[imported_Shade]

Pros

It makes players log in more often - If someone doesn't want to play UO because they got bored of it, in the 30 seconds they log on to refresh their house, they won't see anything worth making them stay for. If we have 100 people who log on for 30 seconds just to refresh their house, that translates to a higher player count of 1 player for 50 minutes a day!! Wow what a great help that was :eek:

Actually a typical person will have the habit of checking on a few things while they are logging back in. I mean honestly kid, if they are worried about their house enough to log in and refresh it then they obviously have some attachment to the shard and will at the very least troll the forums or go to town and see if anything is new. People won't log in to refresh their house if they don't care to ever play again.

If players dont log in it eventually, reduces item count - If you want to reduce item count make more stackable items (something all the crafters actually want and doesn't have any cons to doing) and stop people from selling useless crap in the vendor mall like 1 piece of cloth for 1000000 gp...

People tend to hoard items in houses and its hard to believe you would even second guess this considering you have staffed in the past, this is something you should know. A house full of useless junk owned by someone who quit or a vendor with 5 items on it that are overpriced... which adds more to the item count?

It supports the fact that we aren't carebear - I don't see how being a carebear server or not has anything to do with this. You earned your items, good job now you get to keep them. Sorry I should say "you earned your items, good job now you should get to keep them". This is like telling an athlete congratulations on setting a world record... but since you haven't competed in the last 8 years we have to take it away from you.

It's more like someone not bothering to check their mail (log in) and they didn't get thier insurance bill (renew their house) and it burnt down after the policy lapsed (decayed). Guaranteeing that someones items will be there indefinitely without any risk of them ever being lost is a pretty carebear feature in my eyes.

It would show we care more about existing players then ones that bailed - A player is a player and I don't see how a new player is more valuable then a previous player. If anything, someone who previous played INX will have more of an 'allegiance' to it and they will be more likely to stick around compared to a new guy stopping by for 2 days to try it out. What would you prefer; someone coming back and playing for another year, or a new guy coming and stay for 2 days?

I didn't say anything about new players in that line you quoted, I was stating that why should people that quit have the same rights to property over the players that stick with us through the good times and the bad. If an existing player wants a plot of land that someone placed a house on and then quit, why shouldn't they eventually be able to get it?

It keeps the environment changing, people will venture out more - I don't see how it's a big difference. Houses are locked and if you see a new house or an old house it doesn't change much for you, all it means is you can't have that spot. I stopped playing UO for about 1 - 1 1/2 years, when I came back I could only find 1 other house within a 10-15 minute run of my house so don't tell me there's no space for more houses... And what an exciting environment that is when houses decay; big empty spaces everywhere... I don't know about you but I rather run around the world and see houses with rare and unique items or armor sets on display to make me want to stick around and get these cool items instead of running through the world seeing empty spaces all over the place.

Actually what it means is people will go out hunting for decaying houses because by default all items would drop, they will have a chance at obtaining land they wanted and if they get it, they can bring their friends to that area too, and it also gives players the chance to actually form a player run town if they wanted to (right now its practically impossible with every decent large open area taken or clustered with random houses).

House decay was a sphere feature - Oh so we're supposed to be sphere only now, is that it? Well there are plenty of AOS features on this shard, I guess we better get rid of those.

Well for every AoS feature we recreate, we should make sure a sphere feature is brought back to balance it out :p

People who bailed on us for over 3 months would be upset if they came back. - Aren't suggestions meant to attract players? This suggestion is going to keep people away and instead of being away for 3 months they will be away for 6 months, 12 months, or even forever.

If someone doesn't log in for 3 months, the chances are they won't ever log in again. Sure some people rarely come back but that seldom happens. If players can't log in once in awhile to check how the shard is doing and whats new then they aren't going to come back so don't expect them too.


Actually I did read it all but the refund idea doesn't seem too popular from other posts I read. Maybe I read them wrong but it doesn't seem too popular of an idea, hence why I said you'd have to remake the money.

OK great, please email me once this idea is implemented and I'll be sure to sell my house and keep everything in my bank because I know at one point I'll probably take a break from UO for an extended period of time (ex: start school again, get a new job, want to try out a new game (see Darkfall), etc).

Like I said we could easily allow players a way to extend their leave without them worrying about decay. Though seriously, if you aren't going to log on once in 3 months then I can't imagine you would ever really come back. Of course that does happen but it is very rare.

1a) Custom houses have to be approved before they're finalized.
1b) Once every month or every two months a GM checks out existing custom houses and deletes the ugly looking ones.
1c) You have a limited amount of time to design your custom house and leave it as a dirt patch before it's deleted and you're re-imbursed for it.

Randomly deleting players houses is a better idea then giving a 3 month decay timer? yeah...

2) Limit houses to 1 or 2 per ACCOUNT. There's no reason you can explain to me that you need more then 2 houses. 1 guild house and 1 personal house at the very most. Hell right now I have a little empty house next to mine just so someone else doesn't put one there...

Here's some reasons; someone wants to open a little shop or they want to run a tavern, they have an order guild on one character and a chaos character on another so they would need two houses just for those guilds (I guess next you would want to limit guildstones per account).
There are reasons like this and more, just because you don't realize them doesn't mean they don't exist.

3) Staff create more static houses in different towns or random spots around the world and put these up for auction. Take 30 minutes to decorate some of the empty houses in towns and maybe some people will want to buy them. Ex: the theatre in the northern part of Britain. This is a nice big house but it's empty and looks ugly right now so there isn't much of a reason to buy it.

this kind of makes me think that you don't understand how buying statics work... Players pick any static in the world and page to buy it. If it is within our guidelines and a reasonable location we price it for them, at which time they can let us know if they really want to buy it. If so then it goes up for auction. Once a player owns a static they are free to decorate it all they want, and we can even help them add some simple decor to it as well depending on certain circumstances.

In any case, you might not see reason for house decay because you are looking at right now but down the road there will be no room left anywhere. Honestly I think there are only a handful of places that a castle would still fit. Eventually it will be needed so why not do it right before or as we come out of beta. Even if we told people they couldn't build crappy custom houses, normal houses will still continue to accumulate.