How many hours of play should be required to purchase property?

@Rebelweasel

If your struggling to find a place, there should be row/village lots available in Wightwick (just outside Owls Head). Failing that I can put some in Trysull which is South West Novia.

 

I know that in my town I will not be charging extra rent, nor will Port Phoenix. We will be welcoming as many new players as we can, and not gouging them at the start. There are indeed people that want to capitalize on every monetary aspect of the game. My intention is to not deal with those people. Hell I probably will rent out rooms for free if I like you

 

I remember originally they said housing would be rare and not obtainable by everyone. Most would be consumed by pledges, with some amount left over for people to buy with in game gold (the 20% number is in my head). Has this changed? Did POTs make this irrelevant?

 

I believe they said 30 - 50 percent more in the early hang outs. I don't know as this game to me is nothing like what I thought. Although I am hopeful on its future, I really dont recognize it as what it was started as.

 

So, a few things:

1. It would be nice to be able to hire a vendor and rent stall space in order to sell stuff, and furthermore have this process be separate from home ownership entirely.
2. Some of the problems described in terms of property scarcity could perhaps be resolved by putting a limit on the number of properties individual accounts can own at a given time.
3. I really like the idea of a property quest - it could take you through the crafting system and vendors before allowing you to own property.

 

I believe there is a 3 lot limit outside of PoTs at the moment.

 

I would like to have a personal vendor servant able to follow me...with the coconuts.

Clippity-clop
Down the street
Anyone wanna
Buy some meat?

Back to the subject. I really like my idea that there be a quest chain which ultimately results in you getting a starter home and a few basic furnishings. Specifics I was thinking: Owen The Builder (because I like U7 references) has injured his arm. He needs help from someone capable to finish an important project. So he has you build a table, then a wooden storage trunk, then maybe a couple of chairs and a bed frame. By the time you return with the last finished item, he informs you that the person who contracted him to furnish this house was found dead in the swamps. He admits he's short on gold now and offers to give you the deed to the place (as well as the house..which you just pretend is already wherever for simplicity's sake) as well as keep the furniture you created for it. This introduces players to both housing as well as the crafting system in a meaningful, rewarding way. The house wouldn't have to be anything fancy. Thinking something along the lines of the little shack that comes with a village deed. Or it could even be a row lot deed. Or it could be totally random. Yes, no, maybe?

 

Just bear in mind the monetary value of the cheapest pledge that offers a row lot + a house, then consider how long it would take to earn the equivalent in game without devaluing that pledge in dollar terms and making the pledger feel ripped off.

That's a fuzzy metric for sure but that's your answer.

 

How on earth can u be assured of that? It most certainly WILL happen, especially with guilds that have hundreds of members and openly declare their intent to buy up and rent out housing.

 

Something worth mentioning also is that getting the gold for a deed may be the easy part of the equation as its not been confirmed if vendors will even sell deeds at launch or whether there will be some other process in-game to get one for gold.

However, I do expect deeds to be in very high demand and supply to be limited.

 

Portalarium has stated that land and houses will be Available for in game gold.

 

Indeed they have, however they have not said if they will be freely available to buy from a vendor as they are now or limited in quantity and distributed by other means.

 

yes definitely a row lot deed at least .....

 

In EQ2 they had INNS where you could rent rooms ..... for those who could not afford a house, I loved it, that way EVERY ONE gets to own property. The rooms in the inns were instanced and you could select who to visit via a drop down menu of the peeps at that inn... was nice .... no one felt left out, unless you wanted a house, well then, earn it the hard way it was possible till all the land was taken. Yep yep, Inns is the way to go in main towns, cities .... for those who can't afford a house.

 

Scarcity has also been mentioned a number of times in terms of housing availability challenges. I would argue that any sort of scarcity of lot availability in general is artificial - it's a virtual world, there's literally no limit to how many lots could be created. It may be true that the ratio of lot types is currently off, but it also appears that only a fraction of NPC towns have been implemented and presumably the POT editor will allow more row lots to be created outside of NPC towns.

The real issue of scarcity has more to do, I think, with lot locations - there are only so many lots in Owl's Head or Ardois and a big component of that location value seems to have to do with player owned vendors. Vendors in a NPC town on a main road are probably going to get a lot more traffic than a lot on the far side of a small POT. Now if, as I suggested, player owned vendors were separate from housing, you could more easily put a value on a property. Hell, if there's going to be taxes why not have zoning too - certain lots zoned for residential, commercial, or mixed use (light industrial would be cool if means of manufacture / processing are ever created).

 

I realized something last night, as I was explaining to a friend how he could earn a good bit of gold from a couple quests in game.

Content is not in the game. The quests I have done so far, seemed quite generous in their payouts. One of the factors I've been dismissing all this time in my money-earning curve is that I'm taking the game as it is now, with virtually zero content in proportion to what is expected. This isn't going to be a grind game, I won't have to go kill skele archers for hours at a time to earn my 6k gold an hour. Some of the money I'm NOT earning right now, will be there, through the added content that is to come. There will be more work for us outsiders to earn our way, and the path to land ownership will probably be a lot smoother at that time.

This realization made me feel quite a bit better about the progress of economics in the game. As long as the community is pretty carefully protected when the game is live from instant millionaires from unintended things like the tower issue, things will actually be a lot smoother for the lower pledges than I'd first thought, once you factor in the quest income.