What is going on with housing?

[Lord Gareth]

On a side note I'd love to see the old policy of refresh housing every couple days or your house collapses even with a fully paid account. But that's mostly because I love the thought of Gareth having to remember to run to all his houses every day! And yes I am completely evil.

You would enjoy that!!! Now you have to log in just so I can RP smack you a few times

 

[BrianFreud]

I personally don't care how many accounts he plays or doesn't play. But I do care about missing out on prime housing spots because I don't want to pay more cash and abuse the system.

Trollberg, I think this sums up your point, and your problem. You're conflating three things - 1) you don't want to pay anything more, 2) you consider something an exploit which the devs have not termed an exploit, and 3) you want some imaginary prime house spot. Regardless how often someone with a house holder account pays for that account, be it 4 or 12 times a year, or something in between, that person is actually paying for the account. You've decided not to. That's fine - but it doesn't somehow make you entitled to that mythical prime housing spot for some reason.

 

[Smoot]

The box on one of the early expansions advertised being able to have multiple houses on 1 account as one of the selling points, then they took that away from us. Now people have extra accounts for storage houses that they pay for 4 times a year. To them paying $14.22 a month year round just isn't worth it just for a house. Instead they pay around ~$4.75 a month and are ok with it. Do you honestly think if you change things again and try to force people to pay more they aren't going to just say screw it and find something better to do with their money? Doing NOTHING we are losing a lot of players as the servers slowly drain over time. Doing something that negatively effects players only speeds it up. You want to go back to not being able to kite houses for 90s? Fine, then let me own 5 houses on 1 account again, it's not like housing space is the issue it once was.

to be fair, its only 10 dollars a month if you keep an account open continuously. still double the cost, but also dont have to worry about losing your stuff and can actually play the account.

 

[claudia-fjp]

to be fair, its only 10 dollars a month if you keep an account open continuously. still double the cost, but also dont have to worry about losing your stuff and can actually play the account.

Most players only need 1 or 2 accounts worth of characters to actively play so being able to play the house holding accounts isn't really an incentive to keep them active especially when it costs you over twice as much.

 

[Smoot]

Most players only need 1 or 2 accounts worth of characters to actively play so being able to play the house holding accounts isn't really an incentive to keep them active especially when it costs you over twice as much.

agreed. they should really just change it to the sub fee, plus 5 or 6 dollars a month per extra house.

 

[BrianFreud]

agreed. they should really just change it to the sub fee, plus 5 or 6 dollars a month per extra house.

Aye; I'd suggested last year that there be some add-on to allow more houses per account. As I recall, the math worked such that, even with only a $4 monthly fee per additional house, Broadsword would make more revenue than they currently do with the 3/1 house accounts - and it'd be a more stable and dependable revenue for them, which always makes the accountants happy.

Plus, it'd make things soooooo much simpler from a security standpoint - no need to co-own all your accounts, figure out who locked down/secured what, or buy any additional mostly-unused/unneeded upgrades for the house accounts. As I argued recently, the $85 for those upgrades simply doesn't make sense for such accounts, when the only benefits *used* by them are extra storage and some extra house tiles... therefore, most folks I know don't add those upgrades to those accounts anyhow.

Side note... it may seem like it's not much time active, for house accounts using a 3/1 schedule... but most of my house accounts now qualify for at least 2nd year vet rewards.