Home expiration idea

[Drayla]

So, for the past few months now, I've been biding my time and very slowly saving up the riln to eventually get a home. Why not just buuld up the funds and go choose one? Well, because none of the available homes have interested me, and I'm holding out for the next round of houses to see what my options will be. I do understand why there haven't been new homes released in a while, and I am not complaining or offering suggestions. I just thought about some "What-ifs" regarding homes, and figure some people may want to chime in on it or share their own What-ifs.

Here is mine:
What if we had a sysyem in place where after a character is inactive for a certain period of time, like a year or so, their home goes up for auction? It would reduce the need for new houses to be made significantly, and would rarely, if ever, cause any sort of problems.
Now I know whaf you're thinking. "What if someone stays gone just long enough for their house to be sold away and then comes back?" Well, a solution would be to take all of their belongings from the house upon its resale and deposit them and the full price of the house in that persons account at the nearest bank. That way no one ever gets burned in a situation where they do keave for an extended amount of time. And with this system in place, they would likely have plenty of other homes to choose from when they do return.
Again, "How could that be explained IC?" Simple. The cities and hamlets rely pretty heavily on their own citizens to keep their economy alive. If there are empty houses sitting around, that is not only room that another potential citizen could be using, but it is also an eyesore if it starts to fall into disrepair and neglect. Therefore, the cities could have a policy that should your house be uninhabited for so long, they will offer it to another person. However, since the cities wouldn't want to burn a former citizen that could potentially return and purchase property again, they would deposit that person's things in the bank and give him or her a full refund of the property rather than keeping it all. This keeps homes available for newcomers who want to settle down in a town, and prevents people who have lived there before from being driven off by an unfair situation.

Well, tell me what you guys think of my What-if. And feel free to leave your own below. But please, keep them realistic and believable. No "What if CLOK had flying unicorns and laser-shooting robots who farted candy?! Trolololol!" please.

[Rias]

I've wanted to do something like this since player homes were implemented. My idea was that there was something like a property tax that is very low, but mainly serving as a way to ensure a character is still around and making use of the home. If property taxes (or whatever they should be called) aren't paid for so many periods, then the home would be put up for resale.

We already have the inn rooms mechanic in place now, which gives warning letters when rent is almost up, as well as a letter when rent has completely expired on the room. These letters trigger the email notifications as well, so even if you're not logging in, you'll be notified (as long as you have the MailNotify option on and an email address registered for that character). When rent expires, any belongings are taken from the inn room and put in storage, where the character can go at any time to pay a fee and pick up their stuff. This could be easily appllied to homes, with letter reminders at something like 1 month overdue, 2 months overdue, 3 months overdue and last chance, then the home is put up for sale again and all belongings put into the local bank vault, along with a fee.

Note: Changed the thread title to be more indicative of the content.

[jilliana]

I really like the property tax idea, particularly since there aren't very many homes to choose from to begin with, and 99.9 of those available aren't as nice as some of the taken homes.
I also wanted to suggest something in addition to what Rias mentioned. Maybe this could be a little something that more experienced players can benefit from.
Jill gets rich and up until now she's been spending her time wandering the lands doing her Templar thing, and not really staying anywhere that required riln. Now she wants to settle down in relative comfort. She goes to the Town Hall and from there, for a substantial base fee, asks that a house be built. She then chooses from a predetermined directory of locations. (Locations that the GM's may want to add another home or two in.) She then has to choose a blueprint for an additional cost. (Also determined by GM's) After the process is complete, she has to wait a period of time for the house to be built. At this point, it's up to the GM's to determine if property taxes should be higher for someone who had a custom home built.

[Drayla]

I don't know if custom homes should be an easily-available thing, because that would take up time that GMs could be using to improve the game in other ways. I think you might be able to request a custom house right now by contacting the GMs in some way, but I think whether they accept or deny your request is determined by what exactly you want, and what their schedule is like. I do know that if you have an existing house, you can request to have different items or rooms added on for a fee, but again, this is determined by schedules and the location of your house.

