| Subject: The Housing Situation |
Author:
Drayab
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Date Posted: 22:09:08 05/22/02 Wed
In reply to:
Grunt N. Point
's message, "Re: Buying buildings" on 21:04:58 05/22/02 Wed
Hmmm.... if the key was a 'no quit' item, it seems like it would be difficult to store things in your house safely, which is the practical reason I would own a house. If I was going away from home, I would want to take it with me anyway. And I might die with it and we'd still have the same problem. I mean, I want a house so that my things stay safe, but if I leave the key somewhere unsafe (while I go off somewhere) then if someone else finds the key, they have access to my house and all my things. So, I'd want to take it with me and might die with it. If I was quitting for the day, I could try to hide the key, but then, if I had the skills to make that work then I could just as easily have just hidden all my valuables. So that means I've got to keep all my valuables on my person when I quit anyway, and just leave the key behind.
Here's a solution I thought of after reading Grunt's post:
Ideally, the locks could be changed and re-keyed in the game dynamically. The problem as I see it is deciding when it is time to change the lock so that a new player can use the house. Maybe if it was like Grunt said and everyone was on a rental system this wouldn't be a problem; since, if a player hasn't been paying his rent, he gets kicked out at the end of the month.
I used to play on a mud called Rauvyon for a while, and they had a rental system in place. If you didn't pay your rent, your key disappeared out of the game and a new one became available at the rental office. It worked well, but I have no idea how they coded it.
Since lots of players had their own pad, there were things like furniture available to make it nicer. Maybe we could have something like that as well. I think if houses became more easily had that there would be more opportunities for people in the game. For example, there could be new things to craft and a new demand for locksmiths.
As for Rauvyon's system, I always thought the disappearing keys were unrealistic. I would rather see some uppity Centurions going around hassling people for their rent and stuff like that. You know, taking their keys by force when they mess up. Maybe the owner of the house, like the government or a noble family, could be given a command to change the locks at a certain address at which time a new key could be generated at the housing authority. Maybe the housing authority could become something like the recruiter that the city governments now use to get guards. The house managers would have access to a merchant that 'sells' them the key. Maybe it could even be set up so that there is no charge.
The old key would simply become useless. And there would always be someone around to change the locks and manage the houses IC.
Of course, for this to work all the houses would need to be assigned an address, and each key would have to be created dynamically to match the lock at the given address. But I don't really know how tough this would be to code. It may very well be a large project the way I described it. And Elwar probably has enough on his hands with the guard code without having something else on his plate.
Maybe there is a simplier solution, but this was the best that I could think of.
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