[imported_Shade]

You're absolutely right, 3 months is a realistic amount of time and it's the same amount of time in some other games. What I don't find right about this is that someone could spend 2+ years with us and then they take an extended break (by choice or not) and in 1/8 of the time they played with us they just lost all their stuff. Does that sound right to you?

Again, players can request their houses get refreshed for x amount of time if they take an extended leave. It takes 30 seconds to pm me or any other staff to leave us a message. If a player can't take 30 seconds to protect their homes then they won't care if its gone.

Did anyone ever watch the movie The Last Castle? One of the main characters; the general, tells a soldier he committed one crime which lasted 5 minutes in all the years he was a solder, so by his count that makes the solder .0001% criminal and 99.999% a loyal obedient soldier who now has to suffer x years in jail. Well here in our little fantasy world players aren't committing a crime or breaking rules by taking a break. They didn't sign a contract when they joined INX saying they'd never take a break.

Just like they didn't sign a contract, neither did we. We offer a service to our players and if a person is no longer a player then we can't exactly offer them a service anymore. If you ditch your car on the side of the road, when it gets towed you still own it and can go claim it if you care about it but after x amount of time the car is forfeited by the owner, once charges > car's worth. Much like that, every player has a value on this shard but when they leave for an extended period of time that value diminishes and eventually the cost of expecting them to come back outweighs the value, by that I mean the cost is effecting active players.

Added note: 95% of shards have house decay and even OSI too(at least the ones that have been open for over a year).

You're right, it is only a few people making a big deal out of this, but as I said to Shade, if you look through all the replies you'll see it's a 50-50 agreement and disagreement by the players. Not the greatest idea ever to me...

This is not 50/50, UO is not a forum game. As I have already said, people have asked about this countless times in-game.

You're forgetting that item decay is 30 minutes or so, and once the houses decay you have to find those houses and take everything you want within 30 minutes or you can kiss it all bye bye. Not a very good scavenger hunt to me.

Since the house system gradually works in stages you can see which houses are decaying and which aren't by clicking the sign. If there is a location or item people want, they will camp the house for a few hours when it hits its final stage, I've seen it many times.

Will this house decay also apply to statics or only classic and custom houses? And if this also applies to statics (I sure as hell hope so) where they can be repurchased, how do we have the chance to take the items from them?

Yeah there is a very high probability that it would also work for statics. The main reason being statics are set up as a normal custom house, but staff define the staff lot coords, so we would have to go out of our way to change that so it wouldn't effect statics which wouldn't be fair anyway. Plus preferred statics get taken and the owners might not ever plan on coming back, that should not mean nobody can ever own it.