Please remove housing lottery and make some other way of house acquisition.

[Alicie]

Current situation is absolutely horrible.
You bid. You lose. You bid. You lose. You bid. You lose. You bid. You lose. Weeks go by. Months go by. Years go by. You still can not get the house.
Everything is let to pure random. You play for years, you pay sub for years, and yet 4-member FC with level 30 character gets your dream plot just to sell it on RMT website later.

Please rework housing lottery. First and foremost, it should not be a lottery at all. Here are few possible suggestions for rework:

1) Queue system.

• Instead of lottery, player can choose to pay deposit upfront and pick which houses in which wards they would like to get. As soon as any house gets freed up, player acquires house automatically.
• To prevent abuse, once you have got one house via queue you can not do it again for 365 days unless plot you got gets demolished (you can still join the secondary queue if you want to get extra house that is not wanted by anyone who did not yet got any).
• In order to remain in queue, you have to log in periodically and of course you can withdraw from queue at any point of time.
• This system favors players who played the game the most, and they can get nicer plots, while newer players will have to work it up from smaller plots. In my opinion, this system is much more fair than just the random.

2) Auction system

• System that is more controversial but still is something that is better than rigged random.
• The concept is pretty simple: houses are put on auction. Auction entries are non refundable to prevent abuse.
• Again, limit it to one auction participation per year unless plot player got via auction is demolished. Plots that were sitting for over 30 days unwanted can allow players who got a house via auction participate in a secondary auction over these plots.
• Of course, this approach will require that SE fights botting and RMT actively to ensure that houses go to players who actually put the most actual effort into the game.

3) Pseudo-RNG system

• Something that can be made quick and dirty. You lost lottery - you have higher chances to win next house.
• For every lost lottery entry, you get an additional entry next time you participate. Pity system that will hopefully reduce situations where you bid for years and still can not get a house.
• Not ideal at all, probably can be abused in some way - needs investigation, but undoubtedly still better than what we have.

4) SE's Own Solution

• I'm pretty sure CBU3 can think of something better than what we have now on their own. Please do that.

Of course, we all know that instanced housing is the ultimate solution that we need. But while we do not have that, please consider reworking current system.

Thank you.

[CCheshire]

We have a subforum dedicated to housing too.

TBH, I don't mind the lotto even tho I've lost every M plot bid before and after the NA demo started up for months now.

[Velthice]

The lottery system is fine, SE just needs to close the loopholes, do away with their grandfathering system, and actually go after blatantly obvious bot FCs. Alternatively, letting apartment owners finally have access to gardening and airships/submarines would probably do a lot to solve the housing bot crisis overnight

I'd personally like them to do both, but we probably actually are more likely to get instanced housing before SE moves against bot FCs in any meaningful manner

[Alicie]

The lottery system is fine, SE just needs to close the loopholes, do away with their grandfathering system, and actually go after blatantly obvious bot FCs. Alternatively, letting apartment owners finally have access to gardening and airships/submarines would probably do a lot to solve the housing bot crisis overnight

I'd personally like them to do both, but we probably actually are more likely to get instanced housing before SE moves against bot FCs in any meaningful manner

Just closing loopholes won't change that much, we need some system that will prevent people from permalosing lottery.

We have a subforum dedicated to housing too.

TBH, I don't mind the lotto even tho I've lost every M plot bid before and after the NA demo started up for months now.

Apologies, if moderator deems necessary please move it to appropriate forum.

[Toutatis]

The lottery system is fine, SE just needs to close the loopholes, do away with their grandfathering system, and actually go after blatantly obvious bot FCs. Alternatively, letting apartment owners finally have access to gardening and airships/submarines would probably do a lot to solve the housing bot crisis overnight

I'd personally like them to do both, but we probably actually are more likely to get instanced housing before SE moves against bot FCs in any meaningful manner

This. The lottery system is the fairest given the circumstances. I won several houses with it, upgraded some, moved laterally on others (I am not hoarding houses in a same ward/server, just got characters on a few servers. The most I've had across servers and DCs were 4 at the same time).

Current situation is absolutely horrible.
You bid. You lose. You bid. You lose. You bid. You lose. You bid. You lose. Weeks go by. Months go by. Years go by. You still can not get the house.

To get my foot in the door, I started bidding on the houses with the least entries, scouting each ward manually early on during the bidding period, making a list and eliminating the ones with most bids, scouting again midway, reducing my list and then, a final tour just a few hours before closing time to make the final selection (there can be a huge difference in the number of bidders for the same house on a different ward). Then there are people who bid only on the big houses that have hundreds of bids and complain while there have been several houses with 0-1 bids lately. There's only 6 big per ward, do the math. Don't blame the lottery system which is fair, blame the limited housing system for people who each pay a subscription.

That being said, I still think that the personal EW island was a big missed opportunity to give housing to everyone who wanted it. I did bid on two big lately because I really liked the view but didn't win (other weeks I passed because I prefer a practical location and I am happy with what I have).

[Veritas-Ancora]

Mirage housing should hopefully fix a lot of this. If the size of a house doesn't matter (beyond gardening), then people will be content with Small housing and upgrade to a Large/Mansion.

[Alicie]

Mirage housing should hopefully fix a lot of this. If the size of a house doesn't matter (beyond gardening), then people will be content with Small housing and upgrade to a Large/Mansion.

Outside part actually is what matters the most for majority of people, not inside. Something needs to be done to make things fair.

[NegativeS]

[Myotis]

instanced housing will kill lots of good social aspects of the game.
I dont' see a reason why they are unable to add more wards and continue to do so if the game does grow.

[Toutatis]

Outside part actually is what matters the most for majority of people, not inside. Something needs to be done to make things fair.

So you want “the” house and not a house. Only instanced housing would solve that.