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Property Inactivity Compensation


baechi

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Hi there,

 

First and foremost I would like to say I understand the amount of work the property team is under as I had the pleasure of peeking into the inner workings during my short stint as a Supporter in November of 2018. I should also state that I do not know the FULL extent of the property inactivity system, but I am under the impression it is now automatic.

 

I would like to add I am also an advocate FOR the property inactivity system and I am happy it is in place. However there is some much needed backend to this system as it is currently very punishing for players who get hit by the inactivity. I for one was affected by the inactivity in February and it was more or less killed my drive to roleplay with the affected character as it is very hard to justify (ICly) how you randomly lost all of your assets in the one month period.

 


 

Some ideas that I believe would alleviate much of the frustrations of the receiving parties of the system would be the following.

 

Refund at Market Price:

 

The system as it stands currently strips the property away from the inactive player and leaves them with nothing to show for it. I feel as if this system is more hurtful and helpful as money in-game is more or less hard to come by, and losing a property worth at least $100,000 in-game is a hard thing to recover. This will drive people to either leave the server, or to idly grind money and ignore proper roleplay as in most cases, players will put their money into properties and vehicles.

 

Losing 1/2 of their investments is surely something to frustrate players and I believe the ideal scenario would be to simply refund the property at it's market value. This way it's non-arguable what the amount will be and the logs won't need to be scoured through, other than to show that the person did in-fact own the property prior to the inactivity purge.

 

Again - I have limited knowledge on how the coding and system actually works, but from my understanding the property gets exchanged from the player to the "Property Management team," at least this was the case for my business property I had owned. If this was the case, it would just need to be confirmed when the date of exchange happened between the two accounts. A time limit can be set for this to promote players to active, and this could be based off the date.

 

Warning messages:

 

Currently the system comes at a complete shock. To my knowledge there is not a single notification of this happening and I wasn't able to find anything on the forums to suggest the rules that are set out by the system to follow. It can be argued that the player shouldn't get a warning and they should be accountable for their own activity, which I can understand. However the goal of the system shouldn't be to punish the inactive players, but to keep properties open for active players to further their roleplay. That being said, a simple message could bring a player back into it, especially if they get preoccupied on other characters OR with real life events. 

 

Something like this would definitely be an appreciated feature, especially for some of the earlier property inactivities as I don't believe there was any update or documentation in the game change log stating that this will be in effect.  Of course an ignorant suggestion could be for a UCP account to auto send a private message to the associated forum account of the UCP member, or for a message to appear when you log into an alternate character that the inactive character has "x" amount of time before assets may be refunded/taken.

 

Request processing:

 

Obviously "refunds," of this magnitude would require a lot of processing, and I understand that. I believe the refund request format right now would suffice for processing requests of this nature, and that an ample amount of time would be expected to investigate and ensure that the properties were in-fact taken out of a player's ownership. From my understanding, there is logs but they are difficult to navigate due to being processed on an external application, however it is possible to seek the time if parameters were needed to show what date range the inactivity fell between.

 

Another solution that could be used for this is an, "incident ID," being generated when a property falls inactive, as it is very much an unique event. This information could be uploaded to the UCP of the former owner at one point, and could allow for simpler processing of said requests as the property staff would be able to filter said ID into the external application, and be able to find the date and property information (hopefully) of the property in question.

 

An example would be the following:

 

Properties:
1017 Forum Drive (Inactivity:  PA547821)

 

Using a long string code like the example given would allow it to be unique enough for the Property Staff to be able to easily find this information in the logs, and it can be randomly assigned from the available codes not used.

 


 

Final thoughts:

 

My apologies to Pascal as I have been asking about the status of such a system for weeks and have been bugging him about it. I just want to make it clear I'm not trying to undermine anyone in Property Staff as it is very clear they are working hard on other projects, (e.g. multi-interior properties, etc). I am just worried that leaving something like this and not actioning it can cause issues in the future, if for whatever reason the logs were to be lost.

 

I truly believe that something of this nature should be very much considered as the property inactivity system, as it stands is very punishing and although it does accomplish the goal of freeing up properties for the populous, it does feel very much empty on the other end of things as the players will just lose everything, currently without any notice of this happening. If I were to have it my way, I would see an interim request process being in place, as the general concern I have heard from Property Staff members is that the logs listed for the property transactions are difficult to filter through, however it does seem possible to complete.

 

I encourage thoughts or suggestions adding onto this system, and would appreciate any feedback. ?

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Inactive players should not be given back the money at all. But instead lift the 50% money from selling property back to the market to 80-90%, so it would be better for people who wanna go inactive or play with their other characters - giving them more motivation to come back from inactivity period. That 80-90% would also prevent abuse from players who just buy properties to check inventory or trying a quick sell flip.

 

Or add a special command for players going inactive that lets them sell the house with full price but it gives them a timer that prevents them to buy another one for 2 weeks.

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Completely disagree with this. If a player goes inactive and keeps a property, it's a completely selfish motive for them to hold onto an asset that they won't be using for an unforeseeable amount of time. Being greedy and selfish has consequences.

