Housing plots need rent. Sound horrible? Consider these facts:

[Madjames]

Rather not. I have to be away from the game sometimes for 30+ days cause of travelling/work and I worked as hard for it as you.

How about SE admits they've made an utter crap of the housing system in general (even compared to f2p of the early 2000's) and fix the damn thing already?

Then what they can do is share housing and allow people with access to refresh the house for you while you are away. This way the ONLY homes that will be taken away and given back to the population are the ones where people have actually quit and will not come back. I will also say that your gil would be reimbursed to you. The housing system is crap ONLY because they are NOT doing anything about the countless homes that are abandoned. A 30 day limit is more then reasonable.

In ultima online I would be gone from the game for 6 months +. I would still be paying every month and my best friend IRL at the time would log in, fill orders for ore and refresh my homes for me when I was away. Now, my wife logs in for me to do things for my customers and would be able to refresh a house. There is always a nice workaround.

If you CAN NOT do that, be glad SE would give all of your gil back with my system because in UO, not only would your house decay but EVERYTHING INSIDE would fall on the ground and be able to be picked up by ANYONE around. If SE allows shared housing my advise to you is maybe give the house to a real good friend that can be on once every 30 days to get use out of the house.

Ultima Online had th multiple house per account issue as well. Back in the day you could own I think it was 1 house per character.

After a year or 2, they implemented it to ONE house, Per Character, Per Server, Per Account. This opened up thousands of houses across the whole game. SE should do this as well.

[Nuinn]

-snip-

I would still vote against it. It sounds like a forced and dated Facebook game mechanic, in this day and age. I'm really not sure if I dread losing a home after X amount of days or having to log in/pay monthly sub just to have someone do it for me.

A 30 day limit is nothing. People get over-saturated with a game, they want a break, they can't play for whatever reason. Taking their home away, destroying the work they did and the time they put in for furnishing it is just terrible. Also, I don't think SE would ever (and I feel like that one should be underlined) refund us. It would just create a mess where people would lolbuy homes and then do nothing, return after a patch/expansion, suddenly have those 2-10 mil "bonus" gil (depending on server), mess with the economy and so on and so forth... + added rage all over when someone misses logging in by just one day etc.

You definitely don't want to punish players for deciding to take a break and wanting to pick up where they left. That suggestion would get thrown out the window at our brainstorming meeting so fast you wouldn't even be able to see it o___o You'd want to do the opposite. Reward them for deciding to put their trust, time and money back into your game.

The issue here is lack of housing plots. I think that's certainly the one thing everyone can agree on. Making it a time-dependent system would only temporarily "fix" this (while creating a slew of other issues). What they need to do is downscale, if they can't afford more server space for new wards. Simplify it and make it actually user friendly. Honestly, as much as I like having a neighborhood, even the Mog House of XI is starting to look better the more the time passes.