When a house is abandoned

[hdepaula]

When the patch 2.1 was released they said that "from patch 2.2 onward, a free company will automatically relinquish its land if its estate is unused for a prolonged period of time". That was when housing was only available for FCs. It's funny 'cause its kind of like a foreclosure but intead of "we are taking your house because youre not paying for it" its "we are taking your house because youre not using it" lol anyways, so here are my questions: How long does a house have to be left alone for them to take it from you? When they say "unused" does that mean me not paying and playing or me paying and playing but I never use my house 'cause I use the Inn? Do you know a FC or a player whose house got taken away from them for abandoning the house? I dont want them to take my house from me!

[Nyalia]

Of course, the real question here is, does a Personal House (which is very expensive!) vanish with no compensation if the player goes offline for 35 days? If so, I'll never be able to own a house, because chances are high that at some point, I'll go on vacation or something, or get really busy, and not log in for 35 days, and I'll lose the house that took months to save up for.

I can imagine that Personal Housing would be subject to the 35 day thing, because otherwise, all the real-estate will eventually be used up by people who don't even subscribe anymore. But, that really stinks! I don't want my house taken away from me after I went through all that trouble to get it, even if I stop playing for a few months. If Personal Houses are also subject to the 35 day thing, can we please have some kind of Personal Housing that is sufficiently instanced such that keeping the house around is not taking up real-estate space?

If there were instanced housing and server space was a real issue, SE could do something like, if you're offline for 35 days, all of your furniture is sent to the Housing Caretaker and your house is reverted back to being completely bare, but it would still know you had the instanced house. This would only take a tiny bit of server space since the positions and orientations of all of the objects in the house wouldn't have to be saved.

C'mon, no predatory lending, SE! Let us keep the houses we paid for!

[Kaeda_Valentyne]

It will get taken from you if you do not enter your house in 35 days.
So you will have to enter your house at least once every 34 days.

[arctic]

It's a mechanic that as far as I know was never implemented. Which is really disappointing because on my server in Ward 1 Mist there are a couple of abandoned houses. From what I understand, if your house was abandoned all your stuff would get mailed to you or some NPC would hold your junk for when you logged back in, if ever.

People can complain about how its something they paid for in game and that content shouldn't be taken away because every hypothetical of why you may not play and come back. Really though, housing is such a pain on some servers right now because of the limited space. A system like this should be implement for those who are actually take advantage of it.

[Jeykama]

Like arctic said, the auto-demolish feature was postponed for the known future.

With this housing design it needs to happen though. Mail the homeowner a coupon good for another house of equal or lesser value and shove their things onto the salvager for all I care to shut up the naysayers, but I'm tired of unused homes in my neighborhood ward.

[NyneAlexander]

there is a small plot in my FC's ward that has been sitting unused since that fc bought it. Its been well over 2 months. I actually tried to contact the FC leader to try and purchase it from him, but apparently he quit and only 2 members of the FC ever log on anymore.

It sucks, because it would be the perfect personal house for me. Right up the street from my FC house! I could stay in the same neighborhood!

[FJerome]

C'mon, no predatory lending, SE! Let us keep the houses we paid for!

Even in the original outcry against this most people who thought 35 days was ridiculous did agree it was pretty reasonable that you couldn't keep your house forever without ever using it, the question was really how long a "reasonable" time-period would be before it's declared abandoned.

In most cases 90 or 120 days would probably be okay, if you weren't coming back for the major patches you probably weren't that interested in the game anyway, but anything under a year was potentially going to hit rare but sensitive cases like people on military deployment.

[Nicobo]

IMO, there should be a rule to release resource, but, first of all, release resource from ppl not paying for the sub!

For example, the character name someone want to use was taken by playerX who no sub over 2 months,
why not delete him and let others use his name? Upon the deletion, all associated properties can be released as well.

When playerX come back, just let him restore the character and pick another name, collect his item from the lost npc.

When this rule is not in place, howcome it can remove something from players who keep paying the sub.

[Riepah]

Considering the outrageous prices they charge for houses, taking them away from someone who's been taking a break from the game for a while is sure to guarantee they'll never return. SE chose to implement housing in the way they did, so it's on them to provide enough server space to let people keep their houses for an extended period of time, no matter if they're using them or paying a subscription.

[Nicobo]

It's a mechanic that as far as I know was never implemented. Which is really disappointing because on my server in Ward 1 Mist there are a couple of abandoned houses. From what I understand, if your house was abandoned all your stuff would get mailed to you or some NPC would hold your junk for when you logged back in, if ever. ....

To obtain your desired plot of land at Ward1 Mist in your server,
why not support deleting characters not logon for n-days,
as by character deletion, that FC will be disbanded and you can obtain that house in n-days.

//quote 2.38 patch note
In the event that the deletion of characters results in a free company losing all its members, that company will now be automatically disbanded and its estate deeds rendered void.
//end quote