 

If there are things genuinely out of the player's controls, pretty sure you can give Property Management a heads up about it via some form. We're in a digital age, you can get access to the forums on almost anything these days.

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Just now, Maca said:

Completely disagree with this. If a player goes inactive and keeps a property, it's a completely selfish motive for them to hold onto an asset that they won't be using for an unforeseeable amount of time. Being greedy and selfish has consequences.

 

If there are things genuinely out of the player's controls, pretty sure you can give Property Management a heads up about it via some form. We're in a digital age, you can get access to the forums on almost anything these days.

The idea behind the post wasn't to hold onto the property but to refund the money that the property held. This was it's inconsequential to the server as the property would be lifted, allowing for active player use, but the previous owner who was inactive doesn't totally lose out on everything.

 

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Just now, stephanie said:

The idea behind the post wasn't to hold onto the property but to refund the money that the property held. This was it's inconsequential to the server as the property would be lifted, allowing for active player use, but the previous owner who was inactive doesn't totally lose out on everything.

 

That doesn't take money out of the economy, though. To give a player their money back is just pumping money back into the already over-saturated economy.

 

What if I couldn't sell my property and decided to go 'inactive' to get the full MP back without risking losing half when selling it back to the server? What do you suggest to prevent that almost inevitable abuse?

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1 minute ago, Maca said:

That doesn't take money out of the economy, though. To give a player their money back is just pumping money back into the already over-saturated economy.

 

What if I couldn't sell my property and decided to go 'inactive' to get the full MP back without risking losing half when selling it back to the server? What do you suggest to prevent that almost inevitable abuse?

My suggestion was to have a request system where it could be handled case by case, as such with the refund request presently being handled. If the property staff is concerned about potential abuses like that, reduce the rate of refundment to the player to 50% instead of 100% due to inactivity. Essentially what I suggested was to have it auto sell to market opposed to the owner losing 100% of it's value.

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3 minutes ago, stephanie said:

My suggestion was to have a request system where it could be handled case by case, as such with the refund request presently being handled. If the property staff is concerned about potential abuses like that, reduce the rate of refundment to the player to 50% instead of 100% due to inactivity. Essentially what I suggested was to have it auto sell to market opposed to the owner losing 100% of it's value.

That is a fair suggestion, however, creating further processes for the staff (who have a heavy and stressful workload atm) to be drafting and then later on enforcing would only create more of a backlog in other departments which later on down the line causes frustration from both staff members and the players.

 

This is all preventable by players just simply not going inactive with properties in their possession and selflessly selling them to other players pre-departure or even back to the market if they can't shift it. It'll create a fluid economy around housing if it's kept as IC as possible rather than the staff having to intervene to take the properties back from players. That's why systems are here like this, to assist staff in revoking these dormant properties from players that have just fell off the activity map.

 

It's a dog eat dog world and unfortunately inactive dogs get eaten.

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Just now, Maca said:

That is a fair suggestion, however, creating further processes for the staff (who have a heavy and stressful workload atm) to be drafting and then later on enforcing would only create more of a backlog in other departments which later on down the line causes frustration from both staff members and the players.

 

This is all preventable by players just simply not going inactive with properties in their possession and selflessly selling them to other players pre-departure or even back to the market if they can't shift it. It'll create a fluid economy around housing if it's kept as IC as possible rather than the staff having to intervene to take the properties back from players. That's why systems are here like this, to assist staff in revoking these dormant properties from players that have just fell off the activity map.

 

It's a dog eat dog world and unfortunately inactive dogs getting eaten.

Sure, if that's how the Property Staff team wants to handle the situation, it is obviously there decision. Though I believe it's not very fair to not have any forewarning, especially in the cases where it was implemented without any announcement and that it wasn't clear what parameters the system follows. Personally I wasn't aware that playing on an alternate character wouldn't prevent my other character's assets from being wiped as I still was being active on the server, albeit on another character that had more of my attention.

 

It can be argued that the properties should still be sent to the public as they were clearly not being used, but do you believe it's right for me to lose all of my progress and work on that character due to following a different roleplay story for a month? Obviously if I was aware that this was going to happen, I would have made preparations but hindsight is 20-20.

 

I don't see these suggestions come up often and I don't believe that it would cause as much of a backlog as you would suggest. Reviewing the refund request archive from January 1st of 2019, there has been 4 refund requests related to inactive purging out of the 309 requests made on that forum. That is hardly an influx of requests, even counting requests potentially made through discord. Alternatively the automatic system could be adjusted to simply sell the property forcefully instead of removing it entirely, resulting in no more continuing work aside from the tweaked script.

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39 minutes ago, Maca said:

That doesn't take money out of the economy, though. To give a player their money back is just pumping money back into the already over-saturated economy.

 

What if I couldn't sell my property and decided to go 'inactive' to get the full MP back without risking losing half when selling it back to the server? What do you suggest to prevent that almost inevitable abuse?

 

Maybe finding an autioneer to auction off properties from inactive players could be an solution.

Said auctioneer takes a his commision from the sale and the rest goes to the previous owner?

This way no money appears out of thin air, The inactive player gets -something- and it might create a few RP jobs.

 

Maybe implement a 20% state tax on these sales and remove some cash from circulation that way?

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