House Fallings Become Events...

[Zyon Rockler]

I am not sure if this is technically possible. I'm sure the tools are there but i'm not sure if they can be configured to do this.

First create a house for all house plot sizes, design the house to include furniture, not over done, old style UO. Place some chests and cabinets and allow for some loot to be placed, either draw from another system or place things like an SoS or a treasure chest or a lock pick box that you would find in a dungeon.

Then, allow the system to search the shard and as it finds available spaces for the largest house possible, have it place a house and immediately start the timer of decay.

So, now the system places houses that begin to decay. This would be visible on the sign. There could be a dev name, for example: Cal's House. So, maybe he could personally design a house, throw in some furnishings and these things would start popping up all over.

So, this would do 2 things. It would keep the shard filled with homes, it would keep them kind of random and it would give people an opportunity to find a place where they could find a home.

Right before these houses fall, they could begin to spawn different mini champs that would begin right before the house fell and some time after.

Every now and then the house could have a special item inside that would make it worth going to these events besides the few pieces of furniture and unique chests.

 

[claudia-fjp]

Or just do real ones. Seriously though they can't even get the current housing system to work correctly. Making a new fake one isn't a good idea.

 

[Theo_GL]

Or just do real ones. Seriously though they can't even get the current housing system to work correctly. Making a new fake one isn't a good idea.

QFT.

Worst....idea.....ever....

If anything existing house decays should vanish or should be put up for 'auction'. Highest bid wins house and all contents like magencia plots. There is your gold sink right there. Its a page out of storage wars.

 

[maximusss]

If anything existing house decays should vanish or should be put up for 'auction'.

This.

 

[THP]

But Idocs are ''player events already....and bloody good ones at that!!!...stop whinging.....go find em and reap the rewards from them.

 

[Shelleybean]

I like the idea. I can't do idocs because of my work schedule so this would be neat.

 

[Cetric]

horrible idea

 

[Lady Storm]

I have always said house's that are past the 90days +5days for owner claiming (due to miscalc of months days, which happens alot) Then the house becomes OSI. A Stone apears on steps and bidding should begin for 2weeks time fraim. Highest bidder wins the place lock stock and barrel. Now this is "pig in a poke" you get whats in there sight unseen.
It is a great gold sink on such shards like Atlantic...where housing is at its premimum, but dont over look the other shard gems that could be gotten this way on smaller production shard populations. This would make for no more missed house falls, and to take possession an account must be clear to take it..... another $ for the game. Btw... if the owner shows up past the 95 days he too must bid on his house and cant access the contents till its over if he or she wins.

 

[Tina Small]

I've always thought the whole concept of the remaining players in the game having a chance to get your stuff for free after you quit is bad for the health of the game. It's always seemed to me that it provides way too much incentive for players to be rude or obnoxious to their fellow players in an attempt to get them to abruptly quit playing and let their house and contents fall by the wayside. It has never seemed to me as if IDOCs really do much to encourage people who've quit to actually come back and try to play again. I realize that in some rare cases, friends of the person who quit might get the items and give them to a person who returns or sometimes "shard rares" end up in someone's museum; but it seems as if in most cases, the people who go to IDOCs keep the rare stuff and sell everything else if possible primarily to benefit only themselves.

What I'd much rather see happen is that after 90 days of nonpayment, your house disappears and the space it used becomes available for placement (assuming, of course, the house wasn't placed in an area that currently doesn't support housing). Information about the contents of the account's primary house (i.e., anything in the house other than what might be in a previously loaded and still-unemptied "special moving crate" explained below and any vendor contents that were still available via the house sign) and which shard it was on is recorded and archived by EA. No information is retained for the contents of grandfathered houses (i.e., the house and its contents just poof 90 days after the account becomes inactive).

If a primary house has vendors with unexpired contracts on it 90 days after the account becomes inactive, the house would disappear and the content information would be archived by EA after the last vendor contract expires. (Grandfathered houses with unexpired vendor contracts after the account has been inactive for 90 days would just simply disappear, along with their contents, after the last vendor contract expires.)

