Here's my 2 cents on this issue.. I also dont think houses should be completely safe. There should be a risk and you should have the possibility of death if your macroing or hiding in a smaller house. This adds an element of uncertainty to going afk and macroing. It also promotes people finding cool out of the way spots to hide their houses and moves them away from putting them in popular areas.
Also doing this promotes pvp in random locations. Think about areas on IN that were completely out of the way, such as that valley north of minoc, people had mining houses and castles there and we had some amazing fights because of it. I can't even count how many times a huge fight would happen because one or two people would go to an enemy castle/GH and start killing the afk macroers through the walls (Hell it was practically a sport seeing who could get the EV to go to the right side of the wall).
Scenario 1:
- Me and a friend are out prowling looking for people to kill, unfortunately we aren't having much luck
- We spot a castle with a member of guild A macroing a skill, and he looks to be standing next to the wall
- Being bored we decide to kill the bastard. We summon an EV and he dies
- We have a good laugh and lo and behold he's not afk anymore, so he comes out as a ghost and yells at us
- We laugh and recall away to look for more people.. Still not having any luck so decide to go back
- Another member of guild A is there and ressing him now! We chase but he manages to get away
- He recalls back in 5 min later with 3 friends, we run and/or die and then call more people, huge fight ensues that lasts the next 3 hours. Good times.
This leads me to my other point i'd like to make.. Everyone here is saying there is no value in killing people in their houses but your wrong. Your not going to gain items but it helps create something that a server needs to have a lot of large scale fights.. A reason to fight besides just fighting for the sake of fighting... Anger towards the person/persons that went out of their way to mess up your day. They just killed you in your small house while you were getting resupplied! HOW DARE THEY.
Scenerio 2:
- Your killing some monsters, get a bunch of awesome weapons/armor but need to put stuff away
- You recall to your little storage house, go inside and start unpacking when 2 people from guild B showup outside
- They both start spamming EQ and you die. *******s... why the hell would they do that for no reason!?
- Fine.. OK, you leave as a ghost and go get ressed, run back and so you can get your loot.. but they are still there and kill you again. WTF, MY STUFF IS GOING TO DECAY.
- Try again, same result. Your stuff decays. Maaan are you ever pissed off now, you had full mythril armor and a HH you were killing monster with.. not to mention the 100k and crap load of vanqs/invul from loot.
- For the next 6 months whenever you see those *******s you go out of your way to try to kill them. Hurray PVP!
Anyway thats a long enough post for me. Also just a note, these kind of events occured on a daily basis on IN. People say they played for the community we had.. But you have to remember there were a couple different groups in that community and for a lot of that servers life they utterly hated eachother
~Red