[OPINIONS/FEEDBACK] The LEASING side of Property Management

[Wuhtah]

After the survey, I do want to hear feedback on many different parts of the LEASING side of PM. Lease requests and vehicle leases. 

 

So far on my list of improvements:

 

- Lease requests being more 'noob friendly' and less 'gatekeep-y' as you guys put it. This means we won't be as harsh in denying properties (unless a different applicant for the same property is chosen. If the applications are very close and it was hard picking between them in the team, we will offer the second applicant a different business of the same kind if we have one available). We'll also be more open to guiding the applicants towards more successful applications. The goal of leases is to help people get familiar with how to run businesses, what is in store for them, providing a more financially stable option, and most of the time an already mapped interior. 

- Vehicle leases will be open always. It will work like interior requests - it won't close unless I feel like we need to temporary close them, however, I will try very hard against this. (REGULAR ONES, not the Special One-Time Vehicle Lease Program as this is still suspended. @Selena and I will be discussing this further down the line and we'll be working closely together to make sure this is more 'improved', so you guys won't be as lost on what we're looking for.)

- Ways for businesses to be seen/visited by players if the owners do not have gold/platinum donation status for the blips.

- Tweaking the leases money wise - some leases costing more, some leases costing less. 

- Cracking down on car dealerships and making some sort of 'requirements' of what Property Management looks for when it comes to roleplay standards and quality.

- Getting a leasing list out quicker than a couple of days before leasing opens. I want to try to let people know at least a week ahead of time what properties will be available. This isn't always able to be done, so I am trying to make it easier on myself through automatic means. 

 

Things that won't be fixed no matter how hard I want them to:

 

- Lease requests will always take at least 1 week. This is because we compare the lease applications together and we give players 1 week to plug in their application on the UCP. We have the 2 week turnaround time for our mental stability. 

- Business blips will always be a donation feature! No changing this, please don't complain about it. The server needs money to run!

 

 

I will add more to the list as people comment with constructive criticism, feedback in general, the likes and dislikes, etc. I understand that this topic will be a little heated because I do know some of you have frustrations with Property Management. This is us trying to see if there is a compromise available and to hear your angry pleas. If you are disrespectful to the team or to others, your comment will be removed and you'll receive a warning on the forums. This ain't a place for toxicity. You want change? This is how to express yourself in a nice, respectful manner.  

[Welsh]

There are certain areas of the city, such as South Central that businesses are technically borded up, something that has been suggested before is a "Landlord" style system, where the properties would be under the management of a user/admin. And they can then sublet the business to another user. 

 

They as landlord are responsible for upkeeping the monthly lease, which would drive them to ensure that businesses are occupied and running/paying rent. 

 

In terms of /bad - I am well aware of the fact that the server needs an income, and the main driver to Gold is for the /bad. 

 

However, could we link /openbusiness to ONLY the "list open business" list 

 

Or

 

Give a generic blip with no information, so if people want to know what it is, they required to actually visit it themselves.

[Fergie]

I would love to see a way to buy a leased business from PM. Sure - most leased businesses are already mapped and not allowed to be re-done, however there are those of us out there that get permission to re-name and re-map their leased business into something new. 

 

I understand you don’t want leased businesses to be flipped and re-sold, so there should be a time limit from when you purchase the leased business go when you can sell it to another player. Say - four months. 

[Selena]

20 minutes ago, Fergie said:

I would love to see a way to buy a leased business from PM. Sure - most leased businesses are already mapped and not allowed to be re-done, however there are those of us out there that get permission to re-name and re-map their leased business into something new. 

 

I understand you don’t want leased businesses to be flipped and re-sold, so there should be a time limit from when you purchase the leased business go when you can sell it to another player. Say - four months. 

That's actually a thing! Wuhtah imposed a Lease-to-buy system, we're still very much working on it and getting it to be perfect but you can contact her on the forums if you wish to buy a lease.

 

I always disliked the leases being bought as leases are leases but we are trying new things and we are looking to improve for the better of the community, so as I said, just contact Wuhtah for more information on that 🙂

 

EDIT: Just to be clear, this is till in the works to be as good as we can make it!

