[Eighty Swords]

Once the 30 minutes are up it's back to the same old same old afk macroing or afk sitting in pits. I can't foresee many people running all over the world every other day to look for decayed houses, not to mention that narrow window they have between the house decaying and the items decaying.

If all this is to generate 30 minutes of activity every 3 months or so, give me a staff instead and I'll generate 30 minutes of fun for people every day!

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.

The example of me coming back might just be one example, but it's an example none the less of someone coming back and by implementing this house decay, instead of this being a rare scenario, it will be even more rare or even never happen.

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.

Well if the staff are willing to grant extended leaves of absence (sounds like I'm arguing something with my boss) that would help some people who have legitimate reasons other then 'I'm bored with UO'. I just hope the conditions to get an extended decay period aren't too severe and something like difficult term starting with school are valid.

Again, see the example of me returning. And right around the same time that I came back, smoke, luda krishna, and scarecrow all came back too! And we didn't even talk to each other to plan it, it just happened all of a sudden. I wonder if we all would have stayed if we lost everything we earned the last time we were here. Ok so smoke got banned and that's why he lost all of his stuff so that's a bit different of an issue. But I wonder if we all would have stayed if we lost almost every item we earned in the first 1-2 years the shard was up (there were good times and bad times back then too).

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...

You completely misunderstood the idea. Only one portion of the idea is to delete the ugly houses that are in no way being used. I'm not talking about someone who designed an ugly house and is actually using it, I'm talking about the useless houses you'll find in the world if you explore enough. Just like the example I gave; a 1 floor house that just says 'Hi'... You can check the last time someone entered the house to make sure it wasn't just made yesterday as a joke.

What about points 1a and 1c from that suggestion? I see you didn't comment on those so I don't know if that means you agree or disagree with them...

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.

Well as smart as I am I can't think of EVERYTHING. I don't know of many people (or anyone for that matter) who has characters in different guilds. I didn't say it has to be capped at 1 or 2, I used that as an example. Make it 2 or 3 if really needed.

Besides, if there is a cap of 1, 2, 3, or whatever amount, like all things in life people will have to choose what is more important to them. Just like how I have to choose what kind of player I am; crafter, hunter, pker. I don't have time for all 3 so I do a compromise and do 50/30/20 or 50/50, etc. Or how I have to choose which craft to train since I don't have enough gold to train them all, or how I want to buy a PS3 and 360 but only have the money for 1 so I buy the PS3... The same decision will have to be made whether you want characters in different guilds, if you want to run a shop (more or less done by the vendor mall by the way), etc.

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.

Yes I understand how statics work, and what I was getting at is that maybe some people buy an already decorated static because they don't want to make a custom house and decorate it from scratch, or they want to have it decorated with items you can't normally get.

This suggestion also came from the fact that people are saying we are running out of available plots of land or there aren't that many statics remaining, so a tentative solution is to decorate existing statics or make new ones on the edge of town. The great thing about making a custom house as a staff is you can shape it however you want. It doesn't have to be 13x13 or 18x18, you can make it 10*30 or 30*15, L shaped, etc.

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.

You're right, to some degree I am only considering how it is right now and I understand the concept of preventative measures and why you want to implement this idea now. That said, right now there are plenty of places left you just need to explore and not give up because there's already a house at the first place you want to put one or because there's a house within 5 minutes or even 1 minute.

I also firmly believe there are less drastic measures that can be taken before this suggestion has to be used and these measures should be explored before pissing off people with this suggestion.

When that idea get implemented I hope you are going to send a mail to everyone who played and have mail archived telling about that new change.

Agreed. Not very fair to do delete a house on someone that has no idea this is happening. It would also be nice if the person could be emailed when it's say 1 week before their house is deleted so if they think they ever will come back they will know they have to refresh it every 30 days or however often because it's very easy to forget about an email 2 months later when it took you only 1 minute to read.



Overall I don't like this idea of forcing someone to stay around and log in every x weeks or days just to make sure their stuff doesn't disappear on them after they worked so hard. In my opinion if someone wants to take an extended break, let them. As Shade said; if people want to quit they'll quit, well if they want to come back, they'll come back when they're ready and this suggestion really won't encourage them to come back!