Architect Archive

Alright, well I had a really nice write up of a decay system, but my laptop froze and I lost it. So here is a quick brief re-write of the system I had in mind. Please excuse any mispellings or improper sentence structure, but I need to sleep

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Decay System

Houses are given Condition Ratings.

A House will naturally lose Condition points no matter what.

Paying maintainance will only slow down the rate lost, but not at a full 1:1 ratio.

A Small House that is paid up to 100% maint at all times will naturally decay down to Condition 1 after a month. If maint is not at 100%, the house will decay slightly faster.

Once a Small House reaches a Condition of 1, it will become Condemed. A condemed building will become private and will only allow access to the owner. Once the house reaches a condition of 1, it will take seven days for it to decay to 0, at which time the house is destroyed. The seven day leeway is to provide the owner with enough time to remove their belongings from the house.

An Architect can attempt to repair a condemed building using House Repair Kits. A HRK comes in the same sizes as houses, Small, Medium and Large. A HRK will use 75% of the resources needed to create a house of the size kit you're attempting to make.

So a Small House needs 3388 total resources to make, a Small Home Repair Kit would require 2541 to create. Repairing the house will give differing degrees of success, much like armor and weapon repairs, and the overall condition of the house will lower.

So eventually the owner will find it more cost effective to just purchase a new house after a few HRKs.

Small House would decay after 1 month

Medium House would decay after 2 months

Large Houses would decay after 3 months

This would give the owner of the house enough time to save up enough money to purchase a new house.

This system could work for Harvester also.

There's only one small problem. Once a player places a building, the server just assigns it some numbers and then forgets about it. The reason I believe this is so, is because when you reclaim a building, it has no serial number at all, the server just gives you back a generic deed it produces (essentially you don't get the original harvester). How would it correctly re-assign you a deed of the correct condition? The only way I can see the server doing this is if they just put the Condition ratings on a timer, that once set, the server would not keep track of it anymore. When reclaimed the server would just check the time remaining and create a deed of the same condition.

The Construction tree would be changed to Construction and Repair, (C&R). The C&R tree would give players the ability to craft Repair kits. Repair kits would be similar to that of Stim Packs, where a required skill would be needed to use the Kit.

Experimenting would allow Architects to increase the Condition ratings on structures, but not affect the maintainance fees. Architects could also experiment on HRK to increase the effectiveness and charges on the kit.

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quite simply NO!

Decaying of housing is a horrible idea. Most people ask "What good is a houre" whenI try and sell them already and adding the idea of having to replace it every couple months will drive them away. Housing should be a permanent structure (based on keeping the maintenance pool paid)and our prices should reflect this accordingly. The only way I can see this working is having it so that if you don't keep your house with full maintenance you do not go back up to 100% maintenance when you repair - that way if you maintain your house properly you never need to worry about your house it will never decay. If you keep forgeting to pay it will degrade, but time based decay is not a valid option in my opinion.

Harvesters and factories on the other hand should decay with use - not time. It should be a slow process taking several months and could incorporate what you have here already.

Well I had just posted a very similar suggestion on your previous thread Zarcath only a minute before you posted this. Love the idea but would like to add on the fact that you cannot reclaim the deed. Just keep it repaired or destroy it and place a new one. That will solve the issue of having the server produce a deed that has the correct amount of condition left. What do you think?

I think that its more imporant to just make the devs know how critical it is that the houses decay so they have to be replaced. Put your idea out there (which I think is good), put the "natural disaster" idea out there, but just let them know how critical the problem is.

Decreasing the value of a house (making them decay) decreases the demand. Having houses decay increases the demand, but only if people buy the house in the first place. Right now people just don't get much value out of a house so implementing any sort of decay will be a touchy thing and the devs know it. I don't really know what the answer is immediately, but I know that if houses don't decay then Architect is inevitably a dead profession and nothing else matters.

I think that decay needs to be put in place with the devs understanding that houses need to be given more value. If we want ideas for increasing value of houses it should probably be another thread though.

I don't think adding a decay system likeZarcath mentioned would be a very good idea. It may be useful for repair kits if the maint pool was not paid 100% all the time and then started to decay. But otherwise I do not like the idea.

Think of it this way, a car in real life, if you pay to maintain it by getting the oil changed, tires rotated, various things like that, the likliness of needing to pay to get it repaired goes down drastically. Take this same car, never change the oil, don't ever get any maintenece done, just drive it from the time you buy it. Very soon you are needing to repair it, and it costs a lot more, in some cases so much more that it is more effective to purchase a new house.

If a system like that (Where decay/damage from lack of maintenece) were implemented that required either a special kit to repair, or an architect to come and repair, that would enhance the abilities of an architect without penalizing players that purchase a house and maintain it.