If the player reactivates the account in the future, they would have the option to pay EA a nominal fee (maybe $0.50 USD up to $1.00 USD) for each month since the account was last closed to have EA retrieve the primary house contents information and load it as actual items in a "special moving crate" accessible from inside a house placed by the account on the same shard where the primary house last stood. For an additional fee of $25 (or whatever the current cost of a transfer token is), the primary house contents information (if not already retrieved) could instead be loaded into the "special moving crate" of a house placed by the account on a different shard from where the last primary house stood, except that you couldn't use this method to move house contents to or from the Siege Perilous or Mugen shards. There would be no time limit on this ability to have EA retrieve the archived house contents information. However, each time your account becomes inactive, the archival process for house content information would overwrite (i.e., replace) any unretrieved information that was archived the last time your account became inactive and the information retrieval fee would be calculated from the date house content information was last archived. If an account had no house on it at the 90 day mark after becoming inactive, any unretrieved information from a previous inactivation would be maintained until it was actually retrieved into a "special moving crate."

If the loading of this "special moving crate" causes the house storage limits to be exceeded, you would not be able to unload items from the special moving crate until you bring the total house storage (i.e., all locked down/secured items, plus regular moving crate contents, and special moving crate contents) to or below the house storage limit.

There would, of course, have to be an official date to start this new way of handling house decay and the ability to retrieve your archived house contents information would only apply if the account became inactive after that date.

I would really rather see something like this in place to encourage people to come back to the game and, if they are willing to pay a little extra to EA, be in the same place possession-wise as they were when they quit. I know it would eliminate many IDOCs, but it would not eliminate IDOCs that occur because someone places a new house or messes up house grandfathering and doesn't demolish their previous house or a once-grandfathered house before it decays. It also wouldn't eliminate the ability for someone to just drop a house and let its contents fall where they may.

 

[claudia-fjp]

It would also eliminate you ever being able to buy anything you want. Where do you think the best (only) stocked vendors get their goods? Does 100 mil for Ethys and Heritage tokens sound like a good idea?

As for IDOC hunters being rude or obnoxious to people trying to get them to quit, that's just ridiculous. With the things EA does we don't have to put forth the effort, too many people quit anyway.

 

[Fayled Dhreams]

I've always thought ...

nice ... but *grins&winks*
howabout:
get out of line
lose your place
want to re-join?
get in line again.

No resets/pausing/game save, no place holders, no "buying" a better begining(is it? a "begining"?)

"The fun" is in the journey ... yes?

Just saying
Your memories and skills are the ONLY things that >are not lost< when (forwhatever reason) you remove yourself from "the game".
*shrugs*

I would suggest an "improvement" to your "proposed system"
PRE PAY for the mothball/storage of some survival/heirloom >items<
contract runs out (forwhatever reason) ... *blip!*
get out of line
lose your place
want to re-join?
get in line again.

IF I could only go back with what I know now ...
hmmmmm ... cantcha?


*grins&winks*

 

[Tina Small]

It would also eliminate you ever being able to buy anything you want. Where do you think the best (only) stocked vendors get their goods? Does 100 mil for Ethys and Heritage tokens sound like a good idea?

Ummm...well, that's another pet peeve I have about IDOCs. I've never been to an IDOC in the time I've played and think the game would be a lot better off without them. Pretty tired of the "what's yours is mine if I can only figure out how to finagle it out of your possession" attitude that's so prevalent in UO. Always feel like telling the people who got rich from IDOCs to just go out and earn their gold honestly rather than acquire it "fortuitously" because someone else was no longer able to play or grew tired of the game. Just seems like a really ghoulish type of behavior for EA to intentionally foster. Always makes me question the motivations behind some known IDOCers complaining about the dearth of players. Is it because IDOCs have dried up and so has their revenue source (i.e., they're lonely vultures) or do they actually care about the health of the game and want people to come back and stay?

I don't have that much gold in the game to run around buying ethies or heritage tokens. I use my own vet rewards or once in a blue moon someone gives me a heritage token. Lord knows I sure gave away a lot of my own heritage tokens (ones that I got, by the way, just by putting in my time and logging in to receive them in a gift box) to other players that I wanted to help. Didn't run around secretly hoping some neighbor would quit and I could raid their stuff to make myself rich. Just doesn't feel right to me.

So stuff poofs if there are no more IDOCs. Maybe the remaining players who profess to care so much about the game and their fellow players might try a bit harder to keep people around and get them to sell their goods themselves. In the long run, wouldn't that be far better for the game than seeing it continue to dwindle and ultimately end up being a game of vultures and ghouls who got fat off stuff they did very little to earn?

 

[Zyon Rockler]

I think there all wonderful ideas we should consider and keep in mind the points or their negative affects. Having houses turn into auctions could be done through a stage of time, making them completely disappear, i'm not really sure of. I understand why but it seems extreme.

