Official Housing Mechanic Discussion Thread

If I start placing houses around these player towns with the l33t deco and stables, and then start moving fellow thieves in, would that constitute stealing an entire town?

You're gonna have to beat me to it.

Hello, so to be completely honest I really was trolling with that OUF comment for the lols. I mean so many people getting defensive who could resist? Chris even looked up my accounts to verify that. If it really is a good thing for the server I have no problem with the way things are, but as a new player to the server it is concerning to see so many empty houses. The people that I play with feel the same way. I never said that all houses are empty (maybe someone else did?) but I have seen enough to actually want to post in the forums about it. When I was on my miner "crapenter" a GM teleported to me for some reason (maybe to see if I was afk resource gathering?) and he asked me if I had any questions... never mentioning my name* haha. I asked about the empty houses and he said that things were going to change. Maybe I misinterpreted what he meant due to the fact that I am unfamiliar with the server. I am sure we could easily get more houses from the empty plots, or purchase another one from someone for a low price, but that is not the issue. The issue is myself and my friends have never seen so many empty houses and we are unsure of what it means. Is the server dying? Full of people with multiple accounts? How spread out are people? In looking through the old posts on the subject you just see people getting heated over the topic and you don't really get a clear answer as to why it is 1 house per character, if this is a problem or not, and if anything is going to change. I assume the current housing situation is a bad thing because of my perspective as a new player and a GM said things were going to change. I am glad Chris is going to look at some of the server stats to get to the bottom of this rather than listen to people argue in the forums.

You can call me a lazy noob looking for a handout, a troll (I am to some degree haha), a player from UOF, or whatever. That doesn't address my question. All I wanted to know was if things were going to change or not hahaha.

* I will accept my name change punishment for forum trolling/having names deemed inappropriate by Chris.

Also what is the deal with the 8 companion slots?! hahahhahaha

I just placed a tower and saw countless spots for villas. There's also very few actual empty large homes that I saw. The vast majority of Towers or larger, had decoration and apparently were in use. I'm not sure where you were running around, but most of the empties I saw were blockers around large homes seemingly preventing neighbors. Anyway, nice troll, good luck in your search for a house. As for the control slots, this isn't the thread for discourse about that. Find an existing thread (there are plenty on that topic) or make another.

For some reason I think the biggest thing is everyone wants large keeps/fortresses for the courtyard aspect. Thats a big draw towards them and players seeing these keeps and forts sitting unused and empty might drive them to ask questions. Maybe the best thing to do is make it so a friend can refresh a house for a month but if the owner is gone 1 month+ the friend can no longer refresh.

I recently let my Lkeep drop and have been living out of a villa and its fine but I do miss the courtyard aspect but in terms of medium or small houses there are quite a few spots still available on the server I think people just secretly strive for those courtyard houses and due to the fact the space for them is now at a premium many people are in an uproar. Another possibility to help with this is like what Jack said, maybe take the large patio house and instead of having that stone area just make it normal ground that can be recalled into. That gives players another way to work towards a courtyard like area and make the deed on the price range of just under the Lkeep so its much more expensive. I do understand the courtyards are meant to be rare and not many are private these days but many people just like the ease of recalling into another area of the house and keeping their main door locked.

Honestly I don't think much can be done with the housing situation, it seems like there will be an uproar if limits are set and theres unhappiness with no limits so maybe retooling some of the small and medium houses can help fix the problem a bit better as there are plenty of spots for those.

I would really appreciate this change. With the way best practice house security works in UO (barrels and locked downs), having a character which is not co-owned to a house makes it so that character really cannot use that house without significantly compromising the house security. I understand there are ways to abuse this by using strongboxes, but I think that can be addressed without forcing everyone to jump through this hoop. The number of people willing to abuse strongboxes pales in comparison to the number of people constantly inconvenienced by the inability to co-own house owners.

To me, it's similar to the stackable potion solution. Can it be abused? Yes, I could carry a stupid amount of potions into the field or into instanced events. But the convenience gained by the vast majority of players would trump the benefits of the few who may abuse it.

This would be a much appreciated, easy fix.

House Hoarding/Limitations

To be honest, I don't believe house hoarding is much of a problem on the server, but I would like to see some system which increases the costs to players who want to hold many large houses. If it were up to me, I would have an automated lease-system for houses in designated areas (there are probably about 20 such houses, e.g., houses immediately next to banks) which would have a bidding process for "ownership" and the gold would be deleted from the game. After a period of time, there would be another bidding process to determine who wants it the most. This discourages people from letting those houses sit empty or those people who use it for essentially nothing while at the same time allowing it if they're willing to pay.

The server would both look and be healthier if people who rarely play or use such houses lost out to it. Allowing the interests of players who log in every couple weeks but essentially never play (or worse, allowing their friends to refresh indefinitely) to outweigh those who are currently playing is a great way to run off newer players on a server which is almost 3 1/2 years old.

Smaller House Design Diversity

I think a big reason players want the larger houses is due to house security and courtyards. Some small changes could be made to existing designs to make most of these players satisfied with smaller houses (I would probably get out of a fort altogether if these were available). For instance, you could make the first room on the bottom floor of a tower be open and mark-able, but blocked off from the outside with a small wall or fence. This way, you could recall into it and drop stuff off but could also be seen from the outside. This would make larger house courtyards still better, but give a much appreciated option to players who want the added security of a blanked

tl;dr:

• Allowing house-owners to be co-owned to other houses would be a great and easy change to improve house ownership.
• House hoarding isn't much of a problem, although empty houses are common
• I would like to see something like a house tax based on location/size or another mechanic like leasing for highly desirable houses
• Design changes to bring court-yardish areas to smaller designs.

Everyone is carefully tiptoeing around the obvious issue here - it's the IDOC guild.
There's a whole economy around it. Just look at the trade forum. It's the same people selling overpriced houses to the same people who have suspiciously large hordes of gold.
It's a snake that eats its own tail, and it inflates housing prices and encourages people hoarding homes. This hurts the little guy, which I assume is the reason for this topic.

I also think that change is very unlikely, because many of the players involved in the idoc group have very influential voices and they will scream bloody murder about anything that threatens the bottom line.

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I dont think house spots in general are the problem at all. Ask anyone in our group, I carry around a house deed for almost ANY size house (Tower and Below) and I randomly drop houses all over the map. I persoanlly have seen probably 10 Large tower spots today alone, but they are out in BFE...its the locations that are important.

I want to be able to access the bank from my front porch! Is that too much to ask!?!?

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I literally went out the last few days to find an unplaced tower spot and could not find one, so I am 100% positive every one of you talking about all these tower spots is absolutely full of shit. Tell enough lies and people will believe you, unfortunately I am not believing you yet.

Blaise just placed one. Are you calling him a liar?

People can say anything basically, I run the world constantly looking at what is available where, its just something I do out of complete boredom.

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You have to have special forum permission to view that image I believe.

I just went and looked at exactly where you are talking about and a tower does not place, which is exactly my point I actually test every spot I dont just run by and go "oh tower spot"

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