Request to Review with Proposed Solution - Housing Auto-Demolition
Problem:
On quiet servers or DCs like Materia, there are a lot of empty plots. When i check out a design in the HGXIV housing community discord, there are only a few posts on Materia in the last year, so i go back 2 years worth and pick out 7-8 designs. When i get to the districts, more than half of these are now empty and unowned. I love going on day trips to look at housing designs when I can and leaving messages in guestbooks for the effort that is spent!
I would kindly ask SE to review this and make districts look more populated!
Proposed Solution:
Please note: this proposal for change ONLY affects the Auto-demolition section of the Housing system (player being inactive), ie. Reliquinshing and Transfer Rules stay the same.
My proposed solution would be to replace auto-demolition with AUTO OPEN HOUSE, meaning after 45 days, the house is open to the public for bidding, design still intact until the hammer drops and furniture goes to Resident Caretaker with usual rules to reclaim furniture. There can be a new indicator for Open House.
Simple Version: Instead of automatic demolition, house is open for bidding. When there is new owner, house is demolished as usual, furniture to caretaker and new owner owns a flat piece of land. If plot has no demand at all, house still stays up, but has an Open House indicator.
Only grey area up for question is the rules within the bidding period. Here are the options i thought of:
1) the house can be property of SE again once a bid is made, but the design can stay up until there is a new owner and then furniture is sent to caretaker after there is a new owner (meaning the owner has loses property once a bid is made)or
2) the house is only lost when the hammer drops and there is a new owner. In doing so, the owner can have a chance to reclaim their house during the bidding period, which stops the Auto-Open House and essentially, takes the house "off the market" again.
Advantages:
1) Prevents an active owner seeing house demolished while online - they can see a notification that the house is now an OPEN HOUSE and stop it by entering the house
2) After 45 days, if the demand is there and the owner is inactive, anyone can bid. This will provide a handover, instead of just a dead unowned plot
3) It would be more aligned with IRL as houses aren't auto-demolished. They go as Open House on the market or they are empty plots, owned or unowned.
4) an overall improvement to the housing system for all players and servers
5) It can apply to all servers. If the servers are full then owners will still do their thing and not let it go to 45 days lapse. That wont change.
Email alerts as usual with wording changed and after 45 days the email should alert the owner it's now an OPEN HOUSE.
My thoughts/perspective: I see this proposal as:
1) honouring house designs until the owner no longer upkeeps and house becomes "abandoned" and allows buyers to takeover and
2) it still honours loyal subscribers to the game without them sadly losing the house by a simple mistake and only offers the "risk of losing" their house rather than auto-demo. So it still offers them a chance to reclaim before someone might come along and bid. On busy servers, they would risk losing their house pretty much immediately. However on quiet servers, auto-open house would make them look busier and might make people want to buy in.
If you see any disadvantages, please also list below and we can discuss. If we can have islands, isn't this a nice positive small housing change that adds quality of life to the game?
What do you guys think?