Will the various lots with houses remain in place? What happens to pavers and decorations that the previous owner has placed?
They said on today's stream that as long as you don't change the biome or name you could move a town with anyone having to park their houses. But not sure if it affects anything to change owner.
Everyone I know that has sold to another player, the new player starts with an empty biome, myself included. Unless something has changed recently, this is what happens.
If you don't change the biome, it'll stay the same. When I got my town, all houses stayed in place, there was no change.
@Sannio taught me the rules for this the other day -- if the name changes or biome changes on a POT, it will require everyone to pack things up. I can't see their being a nuance to transfers requiring this, but I tagged him just in case. Still learning
On the Friday stream Chris was surprised to hear this. I am too. Not sure how a name change affects a transfer unless it requires massive updates in the DB. I suspect all the deco and houses in a town are tagged with an ID that relates to the owner of the town. Probably a massive hit to the DB to try and update all of that. Seems like you should look to eliminate whatever dependency there is to this tag for housing and go with a different relationship to the parent object. A house shouldn't need to know who owns the town, only the town where it is located and who owns the lot. The stuff on the property only needs to know the property that contains it and who owns it.
I was a bit surprised too about Name Change causing a reset. When taught, I learned some town change types are quite complex. It takes the magical powers of Sannio himself to accomplish the work.
A governor change does not require a reset of the town, but in 99% of cases, the new governor wants a clean slate, so it's almost a default action that they take (or at least it was in a previous iteration of the CS team). I had personal experience of this - when I bought my POT and ownership changed I made sure to ask at the time to ensure that I could give residents enough time to pack up their stuff. On release day it was all wiped. When I contacted support they apologized for assuming that as a new governor I would want a wipe.
Yeah, they shouldn't make that assumption. In my case, they did the transfer and didn't touch anything. They should always ask (or require that info before changing).
Chris isn't as familiar with the needs and best practices for POTs as I am. Which is OK, because I'm the POT guy on the team. (For example, he also didn't know until recently that we allow for interconnections with NPC Towns for POTs.
I apologize for that. I don't remember it, but it could have been my fault. We don't evict POTs because of an ownership change, but, for a very short time, I thought governor changes required an eviction of the town. I quickly learned that this wasn't required and I think only 2 POTs were affected. Again, sorry about that.
You're good, no apology needed - my post wasn't intended to kn oak you guys - you were super apologetic and very fast in getting things sorted out. The intent was to provide context on what _should_ happen