Edited May 28, 2022 by Selena

[L I C E]

u guys turned down my forklift lease : (

[bricksbricksbricks]

I think less leases, I think remove vehicle leases just have all vehicles available in game or some can be leased in game without admin intervention. Makes it easier for people to be creative and makes less overhead for admins, it seems everything in world is a big application, is it really needed to create more work for admins? I can go and buy a truck but not a lawnmower etc..

If leases can be bought after running them that's great since leases are inferior to owning, you are controlled and less free. Commercial property market is practically inexistent on the server because it's such a hassle to acquire anything making commercial properties value far exceed any number of virtual bucks. Sorry for cross over into property owning but I guess it goes hand in hand.

Like @TotalDeeJay suggest some kind of faster system would be good. Preferably you should be able to acquire a small shop lease from like the city or building owners icly and ingame. But you need some guarantee of possession if you are to put any effort into your venue, like mapping for example. Which is a lot of OOC effort too.

Ideally I think leases and commercial properties should be much more easily available in game, similar to how you can easily acquire an apartment. Imo it's great when there's many venues open at the same time. makes the city feel more alive, competition is healthy too i tink.

 

Edited May 28, 2022 by bricksbricksbricks
bought a lawnmower

[Anders]

The costs of leases, both property and vehicles, is a bit weird. A speedo is what? 3-4k a month? An office in a prestigious location is 10k. I know this is on the works but surely one can go through the leases and think how much everything should cost

[cruelhoney]

18 hours ago, Wuhtah said:

- Ways for businesses to be seen/visited by players if the owners do not have gold/platinum donation status for the blips.

I don't see any other way around this other than a generic blip of maybe just a green/red circle, meaning players who see it on the map need to show up to know what it is. Or making it cost less WP for players to purchase it (30WP-50WP). @Nervous has already suggested that he does not "care" about profits and previous stuff he has said suggests he is against malicous business practises that prey on people. Otherwise he would not have introduced Panda Points. I've already been able to purchase 2 namechanges with them. It's a lovely system and I appreciate it being introduced. However, it would be extremely appreciated if at the very least you could actively buy a blip with them.

Donations should not hinder roleplay but become a luxary for people who can afford it. I, and I think much of the community, would appreciate Nervous speaking to us about it and why you seem adamant things won't change.

 

Blips aside, I feel like the leasing system is very intimidating for newer players and overral feels very intense and a lot of work for players who wish to create roleplay for the server. I feel like a more lax approach should be taken for certain businesses (if they're unique for example) bars, nightclubs etc - they can reamin how they are but for players who maybe want to open a small deli, a comic book store, an occulat store, a toy store hell even a video game store. We need more of these and honestly, i feel the amount of effort to put in can be seen as extremely over the top for what is a game.

[Wuhtah]

1 hour ago, TotalDeeJay said:

There are certain areas of the city, such as South Central that businesses are technically borded up, something that has been suggested before is a "Landlord" style system, where the properties would be under the management of a user/admin. And they can then sublet the business to another user. 

 

They as landlord are responsible for upkeeping the monthly lease, which would drive them to ensure that businesses are occupied and running/paying rent. 

 

In terms of /bad - I am well aware of the fact that the server needs an income, and the main driver to Gold is for the /bad. 

 

However, could we link /openbusiness to ONLY the "list open business" list 

 

Or

 

Give a generic blip with no information, so if people want to know what it is, they required to actually visit it themselves.

 

For /openbusiness, I will update that list as it is quite out of date. Send anyone in PM a message asking if you can use /openbusiness. It's okay to ask!

 

Landlord applications aren't actually the leasing side. It's moreso requests persay? Or maybe just the whole umbrella of PM. We are definitely working on this, so any ideas from you guys about it would make it move faster or get improvements!

 

I can forward the suggestion that if the players have /openbusiness it can appear on the open business list to at least get the GPS thing there.

 

18 minutes ago, bricksbricksbricks said:

I think less leases, I think remove vehicle leases just have all vehicles available in game or some can be leased in game without admin intervention. Makes it easier for people to be creative and makes less overhead for admins, it seems everything in world is a big application, is it really needed to create more work for admins? I can go and buy a truck but not a lawnmower etc..

