Reclamation of Inactive Housing announced

[Sicno]

The only kind of thing I think this may solve is that many housing wards are ghost towns, which is sad for the active players in that neighborhood. This barely does anything to solve the housing problem though. In any case it should certainly have been a longer period.

[Reaperking386]

No. Certain people asked for this feature, namely people without homes, who just wanted to have them.

I own a medium house.

[Reaperking386]

Until the problem is fixed, it isn't fixed. Just saying "we'll do this someday" isn't getting it done. If by "adding more wards as necessary" they mean a dynamic system like what LOTRO has, then that is a solution.

But so far this "adding more wards as necessary" hasn't even come close to that solution. How long has it been the way it is now? A very long time. Making the jump from 1.8% to 2.5% is not a solution. A system needs to be implemented that is large scale to fix this problem. It needs to be a dynamic wards system like LOTRO, an instanced housing plots system like Wildstar, or even just an instanced private room system (something that ALREADY FREAKING EXISTS AND THEYD JUST HAVE TO MOVE THE FREAKING DOOR TO A PUBLIC AREA).

Adding more wards the way they have been doing (and failing at miserably I might add) is not a working solution. It just flies in the face of the problem.


Yes, I've stated three different objectively superior solutions several times in this thread. Once in this post. One in another thread. I've posted them all over. I came up with these solutions in 3 whole seconds. There's no possible way that SE could have spent any length of time and not thought of any one of these solutions (all of which have been done in other games before and proven to work). It's clear that in light of this especially, there has to be a driving purpose to intentionally withholding housing content from players.

And SE benefits from doing this. They benefit because they don't have to spend the money to fix it. They benefit because almost 100k players will be guaranteed to always be subscribed until the bitter end.

I will look into your solutions in the forums.

[kamikrazy]

I will look into your solutions in the forums.

Look no further than the post you quoted. All three of them are listed right there.

Solution 1: Dynamic ward system that guarantees that everyone will get a house, EVEN if they are evicted for inactivity (LOTRO)
Solution 2: Everyone gets a private house instance, FCs get a guaranteed instanced FC house, could even pay to upgrade this type (Wildstar)
Solution 3: Everyone gets a private room in a capital city of their choosing that is accessible from the Inn (It's already in the game, they'd literally just need to move the door to the Inn)

Three working solutions, that wasn't hard at all.

EDIT: Have to put this here because I reached the daily post limit. If someone could be so kind as to step in to keep putting down the false celebration and get people to realize that this is very bad news for us and especially for the game's overall health, that would be great.

What are you talking about? They clearly said that this system was the first step to make more plot available. They'll either add more plots to the existing cities or they'll open Ishgard.

Besides, your 1.8% thing is completly wrong since it doesn't take FC into account. I'm a FC leader and we do have a house... but according to you, we don't? Even if you are talking about individual houses you're wrong since FC and individual players share the same plots.

So not only you clearly don't know what you're talking about in the first place, but you also support wrong arguments and calculations just for the sake of arguing on something you hate for some reason. Stop it or bring actual objective facts.

1.8% is certainly a rough approximation to be sure, but it is an approximation all the same. It is nowhere near 100%, which is the only number that should be acceptable as a fully functioning solution. If housing content is not available to every player, then the solution is not good enough.

And I've stated accurate observations constantly. Nothing here is my opinion. I've never stated how I felt about anything. Are you saying that my thinking that 100% of players should have access to housing is an opinion? Then I'll gladly call that my opinion. It sounds like a pretty good opinion to me.

[Fyce]

Actually, no, this is worse than nothing. This is indicative that they have no plan or intention of fixing housing availability. If they had a plan they wouldn't have spent the manpower to implement this because it, in the long run, would have been irrelevant.

This system proves by its very existence that they have no plan or intention of fixing housing availability. If they had a plan, they wouldn't waste their time and money implementing this. They'd have just announced their plan to placate customers. This is very bad.

What are you talking about? They clearly said that this system was the first step to make more plot available. They'll either add more plots to the existing cities or they'll open Ishgard.

Besides, your 1.8% thing is completly wrong since it doesn't take FC into account. I'm a FC leader and we do have a house... but according to you, we don't? Even if you are talking about individual houses you're wrong since FC and individual players share the same plots.

