FC Housing QoL - Request: managing interactive object permissions by rank (and more!)

[Geist]

Hello everyone!

As we approach this year's Starlight, my FC leader and I were busy decorating our house (it's a medium-sized mansion in the Lavender Beds, on Ragnarok).
While working on it, we noticed that the way the game handles interactive objects such as light, food consumables and the display frames is still lagging behind in comparison to other features such as the company chest and orchestrion.

Let me explain: while guests cannot naturally interact with objects in your housing plots (but for a few obvious exceptions such as the guest book, the doors and the training dummies), there's no clear way to keep FC members from using or overusing other features.

Normally, this wouldn't be too much of a problem in a small, close-knit FC, but it goes rapidly out of hand once people and ranks start to multiply.

While you can manage orchestrion and chest access based upon roles / ranks, even with a certain degree of granularity (allowing only certain functions, or disabling them entirely), you cannot keep somebody from removing a picture you've just set in a frame, or from shutting off all the lights in the house, or eating up all the food indiscriminately.

There is currently no safe way to limit / regulate access to these things, or block even some of them, such as certain food plates being only for display and not interactive.

Gardening and flower pots are in a similar boat, so to speak, allowing only for very basic management. It works, of course: everything sorta works out of the box, but I can see trouble arising with people not taking proper turns using the patches, or removing plants because they've got something to grow, fast. In the case of pots, maybe you've just chosen that flower or plant because it looks good there...

I'm quite sure the developers might be already aware of some of these issues, and I know it's a lot of work; I'm not entirely sure how all of this ties into the older codebase from pre-ARR times. However, with a new expansion on the horizon, I'd also say it is high time to take a look at these issues and tackle them for good.

I mean, I believe there is a good "middle ground" between being able to keep members entirely out of the house (which is oddly possible even now) versus consenting to indiscriminate access.

IMHO, the most sensible approach would be allowing FC members to unlock certain features only as they mature and progress through rank, with the leadership maintaining tight control on permissions, thus granting said leadership more discretion in terms of resource management and proper housing administration (this can be especially serious with consumables and items purchased through Mogstation: imagine the costs of having them replaced at a steadfast pace).

I do hope this comes across as constructive criticism: we want our homes to be good-looking and welcoming, while keeping conflicts and petty disputes out of the window (imagine being a FC officer and having to arbitrate several instances of "You've eaten the last slice of cake! Do you know how long it took me to learn that recipe?" "You've left the lights on all over the house!" "My cabbages!", and so on).

It's also a matter of aesthetics: if something looks good, if it works as part of a design / idea for a home, please allow us to let it stick that way. Otherwise, it'd be just private homes all over, and we all want FCs to thrive, don't we?

One last request, one I've already seen posted on the forums - but also one that deserves reiterating: please give us more control over partitions, especially when it comes to decorations. We can't still apply pattern / wallpaper settings to many of them and it can be troublesome for proper house design. Set more objects with the tabletop flag so that we aren't forced to rely on quirks, it's especially egregious with certain things such as vases, certain small plants, but also with the mannequins.

Also, it'd be great if there was a way to "overwrite" windows on the inside with an apparel of choice, without having them stick through the new window: the only workaround is to cover them and then set up the replacement upon the new surface.

Thanks for your time! A merry Starlight, everyone.

[Dustytome]

We had someone join and take out/replace anything interactive on purpose awhile back. They didn't get chest access luckily as we locked that down after a previous incident. Not a super costly loss for most of it, but someone did lose a fish they paid a lot for. I don't understand why accessing these items isn't tied to housing permissions and I think we should just have a menu in the housing category that lets us adjust interactive objects (wallpaper on partitions, fish/decor in aquarium, paintings in frames, ect) while keeping them completely non-interactive outside of it. By being in that menu the permissions would be locked to those whom had access to edit housing. Maybe a permissions category for food/lights on top of that similar to the orchestreon.

[Geist]

Yes, using the Orchestrion as a reference for this system would be one of the best bets, it was one of the first ideas my FC boss and myself were discussing yesterday.
Like the company chest, it can be already handled through semi-granular permissions and once you've set them up they work without a hitch.

Otherwise, something in the vein of the furniture placing/color editing permissions, but we most definitely need some kind of standardized system to regulate access.
Putting aside the issue of willing mischief, which has to be accounted for anyway, simple mistakes just happen and having certain items (or interactive objects as a whole) locked down would prevent the house suddenly turning into a mess with missing paintings, switched plants, and so on.