One more thing, I don't think it was ever intended for there to be enough houses for every active player to own their own house. With plenty of homes having one or even two spare rooms, I think the intention is that people will develop IC relationships that would allow one person to live with another, or even for one person to rent out their spare room to someone else. I would like to see existing homes come up for sale soon, because I've always seen all these homes and thought "I wonder how many of these places are just sitting unused because the person never plays anymore? It would be nice if I could somehow end up with it and put it to use." I do like Rias's idea. It would let houses become available sooner once abandoned, and people would have fair warning. If a property tax were to be instated though, I think it should reflect the value of the home, but not be so high that you must have a few hundred riln every month to pay it off. Maybe something like 50 riln a month for every 20000 riln the house initially cost? This would make the smaller homes anywhere from 50 to 150 riln a month, and the larger ones would be about 300 or little more. Maybe that is too much, but it seems reasonable.

At any rate, I will be holding on to my riln until another batch of houses become available, either from Zoiya dishing more out, or a system to free up those that have been abandoned for a while geting implemented.

[faylen]

First, I really like the idea that Rias mentioned, and would absolutely love to see this implemented.

As an addition, I think it would be neat if the owner could designate one or two others who could pay the property tax in their stead. These additional people would also get the warning letters, like co-owners of sorts. This way you wouldn't have a situation where player A buys a house, gives player B a key and then some weeks later disappears while player b is still around and using the house. Then four months later, player B is out of a place to live because taxes weren't paid by player A. since the idea is to make sure a house is actually being used, I think this would be reasonable.

I also would like to see a mechanic for players to be able to buy/sell existing homes among one another if they wanted to. I mean sure you can sell the title and key to someone, but it's been said that there are some code things that gms have to deal with with such transfers. Of course it's also possible I got misinformation.

[qinweiqi]

I don't know if custom homes should be an easily-available thing, because that would take up time that GMs could be using to improve the game in other ways. I think you might be able to request a custom house right now by contacting the GMs in some way, but I think whether they accept or deny your request is determined by what exactly you want, and what their schedule is like. I do know that if you have an existing house, you can request to have different items or rooms added on for a fee, but again, this is determined by schedules and the location of your house.

The way I envisioned this working when I first read the idea was kind of how the Mistral tailor works now. You order an item custom (a house) and have several customization options (rooms; stories; brick walls or wood; tile, dirt, or wood floors; fireplace or no fire place; thatch, clay, or wood roof; etc. -- and of course not all options would be available in all places, not every city is willing to tolerate thatched-roof wooden shacks cropping up). House building could honestly be made part of a script that builds the houses based on the input parameters. It should have a delay in being built strictly for RP reasons, though it may be highly desirable for the system to simply build an invisible house and queue a message for a GM to (sometime in the next month or two) bug check it and flip a toggle that makes the house visible on the street.

That being said, such a process would definitely be a long term scripting project, and a considerably lower priority than clearing out old homes. On the up side, if housing of this sort ever does become available, there would not necessarily be a need to restrict the number of homes one may own. Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth.

[Rias]

I wouldn't expect custom housing anytime soon, sorry. Not against the idea, but not particularly interested in implementing it. One thing we're frequently pushing is that the towns are very crowded already, and that's one of the reasons we turn down home expansion requests. Look at the descriptions in Mistral sometime - remember they're cramming everyting on their lake platform, "open unused space" doesn't really exist. In Shadgard's case, they're cramming everything within the confines of the canyon the town inhabits. Again, undeveloped land is more or less nonexistent.

TL;DR: In the player-accessible towns, housing/land is extremely limited for IC reasons so custom-built homes from scratch or home expansions aren't likely to be available.

Hamlets? Yeah ... they've gotten more developed than originally intended. Don't expect many more homes to be available in them.