So not only you clearly don't know what you're talking about in the first place, but you also support wrong arguments and calculations just for the sake of arguing on something you hate for some reason. Stop it or bring actual objective facts.

[LaylaTsarra]

This is a positive step forward. Reserving housing for those who are no longer playing the game is a bad idea. I am a bit surprised that the timer is only 45 days, I would have expected it to be more like 2 months. This in addition to adding more wards and housing areas should be helpful in fixing the housing issue. Also the idea of being able to share housing with up to 5 people will afford access to others who might not be able to afford or access housing because it's not available.

I'm curious if an owner who elects to share a private house whether or not the timer will be reset if one of the people who they are sharing that house with enter the house.

[SugarPeanut]

Wake up , people. Don't u think if they really WERE going to put in more wards any time soon they would have done so instead of just making this rule?????

[ElHeggunte]

Why implement this if they were going to add more wards "as needed" any time soon. Cuz that need has yet to be met for awhile now.

* * *

Wake up , people. Don't u think if they really WERE going to put in more wards any time soon they would have done so instead of just making this rule?????

No matter how many wards SE plans to add in the future or when they decide to add them, something needed to be done about abandoned plots.

And that is exactly my problem with this. I'm part of a very small FC of people (all of whom I know in real life). These days only me and another member are online, and sometimes I just need to take a break from the game. But I always come back. So it's just annoying that you're now going to have to pay a sub fee every month even when you want to take a break just to check up on your house...

Honestly, if at least one person can't be bothered to log in once every 45 days it makes me wonder what you even need the house for because it sounds like you aren't using it at all. If an entire FC (even a small one) fails to log in within 45 days it's incredibly unlikely that they'll be coming back.

The only thing I don't like about the system is I think the time for a personal house destruction should be longer, but otherwise this is a much needed feature that we should have had from the start.

snip

It's almost as if you don't understand that any good plan has what we like to call "steps" and this is just the first step in dealing with the run-away beast of their own making. Even if what you're saying turns out to be true and SE has completely abandoned all hope of ever salvaging this mess, having a way to free up unused plots is way overdue. They most certainly shouldn't just leave it broken regardless of what they do from here on.

[Nalien]

And SE benefits from doing this. They benefit because they don't have to spend the money to fix it. They benefit because almost 100k players will be guaranteed to always be subscribed until the bitter end.

This is still a notion I find utterly absurd... Can we actually get a show of hands for people who'll cling to their subscription just to keep their House? I don't think I've seen any... We've already had a fair few people effectively claiming the opposite, that owning a House would in no way guarantee their continued subscription should the game go south...

You seem to think SE has been scheming this whole system together to milk more money out of us (despite something like extra Retainers being far more guilty of that... Why am I the only person outraged by that?), you know what I think? I think this is just a ripple effect from A Realm Reborns launch... You know, the "catastrophic" launch where the developers were woefully unprepared for just how popular their game was... I think when they were planning Housing, they didn't think the game would be this popular... Should they have delayed Housing with that in mind? Perhaps, but that would perhaps have far reaching effects; Would we have Airships right now if they had to scrap their original Housing plan?

Like I've said, they got themselves in a sticky situation... I'm certainly not going to fault them for that though, and I'm certainly not going to act like this is the end of days... I'll admit, solutions like Private Rooms at Inns seem like simple solutions, I'm certainly fond of parroting that solution, but realistically I'll admit it's probably not that simple... Private Rooms are currently locked behind Free Company Housing, that gives them a reasonable idea of how many Rooms there would be (average FC size, number of plots, etc.), and clearly they can handle that many rooms. To add Private Rooms for absolutely everybody, they'd have to be sure the servers can not only handle absolutely everyone having one, but also handle an excess to accommodate what is apparently a growing playerbase, and clearly that isn't the case. You know what doesn't help with that? Wasting server space on plots that have long since been abandoned. Again, this is the first step. Of course they bloody benefit from this, do you think they want to waste server space on plots for players who've quit? With this Housing system, they absolutely need a system that frees up space when people quit, that is what this first step is.

[Fynlar]

all this will do is annoy people and feel like a cheap gimmick to force you to keep playing the game every month

Probably because that's exactly what it is.