I think there should be a 1 house per account limit seeing as how everything is so locked down. 10 people with 15 houses - 150 spots and that leads to the massive amounts of housing in good spots being unused, hoarded, or speculated to the loss of new players. I think the only way that it could be implemented though, is to grandfather in the houses as they are (like OSI back in era) and any new placed houses would condemn the old ones, or any that were traded or fell would lose the grandfathered status.
I agree that it is quite annoying to see the majority of great spots taken with unused houses. Two houses per account would be a little better imo. Although there are still tons of places to place any house up to tower size and existing houses drop/idoc all the time if you keep an eye out. I doubt there will ever be any changes to the 5 houses per acct rule.
I agree with reducing the overall housing availability. As a roleplayer, it can help in building player towns but you are right about massive unused properties.
2 houses per account.. I can live with that No grandfathering... that just keeps current houses locked up when they are actually going unused. Forces folks to make the hard decision on what is really valuable to them. Also frees up space for new folks coming in. Encourages guilding and social aspects. Get to know your neighbors. Forming a town.. should be more than you and your 14 alts, unless its that important that you spend your 6 house slots on one area.
If you were going to further limit it, then keeping it at two or three would make a lot of people's lives easier. When you move houses you need to be able to keep the old one up for a few hours or days while you haul stuff around. It's pretty common to desire owning multiple houses .... a guild house and a personal house, or a main castle and a secret cottage in the jungle, or a personal home and a public vendor space. I don't know if people should HAVE to multi-account to do that. And having some form of temporary grandfathering or rolling it out slowly would only be fair to the people who have five houses filled with junk or who might be taking a short break from actively playing. For the record I only have 1 so I've got nothing to protect.
I agree - no good reason that I can think of that people should have the ability to have 15 houses here. Or more if their "spouse" plays and they get another 15.
I can live with 2 houses / account. I actually own 6 smaller houses all over my accounts. Better would be a "follower"-like system. So a small one counts as 1 slot, two-story-villa or log cabin as 2 slots, tower as 4 slots and everything above a tower as 5 slots. This would lead to that no single person could own more than 3 towers/castles/whatever
Full disclosure: I'm still relatively new here and don't have any houses. I think 2 per account is sufficient. Existing players with more than 2 per account should get the full amount of the deed refunded (plus perhaps a 10% bonus for the inconvenience). IMHO the biggest draw for a UO shard is the availability of housing. I realize there's still plenty of room here (from what I've been told), but I'm struggling to figure out why someone would need more than 6 houses. Excessive amounts of housing just encourages hoarding, which means more work for the server.