Building a home in the wilderness? Against my design desires for the Lost Lands: The wilderness is wild and dangerous, especailly in the Lost Lands where nethrim, infested, and brigands are all over the darned place. Might (maybe (possibly (don't count on it))) be possible at some point, but would require frequent maintenance and always with the risk of having the home raided/damaged/destroyed by previously-mentioned antagonistic forces.

[baerden]

Might (maybe (possibly (don't count on it))) be possible at some point, but would require frequent maintenance and always with the risk of having the home raided/damaged/destroyed by previously-mentioned antagonistic forces.

This is exactly what I was thinking.

Step in to my day dream.. shall we..

Doodleedoodoodledoodoodleydoo.. (fade to daydream)

Out in the wilderness there could be low stone wall foundations peppered throughout, some maybe hidden and requiring some real exploration to find.

These low stone foundations would be permanent, but when a carpenter has the correct planks/nails/whatever and begins building, it starts raising the house on that foundation and as he builds and adds more materials/skill time towards BUILDing there, it raises the foundation through multiple levels of completion. For simplicity, when complete, the structure simply follows a template for what is buildable for that foundation much like how static houses are today. For example (please excuse the descriptions, im just throwing these out as examples)

an abandoned stone foundation
a framed-in small cottage
a partially finished small cottage
a (well maintained) small cottage

Until locksmiths can build locks/traps you could have a lock and key set sold at the locksmith that could be added to the door by the carpenter who then could sell the key to the homes new resident or do as he wishes with it.

For simplicity at the beginning, over time, or when the system gets more advanced and updated, through in game events such as the " previously-mentioned antagonistic forces", the house would deteriorate through different stages such as:

A (well maintained) small cottage
A small cottage (with a dilapidated roof)
a small cottage (with a dilapidated roof and broken windows)
A (ramshackle) small cottage (that is ready to collapse)
an abandoned stone foundtaion

A carpenter during these stages could BUILD or repair it with commodities such as nails and planks to keep from deteriorating back to a foundation. They could be hired out by the owner or carpenters could do it on their own volition to practice their skills.

I think already made homes for players should be grandfathered in, but going forward i would really like to see this kind of system.

Doodleedoodoodledoodoodleydoo.. (fade from daydream)

So yeah.. would love to see the interaction and RP this kind of system would invoke, as well as limiting the amount of houses out in the wilderness or world in general, while having a built in mechanism for refreshing the chance to own one.

[Makkah]

Stellar ideas, Baerden. And extra-points for the Wayne's World daydream sound effects.

[Drayla]

So, this discussion seems to be becoming popular on CHAT recently, so I thought I'd bump it for everyone to move the discussion here.

I honestly hope the tax or whatever it may be is implemented soon. I went around browsing houses the other day, and almost all of them are gone. I am glad Haiban has some housing opportunities now, but I'd still like to see the older homes become available. I may not be able to purchase a house for a while, but the housing situation is so bad that the people who are serious about wanting to own a house, for IC reasons or storage purposes, pretty much have a race going on to see who can raise the required riln for that nice house first. I'm not totally against that, except for the fact that there are plenty of houses just as nice sitting in limbo right now that belong to bygone characters.

Now, the argument has come against this of people who have alts that they admittingly hardly, if ever, play anymore that own houses, and they don't want that alt to lose their house because they "know [they'll] want to play that character again" at times. Not that they'll revive the character and be on more frequently sometime in the future, but that they just want the alt around to switch to for a day or two every now and then. My advice: just give the house up. Store whatever you don't want to lose in a bank, and sell the house. It is more fair to free it up for the many dedicated characters we have that will actually use it than to keep it for your alt because it's a bit more convienient during those small amounts of time you play that alt, if you play that alt at all. I would say that a good rule of thumb to keep would be only get/keep houses for the characters you invest at least a week's worth of time into every month. And by that I don't mean seven full days of playing. I mean that if you only play about three days a week, then don't buy a house or keep a house for a character that you have played less than three days in a full month.

