Basements - A Way to Encourage Big Houses in Small Spaces?

I've been doing a bit of thinking lately on basements and housing availability.

It seems that houses have either 1, 2, or 3 options for being placed--village, town and city plots, respectively. Houses must be placed on a plot that is at least or bigger than their intended size--a farmer's hovel can be placed anywhere, a chateau must be placed on a city plot, etc. In addition to houses being placed, basements can also be attached to a specific house--how large depends on the house/plot.

My question is: What incentives are there for people to invest on a smaller plot?

Initially, I was under the impression that there may be incentives for individuals with larger homes to place on village plots due to art interests, or other points--exclusivity, etc. However, this appears not to be the case. To me this suggests that people will need to either buy in advance an hope for larger plots to open, or that there will be a glass ceiling of sorts for smaller plots. With basements however, this problem might be slightly alleviated.

One thought that I had was that basements could be more exclusive. Perhaps basements could replace the upper floors that appear to be missing from the smaller plot models--maybe a one to three-quarters trade? This would allow people an incentive for continuing to invest in a larger home, even if the availability of larger plots were not immediately available.

My assumption is that by allowing people to feel like they can continue to invest, it'd remove the aforementioned 'glass ceiling'. However, there may also be some problems with this approach--confusion between the benefits of plot size, etc. I'm curious what opinions people have to say on this.

What do you think?

Updated: Thanks to some great input, I've restructured my question a little bit. This should accommodate for the issues with placing larger houses on smaller plots--which is currently not an option.

 

I thought that it was a simple statement that housing isn't needed to "win" the game. More choice of smaller houses above ground to suit your playstyle/role and a hidden basement (very cheap by add-on store prices) to store your junk or house your crafting or whatever.

So now, we can buy (add-on or in-game) a small village house based on look and feel and make up for not having the $10k mansion by putting it underground.

*shrugs* a nice way to keep a village looking like a village and not full of skyscrapers.

 

You have it wrong, it is the other way around. You can place small houses, like the village size on a lot of any size, but large ones like the city houses need a city lot.

Thus you can not place a city sized Baron's Chateau in a village lot, as you suggest. It is simply too big.

 

Plus the fact that you might be able to swap houses and basements at will (which i'm not a fan of myself) means that it's like you will be able to continue to invest in "add-ons" and all your houses and basements are really just dimensions of one large house. Eventually I suspect that there might even be true add-ons and customizable homes layouts. Either way, I think the swappable houses would encourage continued investment.

 

Hmm, if that is the case, then at would definitely undermine the whole suggestion. I suppose my thought was that since the concept art had illustrated larger houses being placed on smaller plots, then it should work as described above: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/concept-art-barons-chateaus.92/ . In this case, a Baron's Chateau, which is a city-level plot, is being placed down to a village level plot.

I'll try to confirm what you've said--just to be sure. Nice input.

 

My pleasure, cs2501x.

This is from the FAQ:

"There are different kinds of houses?

There are a wide variety of houses players can choose from. Style variations include stone keeps, wizard towers, wood and plaster homes, etc. Size variations include Village (smallest), Town, and City (largest). Each house has a minimum lot size requirement, thus all Village size homes can be placed on any lot size but larger size homes can only be placed on larger lots. Some styles come in all three sizes but others only come in one or two sizes."

Hope it helps.

 

Well, there we go. Learn something new every day.

 

Just get a city lot, put a village home on it but get 5-story city basement. The lot sizes are really small considering how much bigger the homes are for that particular lot. There's barely any more usable above ground real estate.

 

This is why I wish they hadn't used the settlement sizes as lot names. A city lot can be in a village, as they have said, there just won't be a ton of them like there will be in cities. Better to have called them 'large' lots. Less confusion that way. A farmer might actually want a large lot with a small house so they have a larger crop area. What happens if they decide they want lots larger than city lots? What do they call them? Metropolitan lots?

 

After looking at the theads for that Lords' house on the city lot, I hope they increase the size of the lot. There is almost no space outside. Definitely no space for a hedge maze and probably not for a gazeebo.

 

Agreed. I hope they up the lot sizes all around.

 

Hehe yeah. In the video on city layouts, they've interchangeably used v/t/c along with s/m/l. But totally agree, as it also caused confusion on lot location. I'm hoping they change it so it's always referred to as small, medium, and large. Personally, I want to add extra large, ginormous, and ridiculous.

 

Actually, forget ridiculous, it's still too small. We have to go right to LUDICROUS!

 

I like the basements, you could store extra stuff or if you got your friend's avatars hanging out with you in your place, they could store their stuff down there.

 

will we be able to just get a basement without having a house and place it? Id live underground! Doomsday Basement!

 

My question is, if you use one of the water type houses like the cabana, or say a ship, can you still have a basement?
It doesn't make sense for there to be a basement there. However, removing that option, makes those type houses, much less apealing, since it take away so much of you space options.

 

I would think that having a waterfront house, is the benefit. You could dock your ship there! Which is really nice! I would give up a basement for that! By the time i get a house all those waterfronts will be gone, which sucks but oh well. Captain jack - You better get that pledge up!! I know youd like that type of house! Now on a flipside imagine having a basement on the waterfront house, except youd have crystal or glass walls, and then you could open up a sea world type of place and watch all the fish!

 

As far as I know, they've avoided answering the basement question for waterfront houses. My guess is that basements will be remain a land lot benefit for the time being. Extra storage / underground housing vs. being on the water.

 

That's funny, because I have the opposite guess. I think they'll allow waterfront houses to have basements, they're just waiting to see if they can come up with some clever in-game reason to allow it. Which leads me to guess that perhaps they are creating an underwater basement design (magic forcefields?) for those people who want to roleplay with a little more realism.

 

I think we need to actually SEE some of the waterfront houses; since they won't be masking (will they???) the basement, we'll be able to actually see it from above the water. Maybe a long or magical access down to the ground below the water where the structure itself will be built?