Property Inactivity Compensation

[Pan Grama]

A friend of mine semi-quit for this very reason. He went inactive with every intention of coming back. He just had to deal with IRL, but one week turned into two, turned into three, turned into four... When he eventually came back he'd lost his apartment and, as he put it (paraphrasing), "It's a loss that I can't recover from."

 

He deleted the character and started again, but he never came back with the same passion he had the first time around. Now he hardly ever logs in. And he never bought another apartment.

 

My argument to him was that he could've found the time to log in once a week, just to keep his claim, but he never did. And in a way that would be more selfish than going inactive while owning a property because he wouldn't have been an active member of the community while still taking up an apartment.

 

Ideally I'd like for inactive members to get a full refund, because I've seen first-hand how that affects a player, or maybe have the option to choose an available place for the same amount. But I understand why they don't. I'm glad I'm not a decision maker.

Edited April 25, 2019 by Pan Grama

[Wisci]

2 hours ago, 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 get eaten.

Selling a property is a chore, especially with apartments being introduced. If you think it's fair to make someone take a 50% hit to their bank and lose hours (a 70k property probably takes 70 hours of passive income to recuperate if they sell it to market, considering car insurance and other expenses) then I think you need to take a look on the other side. Someone shouldn't be punished because they decide to take a vacation, get deployed, have a medical or family emergency or just need a break. If you don't have a desirable property you need to start selling well in advance, or pay for gold donation, which is sort of an unfair request. 

 

Tldr people don't need to feel like real life is going to punish their in game progression. Cut them some slack. 

Edited April 26, 2019 by Wisci

[WirelessMind]

+1 The fact you can lose a house you possibly spent 100k on with no compensation is just stupid

[Voodoo]

Agreed. Having been a victim of this, honestly, it fucking sucks.  I'm not disagreeing with the obvious fact that inactive players could potentially hog up resources (properties), but just pulling the rug from under people that might have just had life happen or who knows what is wrong.  And I also disagree with the notion that players should have to put forward some type of leave of absence REQUEST to take a break from the server for any reason. 

[pogoyo]

Inactivity removals should refund the player what they would have gotten if they had logged in and sold it to the server, which is 50% of the market value. If the goal is to remove some money from circulation, inactivity is not the best way to do it. Inactivity is a good way to free up house locations, because some are scarce and it's good for all of them to be used by someone who wants to use them, but available housing and the general amount of money in circulation are two separate things that shouldn't be conflated. A player's activity shouldn't specifically factor into the aspect of shrinking the cash economy; should you erode someone's wealth because they stopped playing for some reason? It seems like an arbitrary way to determine who is on the receiving end of a money sink. And that being the case, would the size of the active economy really shrink if the primary target for this money sink is people who haven't played in two weeks to a month?

[mala]

It never made sense to me that the inactivity timer took the house and didn't refund you for it. It seemed like a punishment, if they go inactive on accident and come back to having lost 100k+, who would stick around after that? No one wants to grind script jobs just to have their own place again.

Before, if you were at risk of going inactive and knew it, you could sell the property back to the server for 100% back. Then, you'd still have incentive to come back later on, and the property was right back up for sale for anyone who wanted it. That worked out for everyone.

Now with the 50% server sell price cut, people will be wanting to hang on to their properties. Because of the influx of new properties it may be harder to sell for even a fair price that covers what it cost you.

It could be a lose-lose situation - if accidentally go inactive because you couldn't sell for a fair price while you had the time,, and you get screwed over anyway.

 

Potential fix: Make the inactivity timer give you 100% back, but keep the manual 50% server sell update. I highly doubt people will abuse this, because think about it: would anyone really go inactive for a month just to make 100% back on their property? If they have several properties, they could lose ALL of them just to try to make 100% back on the one they couldn't rp'ly sell.

 

It'd be hard to abuse, and if it's an automatic sale & refund, it doesn't add any processing workload to the admins. Definitely needs the warning as well, maybe a 2-week UCP e-mail warning?

Edited April 26, 2019 by Havana

[Wisci]

19 minutes ago, Havana said:

Potential fix: Make the inactivity timer give you 100% back, but keep the manual 50% server sell update. I highly doubt people will abuse this, because think about it: would anyone really go inactive for a month just to make 100% back on their property? If they have several properties, they could lose ALL of them just to try to make 100% back on the one they couldn't rp'ly sell.

 

It'd be hard to abuse, and if it's an automatic sale & refund, it doesn't add any processing workload to the admins. Definitely needs the warning as well, maybe a 2-week UCP e-mail warning?

Additionally, making the inactivity timer shared among characters would prevent people from using another character in the meantime just to try to get the 100% sale. Arguably it might keep properties on some inactive characters (where other character slots are played), but would also remove the confusion of tracking your last login across all property-holding characters.

[Lance]

Some people mentioned "leaving" as it's something players chooses. I'd like to add that in my case it was not something i chose, rather something I had/was forced to do. I lost everything I had except one property because I gave it for people to use and got it back when I came back in 8 months. It was not nice coming back and losing almost everything, so I personally would like some kind of a refund. Because there are people who are temporarily leaving due to real life reasons, not just because they're bored. 

I have lost my Mirror Park house as well, nowadays people are selling it for 800k. That's a big damn amount. 

Edited April 26, 2019 by Lance

[Spartan_old]

I don't think inactive players should loose their properties without some kind of notice.

 

It'd be great to have a warning or notification system, whether it's in-game or on the UCP. Maybe we can have the main property address that is set on the UCP to be exempt from this.

 

Also, is it player inactivity that causes you to loose properties, or property inactivity? I often log out outside my property's side or back door or even inside the garage instead rather than inside the property itself, it'd be silly to loose a property for not going inside it.

[baechi]

46 minutes ago, Spartan said:

Also, is it player inactivity that causes you to loose properties, or property inactivity? I often log out outside my property's side or back door or even inside the garage instead rather than inside the property itself, it'd be silly to loose a property for not going inside it.

Player inactivity, or character rather. As far as I am aware the system is setup to auto un-assign your properties from your character should you not log into that character once within a four week span.

Edited April 26, 2019 by stephanie