There are some things in the game that should not disappear and some of those things are in peoples houses. That's why I've always liked the system the way it is.

As far as paying for storage to maintain for what you've worked for in the game at a lower price and even the exact fashion is a good idea.

We should maintain that after a certain period of time passes, the space becomes available if it is not being paid for.

Alot of what I was trying to say or do was first, have the system have all built homes, so no more slabs. The next thing was to have the system make sure there were no empty spaces and finally give people something to do other than the normal IDOCS.

Also, if a player placed, they would have some starter furniture and would know what type of house they could place there and then customize.

I was thinking, using the housing system as far as searching for a place and the choosing of the home but it could be broken into a spawn type, so, it would not be like a real house but it would hold the place of a real house and would look like a real house.

It will probably take me some time to think more about auctions and how to protect player's interests but I think they could all work together.

 

[Bobar]

Even to suggest houses all over the place falling at random fills me with trepidation. Bearing in mind the amount of bugs we get with the introduction of anything this must stand at the top of the worry list.

How long would it be before the first player houses started accidently decaying because of a bug?. I feel there would inevitably be something go wrong and it would probably be irrevocable too. We would then get the usual 'Sorry but we cant help scenario'.

Far from keeping players within the game it would likely be a reason to lose a lot more.

Idocs have always been a part of UO and as far as I am concerned it aint broke so lets not fix it.

 

[Elric_Soban]

IDOCs are proof that people are mindless vultures who flock to as much free crap as they can. Why do we need to encourage the behaviour?

 

[Fayled Dhreams]

Ummm...well, that's another pet peeve I have about IDOCs. I've never been to an IDOC in the time I've played and think the game would be a lot better off without them.

Wait! WHAT!?!?!?
tina tina tina ... shame on you

An Elder >should know better< .(period)

Tsk!
I've not seen much of the IDOCers >here< of late
BUT
They >the players< created quite the game within the game ...
that alone should earn them high praise and respect.
From their comments and guidance
quite a few GOOD changes were implemented FOR the game
Barrel blocking, resize timers,
at their CORE was an >> anti-scripter ethos

Tsk!
TSK! I say ... MEH!

 

[THP]

But Idocs are ''player events already....and bloody good ones at that!!!...stop whinging.....go find em and reap the rewards from them.

PRETTY MUCH BUMP!!!!

 

[Zyon Rockler]

Well, I've probably placed about 15 homes and I've been to alot of IDOCS. I remember the first IDOC. My brother and me stayed up all night long. We were waiting for a house in Yew to drop. People were hiding and waiting and then sometime in the morning the PKs came, then everyone started dieing and sometime in the night the house fell and was placed.

I remember we didn't have a home so we set up a boat aside of the Abbey. So, we were ready to loot and my brother really wanted to place but I wasn't really interested in a house for some reason. Then the server dropped and my brother and me talked on ICQ and I told him we should wait to see if it saved and here when we went back in, the house was still there.

But one of the guys who was originally hiding with us got to place. It fell about 20 minutes after the server came up. Even then, I would think to myself, what I should do and one of the plans I decided on, was to take the runebooks and any keys I could find.

Sure enough in one of the runebooks was runes for House 1, House 2 and House 3. We got so much loot that it didn't even fit in the hold of the boat. We had boxes stacked up higher than we were on the deck. 2 of the houses had dropped but there was 1 on Ice Island.

We waited for 2 days as the house slowly decayed and only 1 other person came. As we stood inside the house to fall around us, the guy said he had to go to the bathroom and right at that second the house fell and we were able to place. That's how I got my first small house on Ice Island. My brother moved his boat aside of our house on the icy waters.

As we sat inside this small, 4 x 4 we thought about how much fun we already had and were only in the game for a short time.

 

[claudia-fjp]

Ummm...well, that's another pet peeve I have about IDOCs. I've never been to an IDOC in the time I've played and think the game would be a lot better off without them. Pretty tired of the "what's yours is mine if I can only figure out how to finagle it out of your possession" attitude that's so prevalent in UO. Always feel like telling the people who got rich from IDOCs to just go out and earn their gold honestly rather than acquire it "fortuitously" because someone else was no longer able to play or grew tired of the game. Just seems like a really ghoulish type of behavior for EA to intentionally foster. Always makes me question the motivations behind some known IDOCers complaining about the dearth of players. Is it because IDOCs have dried up and so has their revenue source (i.e., they're lonely vultures) or do they actually care about the health of the game and want people to come back and stay?

