This is exactly how most of the people look at the situation. Nobody will pay 10m for a basic house when you can live in Eclipse and have a penthouse worth max. 1-1.5m that will look so much better.
People are VERY disappointed and unhappy with how the administration handles certain problems in terms of assets owning. This might not be visible at first glance but over the course of almost 3 years that I am playing on this server most of the complaints I hear and most of the reasons that I hear as to why people leave the server or are doing certain things differently is because of this, the amount of control that the administration wants.
People have been struggling to make a point since they are being ignored or just pushed away, making them just not want to express their opinion publicly as it won't make any change.
It has become clear to me while reading the response of the administration throughout this topic that they are not looking for solutions based on what the players want and what would make sense but rather solutions based on how they can control something that shouldn't be controlled by them and also they implement rules like:
- 3 hours per 14 days in order for you not to loose your property
-> Alright, so there are times where it is simply impossible that someone can invest 3 hours in the 14 given days (This could occur because people are travelling for work, vacation, being in hospital or a bunch of different reasons that sometimes are none of admin's business to know) and while we have a command /vacation it still only covers 2 weeks while most of the people have more than 2 weeks of vacation per year (Maybe I am wrong on the 1 year/2 weeks for the command, please correct me if so). However, I have to admit that if you are able to get in contact with PM your properties will be looked after even though there were problems in my case where they took them away from me right after they gave it back to me it still worked out pretty well in the end. I believe that a system can be implemented where PM should contact the owner of the property for their inactivity and I believe most of the time if the owner is unable to be active and also unable to sell the property in the given timeframe they will be lucky with a fair offer from PM to surrender the property. These properties can be put on auction once every month (if there are any of course) instead of them staying there just like that and improve the housing market. Taking them off just like that without warning will piss people off just like it did up until now! @Frezemis
-> This leads to people loosing their items as well, let's say somebody had items that were worth a lot because it just so happens that this person owns a collection of swords (I just take it as an example don't beat me up for that one). This will lead to the person either complaining and get ignored or is forced to take the L or just for the person to not bother anymore with any roleplay regarding owning a collection or owning a property because it will be taken away from them just like that. Furthermore, it will decrease roleplay or have bad impact on the quality of roleplay because of the following problem:
-> John Doe roleplays around and is a pretty good roleplayer, he engages in different kind of venues and is a cool person ICly that has a well paid job and should be able to afford a house/apartment where he can roleplay every now and then when the urge comes but he decides not to own one nor rent one because it simply does not make sense as it might get taken away from him and he will loose the money he invested into that AND he cannot really purchase items and store them in a house/apartment because he knows if he does that he will loose them anyways, so why bother? Moreover, John Doe applied for a PF license, he wants to shoot at the shooting range but does not need a CCW as he feels pretty safe without gun on himself at all times. Now the problem is that he does not have any place where he can store the gun because of obvious reasons(sooner or later it will get confiscated by the administration because he was not as active) so he has to risk it all and on the next police stop he might get his PF licenses suspended, gun taken away AND serve jail time (This is just an example, there are thousands of different situations where you just can't hold every item you wanna own on yourself, makes no sense either and in addition to that it just makes sense that your character lives somewhere).
- 3x MP isn't as bad as everyone thinks but I have seen enough people owning basically half of Mirror Park at some point that were asking for something less than 1.5m for their houses but were unable to get due to the restriction so it meant that they were never going to sell these houses at any point waiting hopefully for some improvements to the rules which is the topic here and I believe that @Power expresses his opinion perfectly as well as @Illusory (It is true that this price has increased over the year or two but there is only so much money people have and are willing to invest for a small house and also inflation is a thing IRL too).
- So many houses that are not available to the public including most of Vespucci Canals houses and the houses in Richman being closed behind closed doors. There was an explanation by @Nervous that implementing these houses would take up a lot of the available resources from the server. However, we have seen that it is possible with the new housing system where you can request a house but the process is a bit exaggerated and a person has to wait months until they get what they want/allowed to get so in most of the cases it is the people that play the most that are also able to write cool essays which is alright but still not quite enough for the public to satisfy. (I have heard a lot of people that have characters that were there for years including mine and have made a pretty big wealth out of something that was beneficial to everyone on the server but still unable to get one of these houses or just can't be bothered with the process which kinda sucks to be honest) I remember I asked for a mansion to use for an event, a single party. We would take any mansion as a roleplay venue for modelling/events and other cool stuff, attracting a lot of people to it as we were on the top of the entertainment industry on the server but we never made it that far even after months. It took us about 2-3 months until we could get our "please" PM to be looked at and a lot of discussions here and there as to why it should be possible to make a single event there that would last about 2-3 hours, extending the process even further until the point where I just didn't even want to be there anymore and eventually took a pause with everything. After all if people are able to buy and rent houses/mansions we don't need PM to look over it as long as the players can pay because renting a normal apartment can be 30k/month or more I don't quite know the prices right now but a mansion might be more than 100k/month and not everyone can afford that. It is better for someone to use a property than nobody to use it at all, there are probably tens if not hundreds/thousands of houses that have not been touched by anyone fearing "resources of the server" but are scripted in already. I believe the public demands an answer to that for the longest time now.
I also see a pattern where the administration wants to further implement consequences for owning a property which shouldn't be the case. I believe that if it continues at this pace people will start selling all of their properties and just continue with their roleplay without them. You can't just force someone to be active and grind the whole time just to own a property, it's not what the players want. Restricting further houses under a very controlled system isn't the way to go either even though it produces a more efficient outcome, again it's not what the players want. Implementing a wealth/property tax isn't that bad but it really depends on how you wanna go about it and you can't really punish players for not being able to be online 24/7 it's just a game after all, most of us have lives outside of this game and there is already the 3 hours/14 days rule anyways that is ridiculous enough because you not only have to be online but you have to be on the specific character AND you need to actually use the property (gives no point of having 2 or more characters owning a property which makes sense up until some point).
I don't know there are maybe more points, maybe some points might be wrong but they have been built up throughout the 2-3 years of my experience on the server and talking with a lot of people ICly and OOCly which by the way share the same or similar opinion. I don't want to derail the topic or anything but I see this as an opportunity to further explain the problem and maybe get attention by the administration to take some of these points in consideration just like I did in a previous post with the car prices and the problems around them.
