Cities And Housing Archive

Thread: Suggestions regarding new Housing Changes on Test Center

Sundown6
Thu Jan 20, 2005 3:56 pm
#1
Currently structures on Test Center drain from a bank account when maintenance is 0. This prevents player loss of items, but introduces new problems:


-Houses that won't be removed from the landscape for a very long time.


-Burdens on cities due to abandoned houses that won't go away.


-Rendering maintenance droids useless.


These problems can be resolved with the following changes:


After a house reaches 0 maintenance, they drain from a bank account-- attwice therateof normal maintenance, to give players a reason to pay maintenance through normal means. This also preserves the usefulness of maintenance droids. When the bank account is also depleted, the structure decays and requires repair. At 0 condition, they become condemned. The house goes into repossession within 7 days.


Harvesters should still decay and destroy themselves when out of maintenance.


If a customer stops paying, at the end of the month, all his existinghouses and harvesters also go into repossession.


If a customer's house is in a city, as soon as he stops paying, or as soon as his house is condemned, a mayor can alsodirectly assign the house forrepossession.


Repossession--house are taken up from the spot in game they were built, but are still stored away. Every house or structure in repossession still takes up one lot. This allows both storage of items and houses for inactive characters and allows real active players to use their spot. This nicely removes the problem of cities being ghosttowns, empty structures that never decay, landscape cluttered overtime with abandoned buildings, and mayors being stuck with buildings that won't be removed for 6 months.


To re-claim yourdeeds along with the items stored in the house, go to an NPC in one of the capitols to reaccess your repossessed house, for a fee, of course. This also nicely adds usefulness and content to the NPC capitol buildings.


Having to wait 6 months for a non-playing player's house to clear is much too much, and a system likehe one posed abovestill prevents loss of items due to negligence and inactivity. These changes should take care of almost all of the objections and problems with the existing housing implementation and the new housing changes, while preserving all of the benefits of both.

Kryxal
Thu Jan 20, 2005 4:15 pm
#2
Two times isn't much of a burden for some of the really rich people on servers. Better might be an exponential increase, as time goes by. First week, it's twice, second, it's four times, and so on. The time periods and multiplier can be adjusted, of course...



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MeciniaLua
Thu Jan 20, 2005 4:43 pm
#3
The most time you'd have to wait for a building to disapper is 6 months. This is the first step towards the 6 month character deletion promise.


Also to my knowledge maintanance droids have never worked as intended.....



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BleuDestiny
Thu Jan 20, 2005 4:48 pm
#4
You start out complaining of ghost towns, and then talk about changes to the game that dont address ghost town issues. If the person is gone, it doesn't matter if its 2x or 10x the maintenance rate, they're gone. So... what you're really saying is that you want the houses gone if the player is.


Forget the maintenance multipliers, get back to the root issue. Ghosttowns. And be reasonable. There's a reasonable difference between 4 months break from the game because they were fed up, and someone who has pre-paid their house for 1.5 years LOL. How about if someone hasn't logged in for 120-days, they're houses go into reposession? I don't know.


Stepping back, iscity maintenancethe real culprit here?


Also, what you're not considering, to step back even further to something that might be a bigger game design issue... frankly my guild welcomes these ghost players, because server populations have been so low, we don't have to be concerned about losing our player city rank/status because the ghost players keep our citizen counts up.




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Sundown6
Thu Jan 20, 2005 5:08 pm
#5
6 months is a near eternity for a player city trying to shape itself.


BleuDestiny wrote:
You start out complaining of ghost towns, and then talk about changes to the game that dont address ghost town issues. If the person is gone, it doesn't matter if its 2x or 10x the maintenance rate, they're gone. So... what you're really saying is that you want the houses gone if the player is.



Ghost towns might not have been the best word to describe the situation.Many mayorsare stuck with the problem of houses they can't remove, thatinterfere with their city designs, push their city costs up,and with this change, can't even remove for up to 6 months.




BleuDestiny wrote:
Also, what you're not considering, to step back even further to something that might be a bigger game design issue... frankly my guild welcomes these ghost players, because server populations have been so low, we don't have to be concerned about losing our player city rank/status because the ghost players keep our citizen counts up.





I feel for you, but the fact that some players who quit can drastically affect the gameplay of those who haven't and are actually playing is a serious issue. Using ghost players to keep city populations up should not be a main principle in driving the design of city and housingsystems. It's simply using one design flaw of the game to prop up the fact that many other deficiencies of the game are causing players to leave. It's a nice side-effect of apotentially bad design, but for players and mayors who are seeking to actively build and maintain acitycomposed live players, it hurts and hampers them badly. In my opinion, the game design should revolve around these active players.

