straight. So... don't get me wrong: The lotto system is far from being a solution to the housing problem, but placard spamming was way WAY worse.

Is TRUE! Vivian speaks truth. Lotto WAY betters than old system. Lotto is only solution for distribution of house, howevers. True solution requires ramping ups house supply....a LOT.