Merchant Archive

How about a system that would allow merchants to rent lots from other players, by adding the rental fee to the hourly maintains on a house.
So if Bob the BH only needed 2 of his lots for a house he could rent the remaining 8 lots to Alice the merchant for say 60 cr per hour per lot (witch I think is the maintains fee on a heavy harvester). In this case bob would get 11520 cr per day, and Alice would have 8 more lots for harvesters or houses.
Give the contract a say 2-day cancellation period so that if Bob cancels the contract, Alice has one day to find out and one day to free up the lots needed. In addition, perhaps doubling or tripling the maintainer fees if the lot used was exited by the lots owned (if Alice do not free up enough lots the cost on all lots will sky rocket until some buildings decay).
Alternatively it could be made available throe a vendor.
Perhaps even make it possible for Alice to rent though 8 lots on to Joe the resource supplier. But in such a way so Bob could not rent them directly to Joe.

There might be the some issue with the dev's now wanting more lots to be used, and people using a character they did not use to exchange lots between servers...
However, if that is the case then it is a "to high number of total lots" problem not a "lot rental problem", and could be solved by reducing the total number of lots on an account.

I rent lots now, but it is by voluntary agreement with friends. I agree with you it would be nice to have a built in mechanism for lot rentals. Especially if it would allow me to be the one to place the structure, rather than have the landlord be the one to place it.

I just ask people if I can rent (or sublet) their lots, and have them put down harvestors for me, 20k a week / lot

And I get to use more lots - they just have to be there when I put the harvestor down and when Ipull the harvestor back up.

Atm I operating some 22 harvestors...

And looking for more

Is a very good idea. I currently rent lots but would be very glad to see an easier way to do it. You could have timed contracts for lot rentals and prices. You could have a choice of 3 times; lets say 1 week, 2 weeks, and1 month. At the end of those times a menu would appear to both parties asking if they want to renew the contract. You would only have the choices of yes or no and if either party said no then that is the end of the contract. The seller could also set a price per day to the lot contract.

I could see one problem with this is that people would just get others from another server to rent them lots and then we would have amass amount of lots floating around. One way to stop this and the best way would be to make a person have a certain number of used skill points or make them have a certain total number of xp points. A person would be a lot more hesitant to come to another server and rent out his lots if he had to work at gaining skill points or xp points to do it first.