Anywho... that's my 2 creds.

Danvar

Hmm, 1 month for a small? To much a hassle, however, I like the housing repair kits.

My thoughts:

Have any size house degrade over time. Leave the one month time frame, and the house going private after it's condemed, but make the repair kits50% the resources required to build the house instead. After it's condemed, they have 2 months to get it repaired. Also make the kits useable by anyone, not just architects, no chance to fail. We want them buying from us, not having us run all over the place patching up their homes. We also want home ownership not to be a hassle.

Danvar- but a used car isn't worth the same as a new car no matter how much you maintain it. Cars eventually break down and need to be replaced no matter what. Thats the point. In this game, a house you bought a year ago is exactly the same as one you would buy today. If someone buys a new, bigger house they can sell their old one for exactly the same value as a new one would go for. Every single house that is built means there is one fewer house that ever needs to be built in the future. There is a finite number of houses needed and we are getting closer and closer to that number every day. Once that number is reached, architects are a dead profession.

Realism dictates that buildings should last a long time. Most buildings havea lifespan of decades, or centuries in some cases (or even millennia ... pyramids, the parthenon, etc etc). BUT ... they all fall apart very quickly without maintenance and repair. Repair kits are the best (and most consistent) way to reflect this in-game and keep our profession from dying as the housing market slows down. I REALLY like Zarcath's "condemned" idea, which would force merchants to keep their houses in good shape.

Anyone have a guess as to the average "house population" for a server? (i.e. the number of houses) Obviously it is growing rapidly right now (the game is only 1 month old), but where do you think it will stabilize? If we had a handle on how big the market would be for maintenance we could figure out exactly how fast they should decay.

Yeah what a great idea(joking).. How would you keep a player town going when things just go poof and if you lift up the house to place a new one what if someone steals your spot..You need to think of the planned expanding they promised for the future.

I dont think alot of thought was put in when you were considering this decay thing..The problems with Architects are not the gane mechanics but the crafters themselves..Price cutting and XP hounds are the problem..I made it to master without selling out for XP and so can anyone else..

Im just sick of hearding all these new ideas to fix the economy when its the players themselves ruining it..You wanna make a fix then get together with all that are selling for xp and fix that.

Rarek,

When you make any item, it's in the game forever. If you have played EQ, you know the problem this creates. Supply and demand will eventually kill architects. Architects need large volumes of ore, once we are dead and gone, who are the miners going to sell bluk to? This is an economic disaster in the game waiting to happen. Price cutting will have no long term impact on Architects, right now it's driving prices down, but a overabundance of non-decaying homes/factories/harvesters/furniture will eventually do the same thing.

Repair kits will solve that problem. They give the architect a non-durable good to make that people will continue to need. They also solve the problem of lot stealing, since you don't have to move to keep your house up.

If the devs do nothing, plan on changing you sig to another class, because in six months, no one is going to need your products, they will have already bought all they needed and never need another.

Everything in this game needs to decay. Period

There ar e a few problem with hsoues though sjtu becasue it is not easy to move all ones items inside to a new house. So I like the idea of kits.

Anotehr suggestion though to keep teh game viable would be adding new types of strucures (turrets and etc) whihc are destroyable. We need something going forward once everyoe has their house/furniture

I like the idea of housing repair, although I don't think it needs to be such a sizeable percentage of the intial cost of the house. If you make it require 75% of the intial resources, the Architects are rightfully going to charge 75% the price of the deed. I would think to a player, this is still going to feel like they are going to be buying a new house every month. Added on to the already cost of maintenance (which needs to stay in the game for credit sink purposes), this makes owning a house quite a chore. I don't think we want to price the casual player completely out of the market, do we? I think it would be a great idea though, but with a much lower percentage.

Harvesters and factories on the other hand, should be non-repairable. Unlike houses, which are a personal statement to a lot of players, harvesters and factories are just tools. And tools should fail and break with time. Replacing decayed harvestersand factories with new ones should give us the source of new income we are looking for here.

I almost like this idea, but I would suggest changing it in the following way.

No one is going to like that if they dont pay maint their house is gone and if they dont repair their house its gone. What I would suggest is adding a timer to a house that basically says the older the house is the more money it takes to maintian. This follows along the line that an older house requires more maintenance to keep it in good shape. Now what you do is have a houseing repair kit that anyone can use that will in a sense refresh the maint timer on a house. You could have different kinds of house repair kits that impact the maint timer different amounts. That way there is only 1 way to lose a house (stop paying maint) but architects are still needed (either to repair a currently existing house or to create new ones, the choice is up to the player).

So what do you think of that?