Depressing Housing Situation

Normally I am fairly subjective on posts like this however this post is clearly disingenuous. Statements such as "All the houses on the server are empty" are incorrect. Anyone who plays here will realize that is not the case. However our world is a finite place. There is only so much room for houses, which creates an economy all of itself.

The discussion comes down to a few points in most cases.

1. There is not enough room for me to have the house that I want without having to deal with other players or the trade forums.
2. There are two many empty houses on the server.
3. The IDOC'ers are took good and I cannot get the house decay I wanted easily.​

And to be clear the mechanics on Renaissance serve some important functions.

1. Giving players goals in which to work towards.
2. Helping the economy. (the value of placed houses is around 600,000,000 gold).
3. Allowing enterprising players to build communities ingame.
4. Houses decay in 15 days, and given some of the high profile decays lately that is working quite well. In the last 60 days a variety of high profile properties have new owners.
5. Renaissance has the afk system preventing the housing system from being gamed. You cannot place houses unattended, and you cannot single click house signs while not at the computer.
​

Now to address the originator of this thread.

There is a ton of room available on the server for Villa's, log cabins, sandstones, small houses. If anyone has been watching the recent twitch stream of a few of our players you can see how players who start here casually, with a little work, are able to obtain houses that they like, and suit their needs. Can everyone have a fortress in their first 30 days? Of course not, some houses will take a great deal of work, planning, land acquisition or effort to acquire the gold to purchase one.

Obviously as the server grows more attention will have to be paid to players who intentionally hoard houses simply to damage the economy or skirt the rules in place.

Also talking positively about a server that sells islands for $1000-$2000 or sells raffle tickets to win a red castle that was placed by the staff is a clear distortion of the facts. Renaissance is and will always be a server where your possessions and accomplishments are earned. We are extremely proud of our player retention, player lifespan, and appeal of the Renaissance server when compared to alternatives. People play here because they choose to, not because they feel stuck on a server they invested 100-500$ in items or raffle tickets.

Since I wanted to see the history of this player to get an idea of the validity of their complaint. A variety of things were made clear.

The accounts are all 4-5 days old
Here is a selection of this players character names.
"Plop In Yo Mouth", "The Racist", "Skank Skank", and "Crapenter".
While normally I would not mention this information about a player, to continue playing on Renaissance these names will have to be changed.
A brief search of the account was unable to find a character with a house deed, or enough money to buy a house.​

The staff on Renaissance are always willing to discuss issues related to the health and enjoyment of the server. However this is not the way to go about it.

I am going to lock this thread as any further discussion on this issue should be in the Era Discussion subforum. I will be more than happy to dig through the servers raw data to get the statistics on house decay, placed houses per account, and player lifespan to show the true picture of housing on Renaissance in a constructive manner. Down the road we will be implementing more clear account bindings per household along with some other changes to make sure the system is not gamed with additional accounts.

Footnote: In regards to 1 house per account. Initially the change was made to address overcrowding on the OSI servers and was eventually made more strict with the advent of custom housing. Ironically OSI had to change their policy down the road and allow anyone who paid for an account to be exempted from house decay. I've spent 4 years studying the behavioral habits of UO players and the idea of 1 house per account sounds great on paper but in application the results would not be what players expect. Keep in mind that OSI also had profit in mind when making the change. If people wanted more houses, they had to pay $15 a month for each additional house.

House prices would be higher than they are now, desirable houses would be just as hard to come by, and there would now be a much greater incentive to cheat the account limits to obtain more than the allowed amount of houses. The perception that everything is "fair" because you can only have 1 house would not magically appear. New players will still make posts on the forums 3 days after they start. Every step OSI took to "fix" the housing issues simply made it worse. Again I am more than willing to discuss this at length in Era Discussion.