Perhaps it might work best if a condemned house within a citywill not be automatically repossessed, and that it requires a mayor to actively repossess it, at least until 6 months are up. This allows the mayer to save the spot for aplayer on a break, and gives him some time to deal with losing an active player. But it still strikes me wrong that cities and guilds should rely so heavily on players who no longer play the game.

Hakai
Thu Jan 20, 2005 5:30 pm
#6
honeslty i think it'd just be better for the mayor to have a CAD like interface to move the houses around within his radius. this allows him to stackup the inactive houses on the outskirts.


The way i see it, you declare citizenship, you allow the mayor to move your house around. There will be situations in which people will complain, but then the citizen could just pack up and move.



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ana-mo-cara
Thu Jan 20, 2005 5:44 pm
#7
This is not a real problem. First of all houses last damn near forever anyway in the game. If your only just now bothering to get peeved by it you have missed something. I remember all the times that a mayor would watch with seething rage as a 1.5 year house just sat in the town. Until he finally got a csr to do something about it seeing as the player didnt even have residence in it anymore.


The problem is the way houseing and cities are set up in general. Players haveing to have five structures for full storage. Cities being so tight during the initial phase and too expanded in the later phases.


These issues actually need to be addressed, and then we can focus on relic houseing.
baradmordo
Thu Jan 20, 2005 6:24 pm
#8
very interesting reading this
VanBoaru
Thu Jan 20, 2005 6:57 pm
#9
People, don't fret over these changes. One of the Devs (dev tracker) said that its just a prepatory step for the Character Purge.



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baradmordo
Thu Jan 20, 2005 7:24 pm
#10
very interesting reading this
Trean
Thu Jan 20, 2005 9:50 pm
#11




VanBoaru wrote:
People, don't fret over these changes. One of the Devs (dev tracker) said that its just a prepatory step for the Character Purge.





1/2 a year is a long ass time for a player city to wait for someone's house to be moved so that they can move in an active citizen, and the idea hasn't even been put into development yet so the first purge probably wouldn't be for a year from now, that is a LONG time for houses to exist in what people attempt to make active areas.



First off, as to you who are supporting ghost towns. Shame on you. Why can't you work with other people on your server. Server population low? My ass, I know you aren't the only city on your server so there are other people, so if you can't cooperate to make it to a higher level city then you are at fault not the game. All other people should not have to suffer at attempts to make active player cities so that people can continue with their ghost towns. Just another reason why they need to fix the player inactive citizen removal system.



As for the house changes. If houses are condemned when maintenance runs out, this doesn't fix the system of people placing houses and leaving game but maybe coming back so they pay up the house for a year. Condemned houses help promote ghost cities, as they will be paid out of the pocket of the person, and to get it condemned the thing has to go to zero which won't happen because in ghost towns someone is keeping that house paid up.



Both this new housing system combined with the new politician 0 pt plan will be the doomsday of player cities. Whether it will happen shortly after or a tad bit down the line, cities will be getting more and more condemned buildings that can't be moved for active new citizens to place in. Also the 0pt plan is a show of hand that SOE devs have no intention of making politician an actual enjoyable profession, but see it as necessary to maintain stability in the game. So instead of fixing the problems of politician they are making it so people can't whine anymore because it doesn't cost you anything so it doesn't have to be fun.




Trean Speyr-Caggeyder
Former SWG Player
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Fidgiter
Fri Jan 21, 2005 7:44 am
#12
No money should come out of a players account when a structure becomes condemned. This is my suggestion on this.


If a structure decays to 25% condition fire and smoke begins to rise from its roof much as happens with harvesters. By their defintion it would be considered comdemned and the owner would be unable to enter it without paying enough maintenance to restore it to full condition. Once the condition falls to 0% it is gone.


The owner would then have a visible and physical reminder that they need to pay the bills. Friends of the owner will have a visible sign and can warn the owner that they are about to loose the structure. If the owner is gone they loose the structure and all within. It's what happens now except this gives them an extra more apparent warning that their structure is going to break down.



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BSMWidowMaker
Fri Jan 21, 2005 11:08 am
#13

I agree with Puertoriqueno to some extent. I think that the mayor and members of the militia should have the ability to act as a city council and if the majority votes to revoke citizenship of a player , then they are notified by mail and have 30 days to remove theirstructure from the city. Failure to do so in the required time willresult in deletion of the structure. When players leave the game , they often loose theirstructures , lets not also have their bank accounts dry if / when they return to us . Just my simple thoughts..
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