I don't have that much gold in the game to run around buying ethies or heritage tokens. I use my own vet rewards or once in a blue moon someone gives me a heritage token. Lord knows I sure gave away a lot of my own heritage tokens (ones that I got, by the way, just by putting in my time and logging in to receive them in a gift box) to other players that I wanted to help. Didn't run around secretly hoping some neighbor would quit and I could raid their stuff to make myself rich. Just doesn't feel right to me.

So stuff poofs if there are no more IDOCs. Maybe the remaining players who profess to care so much about the game and their fellow players might try a bit harder to keep people around and get them to sell their goods themselves. In the long run, wouldn't that be far better for the game than seeing it continue to dwindle and ultimately end up being a game of vultures and ghouls who got fat off stuff they did very little to earn?

You sure are very opinionated about something you've never participated in that doesn't negatively effect you in any way. If you think the game would be better off then you are wrong, prices of many many things would skyrocket due to unavailability. As for "what's yours is mine if I can only figure out how to finagle it out of your possession" it applies to IDOCers in no way since we have no interaction whatsoever with the people who's houses we camp. They already quit! Thank IRL, thank EA, whatever, IDOCers don't MAKE IDOCS. We no more try to get people to quit than a garbage man tries to get you to produce more trash.

IDOCing is actually quite a bit of work. It takes time to find them, late nights to get a time, and early mornings for when they fall. Not everyone wants to put so much time and effort into it. As for "ghoulish" try to remember most of this game is geared toward KILLING. Recycling items is far less ghoulish.

There have always been plenty of IDOCs and always will be until they shut the game down. What we hate is the fact so many have quit the game. No one knows more about population of servers over the years than your local IDOC hunter. If everyone quits UO IDOCers have no one to sell houses or items to! I preferred it when I could sell 18x18s for 10mil when the game was packed over a barren landscape with stretches bigger than castles empty.

Apparently you don't ever buy anything. Well most people do. No one with a 13 year vet account wants to use a pick on a commodity deed box. As for heritage tokens its nice you prefer handouts. However not everyone does and some people don't have any. Many things in UO have a finite supply thats why the price of things creep up over time.

I'm generally well liked on my server, I run a vendor house, price my stuff on the cheap side and a lot of the active players shop there. So before you badmouth people and what they do I suggest you do it at least once yourself, its hard to have a pet peeve about something you've never experienced. Run around your server and look at every house sign in Fel, Tram, Malas, and Tokuno. Then camp those houses you find decaying. Just 1 week worth. Then you'll realize how many are empty, get refreshed, and how 90% of the items at IDOCs are worthless junk that gets deleted or left to decay. After that you'll have an idea of the time and effort, and maybe just maybe you'll find an item that someone has been looking for and unable to find and you can give or sell it to them.

 

[twoburntfouryou]

So many idoc haters here I love idocs and yes 98% is just junk. But the other 2% can be sweet. I have no clue why people quit playing but if they really cared about the people they knew in UO land they would of gave anything of value to them before they quit. Its part of the game and people who go to idocs are no where near "mindless vultures".

 

[Zyon Rockler]

We've all been down different paths and have seen different things and been affected differently. It's hard to see a friend leave the game and even harder to see their house fall and people gather up their things without a thought of whose it might of been or who wore this hat, for example.

It's even harder to change the options that are left. Something like this would take alot more thought to create a parallel that would not cause a replacement of or change to be constant. So, I guess for now we have to accept things and just keep in mind that there are negative affects to just about everything we do.

As far as it being buggy or destroying the server, there's one thing I could see happening, when the test server comes up after it's been cleaned, this system would start placing houses and probably cause the server to crash. I always thought that other things would also affect housing, like anything that you change for example to the map or the tile sets, I would think you're going to run into serious bugs. I'd like to see the housing system redone anyhow.

Who knows, maybe there's something right now in the code just waiting to be found. Besides you would think something like that could stay on test center for a year but I guess that's not the way things work.

 

[Bethany_lg]

It does always surprise me that IDOCers have such a bad reputation. I do them as often as I can, which isn't very often because of my work schedule. I've spent hours chatting with and getting to know many people. I've made some of my best friendships in game over a cup of coffee and a decaying house.

Finding houses does take time and effort and most of them are empty or full of worthless items. And fel houses add another level of challenge and excitement and fun.

I have made lots of gold through the years by selling IDOC loot and I have also given away lots of it to my friends, and to new and returning players. House falls are another part of this wonderfully addictive game that I enjoy. Not as a vulture but as a treasure hunter of a different source.