Hi guys apologies for the large amount of text. These are my thoughts and ideas on what we could potentially do to fix the current housing problem. The purpose of this isn’t to provide final solutions and I don’t think that the ideas here are perfect but I am a firm believer that sharing your thoughts can often spark an even better idea in someone else’s mind. I have read through this thread and some of the ideas here have already been mentioned, however I have expanded on some of them where relevant. So with that said here are some thoughts.
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Clear areas
As in real life when a company wants to build houses they have to excavate the land before doing so. Shovels exist yet we are blocked by a little bump in the land, or a shrub or branch. Either allow people to pay to clear areas, or clear areas to allow for more houses
Pros:- More space for players. Doesn’t require any additions to the map.
Cons:- Established players might just expand their homes into the new land. Will strip away resource gathering areas. Ugly land with houses as far as the eyes can see.
Create more land
There is a big ocean of space that could have extra land put in it. Also I assume because this map is smaller than OSI it’s entirely possible to just add more tiles to the sides of the map to create more ocean and more landed if needed.
If this is done it has to be done intelligently. Otherwise you will just have the rich people sail over there and place their huge mansions. By intelligently I mean, design the new space with pre-set “plot” sizes, say 10 x 9s or 8 x 8, 11 x 13s. Something that someone could actually live out of. To design these plot sizes you would just need to purposefully place shrubs or twigs or other placement blocking tiles in “random” spots to block off areas. Limiting the size of plots that can be placed.
Pros:- Blocking tiles stops rich players buying up 3-5 houses to place a larger mansion. Very efficient use of space. Pre-determined sizes prevents sub optimal placements because of placed shrubs, 10 plots = 10 houses.
Cons:- Have to create a new land, could compensate with possibly creating a new dungeon at this area to give it more purpose.
**** I like this idea but as always rich people are going to be creating accounts with VPNs to place houses so here are some ideas to stop that.
Land restricted (at least for the first week…) to active players who don’t own houses on any account. You could also have it so it would be offered to new players in a GUMP, maybe like a lottery if conditions are met, maybe just a straight up calculation. I’m not sure what the calculation would be because I don’t know what metrics the Admins are privy to. However variables it could include are. Account age, Activity, No other houses previously or currently owned, No linked accounts with houses. The “Activity” can be gamed by people never logging out for their “activity” which is why other metrics are important such as. Gold/week, Monster kills/week etc.
Room Rental Fixes
The room rental system is nice; it allows people to have somewhere to store their stuff. However, its implementation makes it not good to use. A room rental should come with at least some of the benefits of owning a house. As it is now its just a glorified bank box. One of the major benefits of owning a house is the ability to store things for all your characters to use. This should be part of the room rental. It should be rented for the account and usable for every character on the account.
Possibly add the ability to rent different sized rooms for different costs, upgrade rooms for lock downs, allow recall into and out of room.
Apartments (Instancing similar to room rentals)
The ability to flat out purchase an apartment for a set fee. The apartment can be upgraded in the same way a house can be upgraded. Different sized apartments to purchase. The same restrictions apply in regards to IDOC if the apartment isn’t used. If someone finds a house to buy onland and wants to sell their apartment the sell price is 50% of the purchase price.
Pros:- Would reduce housing demand and the ridiculous prices. Because the same IDOC policy would be in place and the apartment is instanced. Goods that normally would of ended up in hands of other players are now removed from the server reducing overall wealth.
Cons:- Kinda lonely having all black around your apartment. Still not as good as a house, no resource gathering nearby.
Apartments (New house deed)
Create a deed that when placed creates a 2 - 3 level plot. Each floor is its own house and can have individual owners. The person that places the plot does (or doesn’t) own any of the floors. Each floor can be sold off to other players the same way a house is. If a floor were to IDOC, all goods in the apartment get kicked out to the ground outside, the floor returns control of the initial plot placer. Or it could also be placed on the housing market for a price. If someone purchases it the money is liquidated.
Pros:- Potentially double available housing. People could replace their 8x8 with a 2 floor 8x8 and sell off one of the levels.
Cons:- I’m not sure how easy this would be to implement or even if it’s possible with current game mechanics. Owner would have to "buy back" floors if they wanted to remove the deed and replace with another building.
Forced selling
So this will be a very unpopular idea for those house hoarders. I have scoured the land looking at houses and there is a large portion of places that aren’t even being used. Simply being held by people. This again will rely on metrics collected by the admins but if they just go through their data about how often a house is accessed as well as comparing the amount of items/change of items in the house it should be easy to detect the houses that are just being refreshed, and houses that are being used.
Once a house is detected as not being used it is placed onto the housing market for sale at 125%-150% of the deed value. The player owning it is not able to remove it from the market, no accounts of the player are allowed to buy it back, if it doesn’t sell on the market the house goes into IDOC, or is removed completely or is offered to a player at deed price like a lottery based on a calculation of account age, activity, gold earned, monsters killed, no other houses across all accounts and must have available gold to buy the deed.
Things like ACTIVITY should be have a hard limit. For example if the hard limit on gold earn / week was 100k, then earning 200k a week wouldn’t increase your weighting in the calculation. This is to try and include everyone in the lottery and not just the people with lots of free time. Of course these details should be a secret or again people will try to game the system.
Pros:- Puts pressure on holders to stop holding and start selling. More realisic house prices on the housing market... Sick of looking at caravans for 1.5 mill+
Cons:- Puts pressure on holders to stop holding and start selling
Limit housing based on size
There is a limit of 3 accounts per person, 1 house per account. So someone can have 3 houses in total, but if they own what would be deemed a large house, do they really need 3 houses?
If you own what would be deemed a large house, like a 16 x or a 17 x something, then that is the only house allowed on all 3 of your accounts. Because houses can be upgraded ad infinitum to increase secures and lockdowns there is no need for someone to have extra houses. 1 house this size should easily be able to accommodate 3 accounts. To aid in this, reduce the cost of upgrading secures in the property.
Pros:- Stops people hoarding 3 large houses they probably dont even use unless they are just filling them full of vendors.
Cons:- Will upset some long term players who have 3 large houses. Not sure how many people this would affect. You will probably have the data on that.
Family Playing (Audit)
There are measures in place to allow family’s to have extra accounts from the same IP because of playing with their partner/kid etc. If the wife and kid(s) or house mates play they could potentially have up to 9 -12 accounts from a single IP. But the question is, do they actually play the game or are they just “playing” for the purpose of holding a house.
I’ve looked over the guide lines, and I, being a single male who lives by himself, could easily get people to pose in a picture, use their email addresses and idle in a discord channel (All they would have to do is just mute the channel and forget about it). Just because someone has "proven" that they have family doesn’t mean that any of the members actually play the game. An audit should be done on a regular basis to check if these privileged households do indeed have genuinely active players and not just inactive home owners.
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So here are my thoughts guys, please feel free to critique maybe we can come up with some better ideas.