If leases can be bought after running them that's great since leases are inferior to owning, you are controlled and less free. Commercial property market is practically inexistent on the server because it's such a hassle to acquire anything making commercial properties value far exceed any number of virtual bucks. Sorry for cross over into property owning but I guess it goes hand in hand.

Like @TotalDeeJay suggest some kind of faster system would be good. Preferably you should be able to acquire a small shop lease from like the city or building owners icly and ingame. But you need some guarantee of possession if you are to put any effort into your venue, like mapping for example. Which is a lot of OOC effort too.

Ideally I think leases and commercial properties should be much more easily available in game, similar to how you can easily acquire an apartment. Imo it's great when there's many venues open at the same time. makes the city feel more alive, competition is healthy too i tink.

 

 

So, most of the vehicles on the leasing list overall are in the game already. This is just a different opportunity for players to get a vehicle that do not want to spend 100k on and can get it just for a smaller monthly fee.

 

For those that aren't on the leasing list, some of them definitely need to be implemented in game, which we are working on, but some of them are also too rare and pricey to do that. It'll cause a lot of RP quality and portrayal issues and that team will get even MORE work. We don't want that.

 

For lawnmowers and whatnot, I can see the annoyance there of needing to do an application for it. However, I will talk to the team about putting lawnmowers for availability from a dealership. No promises.

 

Hmm, as for being able to acquire leases more easily like such as apartments, it might not work that well. We do need to make sure the assets and whatever makes sense to the character. It will always take a week at least. To be fair, leases and requests both took upwards to 1-3 months last year. We have improved significantly at making 95% of them now only take two weeks or less.

 

[Wuhtah]

43 minutes ago, Anders said:

The costs of leases, both property and vehicles, is a bit weird. A speedo is what? 3-4k a month? An office in a prestigious location is 10k. I know this is on the works but surely one can go through the leases and think how much everything should cost

 

We try not to make offices super expensive because that's the starting ground for many businesses. You don't earn /openbusiness there or can create anything there. There's no profit unless you get them from players via loans or whatever and we want to promote RP, not make the players go into debts.

 

5 minutes ago, cruelhoney said:

I don't see any other way around this other than a generic blip of maybe just a green/red circle, meaning players who see it on the map need to show up to know what it is. Or making it cost less WP for players to purchase it (30WP-50WP). @Nervous has already suggested that he does not "care" about profits and previous stuff he has said suggests he is against malicous business practises that prey on people. Otherwise he would not have introduced Panda Points. I've already been able to purchase 2 namechanges with them. It's a lovely system and I appreciate it being introduced. However, it would be extremely appreciated if at the very least you could actively buy a blip with them.

Donations should not hinder roleplay but become a luxary for people who can afford it. I, and I think much of the community, would appreciate Nervous speaking to us about it and why you seem adamant things won't change.

 

Blips aside, I feel like the leasing system is very intimidating for newer players and overral feels very intense and a lot of work for players who wish to create roleplay for the server. I feel like a more lax approach should be taken for certain businesses (if they're unique for example) bars, nightclubs etc - they can reamin how they are but for players who maybe want to open a small deli, a comic book store, an occulat store, a toy store hell even a video game store. We need more of these and honestly, i feel the amount of effort to put in can be seen as extremely over the top for what is a game.

 

I have already asked Nervous if paying for a blip with Panda Points was an option. It is not. That's okay though, we need to stop seeing what we can't have and think of ways to implement things where it makes everyone win. I have a few suggestions I have already forwarded to Nervous. He's a busy man, so I'm just waiting to hear back.

 

This isn't a thread for blip changing and I would kindly ask you to read the first post that I made. That's not going to change. The blips will be donator features and that's that. Feel free to reach out to him in a forum PM to ask, but respectfully of course. Just not on this as this is a way for me to get feedback on leases.

 

Could you go into detail of why it's intimidating? It asks questions for what we look for on a lease application. Do you think maybe making a forum thread that people can read through would make things better? 

 

We actually are VERY much for laxed for unique item businesses and businesses out on the county as these are the two types of businesses in dire need. 

 

As for the comic book stores and whatever else, I don't have any of those as leases. I have flower shops and food places I put up, but again, not many people want to run a business like that because of a few things that we ARE trying to fix. Getting customers and making a profit are two big ones.

 

But people making unique item stores is not on us, that's on them to do it if they want to!