Cities And Housing Archive
Thread: defunct houses in player cities
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Privateer21
Sun Feb 06, 2005 9:58 am
#1
Has anyone found a way for non-players to remove their old houses? We've been patiently waiting for a couple to just run out of maint and burn down, but now this new patch has thrown that out the window.
A CSR has given me a process to remove them through email to swgsupport, but that's only worked with one former player so far and even then it was like pulling teeth. He had to send 4 emails, mostly trying to get around the support filters and auto responses.
Should be an easier way. CSR's won't do it from request of the mayor or PA leader, even if the account owning the house is cancelled.
Anyone else been able to solve this nagging problem?
regards
P
Zeon_Zaku
Sun Feb 06, 2005 10:34 am
#2
I tried as well. CSRs wont do it without permission from the house owner. So really, there's no way to take them up. You're stuck with them for good. 
-Devil-
Sun Feb 06, 2005 10:45 am
#3
the last official response i got was ' we do not remove houses, you will have to wait for the upcoming purge '
Mosdl
Sun Feb 06, 2005 10:50 am
#4
Wouldn't it be great if a mayor could "contest" a house, and the owner has a week or so to respond. If he doesn't, the mayor can move the house (and all the items in it) to a different location in the city.
MDEUK
Mon Feb 07, 2005 1:36 am
#5
Yes - a system like this would be great... Let's see if it happens!
Mosdl wrote:
Wouldn't it be great if a mayor could "contest" a house, and the owner has a week or so to respond. If he doesn't, the mayor can move the house (and all the items in it) to a different location in the city.
JoKen_Jash
Mon Feb 07, 2005 7:51 am
#6
Until they do something, I'd just make sure that your mayor has admin rights to every house in the city so that he can move them when the characters' accounts get cancelled.
Scoooter
Mon Feb 07, 2005 9:23 am
#7
Better yet, since they want top cater to players that have left. Let the house decay like it used to and then they can place the items in a spcial saftey deposit box that is accessable for 2 days after they log in again.
Dark_0ne
Mon Feb 07, 2005 9:37 am
#8
I would like to see a little "intelligence" applied to this problem from the CSRs and Development staff.
I outline a similar problem on the politician forum :
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Politician&message.id=45945
Basically, if the building gets to zero condition and is therefore disabled, and if the account is more than a month inactive - it should be pretty obvious that the EX player has no intention of ever using that building again - because they would have lost the building and contents already.
If we can get this rule agreed with the CSR Support, then that would go a long way to solving many problems with old buildings cluttering up cities.
I outline a similar problem on the politician forum :
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Politician&message.id=45945
Basically, if the building gets to zero condition and is therefore disabled, and if the account is more than a month inactive - it should be pretty obvious that the EX player has no intention of ever using that building again - because they would have lost the building and contents already.
If we can get this rule agreed with the CSR Support, then that would go a long way to solving many problems with old buildings cluttering up cities.
No-Ni
Mon Feb 07, 2005 11:03 am
#9
Mosdl wrote:
Wouldn't it be great if a mayor could "contest" a house, and the owner has a week or so to respond. If he doesn't, the mayor can move the house (and all the items in it) to a different location in the city.
That's what needs to happen. Allow the mayor to move houses of cancelled players to another part of the city or even outside city limits.
If they don't make that happen, cities will have to move. That's what the CSR's recommended to us for working around the problem of so many inactive houses in our city....
Gothywench
Mon Feb 07, 2005 11:08 am
#10
JoKen_Jash wrote:Until they do something, I'd just make sure that your mayor has admin rights to every house in the city so that he can move them when the characters' accounts get cancelled.
That's what we do. We ask that all citizens give access to the Mayor, myself or other Council members who are in no danger of leaving. I've taken over houses for people who've left the game, or at least been able to sell off their old stuff and house so we could put the profits back into the city for maintenance.
Khristen
Tue Feb 08, 2005 1:04 am
#12
JoKen_Jash wrote:
Until they do something, I'd just make sure that your mayor has admin rights to every house in the city so that he can move them when the characters' accounts get cancelled.
Only the owner can redeed, rename, or declare residency in a structure, though. Having someone on admin only allows them to see the status of the structure, add maintenance, and add/remove items.
If/When the character purge happens--and it's continued on a regular basis, some of the issues with "dead" housing will be resolved, but not all of them. While the auto-maintenance thing is nice for active players for their own structures, it's a bad situation for player cities.
Perhaps the auto-maintenance should only work for so long before it stops accessing the player's bank account. Say a house would normally take 3 weeks to decay and poof under the old system (just making up a time-frame here) of decay. Right now, instead of decaying the house pulls maintenance from the owner's account until there is no money left which could extend weeks/months/years. A revised system could have the house pull maintenance from the owner's account when it reaches 0 maintenance, but only for 3 weeks (the period of time it took for the house to decay in the old system); after that the structure would begin to decay as in the old system. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a possible compromise between convenience and practicality.
Privateer21
Tue Feb 08, 2005 8:50 pm
#13
actually, they'll do it, but it does take some work from the owner of the structure.
I've had one former guild member remove their house from outside the game. But it took him several more emails than it should've. Apparently the auto-response systemthat customer support uses filters everything. The trick is getting it to not filter your request and have a real person read it.
Still, it's more work than it should be.
I have little faith the mythical character purge will ever happen. haven't they been saying they were going to do a purge for about 6 months now? We have a house in our city that quite literally has been unoccupied for 10 months. I guess it's possible the person is playing on another server, but I've no way to contact her, so we're stuck with the house. This one at least isn't in a bad spot. We have 2 that are totally handcuffing us, keeping our city redesign plans from progressing. The ex-players either won't exert the effort or are purposefully dragging their feet to spite me.
Either way, there needs to be a better system to solve this problem.
regards
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