I understand why people are against losing houses or having to pay a recuring fee on a house they saved up a bunch of riln for, but honestly if you play so little that a 50 riln fee a month to keep your house is too unreasonable, then you shouldn't have the house anyway, because more frequent players would love to have it.

[Zoiya]

I don't think that the housing situation is quite desperate, but a big part of the problem that we also have is that we have a lot of people who have alt characters, and those characters own houses as well. I want you to think about how many alts you have, and imagine how many houses we'd have to put in game to accommodate everyone. That is part of the reason why I only want people who do not own a home to bid on the treehouse next weekend. I would like a newer player who hasn't had a chance to ever own a home to be able to buy one. There are more houses that will be up for sale soon, and hopefully a solution can be found for the people who would like to own homes.

[Kent]

There seems to be an unwritten rule that requires all houses to be unique, and this rule is hindering the building of entry-level houses.

In some industry towns, such as mining towns, a contractor for the Company would come in and build a number of houses on a single blueprint. These identical houses were built and sold to immigrant workers. (There would have been financing options that don't factor in CLOK, viz, in real life, the Company might be the entity mortgaging the homes to it's workers through payroll, etc.)

So my suggestion is that in each town a dozen of these entry-level homes, built on the same floor plan, be made available to players. If you've played a Thief character, you already know that such homes are available to NPC's anyway.

[Avedri]

There seems to be an unwritten rule that requires all houses to be unique, and this rule is hindering the building of entry-level houses.

There are living quarters in the game just like this and they are available for purchase. FYI

[Zoiya]

There are actually nine or ten houses that are all built to be identical, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. :P

[Kent]

There are actually nine or ten houses that are all built to be identical, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. :P

I have never been inside two Clok houses that were the same. Perhaps these homes are already bought up?

I have lived before in an industry town with a row of identical houses as I described (in fact, my great grandparents lived in one) and there were over 20 of these Company homes on each side of the street.

[Zoiya]

There are identical homes in Morhollow and Haiban. Keth as well. I'm trying to add more houses, but like I said in the above post, it's hard to keep up when the houses that I'm adding are being bought by alts. You guys have a lot of them and I can't build enough houses for all of your main characters and your alt characters as well. If I did, all I would ever be doing is building homes.

[Drayla]

I have never owned a home on any character, but I think I'm making Yalika my main now, and I aim to get her house as soon as I can. I just hope a tower becomes available by then. I want to be able to get the perfect house for the character I'm going to be spending most if not all of my time on.

[crystal2014]

Perhaps there needs to be some type of rule put into place that a player can only purchase one home per IP address unless approved by a GM. This will allow multiple players at the same IP address to each own one home for their main character. I know this will not be easy to implement, but in cases where a person has four altes and all four of them own homes, they can be given a set amount of time to empty the extra homes before they are put up for sale. I no, as a new player, I spend about 300 riln or more in storing and retrieving items each day. Perhaps more inn rooms can be added in the main locations. I know shadgard has rooms for rent, but for a new player 150 riln a night can be expensive! Especially when you are trying to purchase other needed items.

[Lun]

Regarding the 1 home per IP address, I don't think it's right to STRIP a player of their home without recompense in that case. If that player actively plays his or her alts, and you were to repossess the home of an alt that they play, that'd be kind of wrong.

[Drayla]

I am not against people owning houses on their alts. I have something against people owning houses on their alts that they hardly play, if they ever really do. Some peoole just hop on an alt and play for a few minutes for fun every now and then. In that kind of situation, the bank vault would work just as well as a home and would give the players who do not own homes a chance to own one.

[Solaje]

I hope you guys don't take houses from people who have long absences. I still love the game, but with five children there my recreation time can be limited. Especially when they're very young, like now. I should be able to play more as the months pass.

I love Solaje's house and spent a lot of time saving for it! Hadya and Dactor also have a house. Maybe it was wrong to have one for each of my alts, but at the time it seemed like there were many available.

[Solaje]

(Clarification: Hadya is my alt, not Dactor. They just share a house.)