Why the needless emphasis on housing?

According to Richard, at a given time housing will only be available to <20% of the players and one person can have multiple houses, making it effectively less.
This does not change, no matter what percentage of the players desire to have a house. Those who work the hardest will secure one, yet it is a local fallacy that this means it is available to everyone.
(If everyone wanted a house and worked the same hard, still 0nly 20% or less would get one at a given time.)

What you say here reminds me a little bit of the person claiming no one could tell her a true statement about the number of plots, yet, I am fairly convinced it will be a positive integer representable in a computer =)
I'd like her tell me that statement is wrong.

Is it really?

 

For me, the only reason housing or land-owning was important was because of the crafting and player vendor aspect. I wanted to relive my "heyday" from UO where i was a blacksmith but also enjoyed exploring and adventuring... I paid more to get to citizen so that I could secure land that I could have a vendor and a place to make goods and sell them to fellow players....

With the upcoming pre-alpha release 2 where we now get to actually try crafting ourselves, this will really help me know if the investment was worth it or not. I hope and pray it was, I have only been burned once by a kickstarter funded game once... the rest have all ended wonderfully with my being a very happy customer. I am trying hard to be optimistic, but this emphasis many ppl have on land owning is frustrating. Yes, it would be lovely if everyone could have a safe place to call home, but life isn't fair, plus we are still so early in the development cycle of this game that we haven't seen much... let's try to be patient and see what actually is done. I love a good debate and deep conversations about design... so please keep that up, but let's keep where we are in mind and not get too ahead of our selves when we aren't even at alpha or beta yet.

 

Incorrect: Housing is available to everyone. But in the beginning not everyone will have a house. In the beginning those who have pledged high enough will get it, then those who wan buy it in-game. There may be a sort of prioritization, but everyone working hard for it will eventually get one (or a second).
Second mistake you make is assuming everyone wants a house. You dont know that and have not proof for it. When you have numbers, you may again claim that everyone wants a house. Until then its just opinion.
Third, you choose to ignore the fact that its more fun some times to work for something than to have it handed out to you (general speaking).

 

20% at any given time does not mean its unavailible to 80% of the players, and that is exactly how you try to make it seem like.

An open market, and with 'Decay' , it means that there WILL be houses for sale at any given time. Hopefully the ingame rent to lots will be high enough to only make it worth it to have a house if you are acually active.

In post after post, you try to make it sound like Housing will only be availible for those who pay for it with real life money, and that this is bad for the game.
I strongly belive you are wrong in both statements, because without house backers, there would be no game ( Therefor , claiming that its bad for the game is highly incorrect ) , and there will ALWAYS be houses to be purchased with ingame gold.

 

Just to toss this out there as well. I know for a fact that some ppl who have an interest in this game, have absolutely no interest in land owning or houses. One of my younger siblings, Joel, as well as one of my closer gamer friends, Kris, are both extremely interested in playing this game... mostly due to the fact that 1) There is NO MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION FEE... which for ppl like many of us who are on a budget find EXTREMELY WONDERFUL... and 2) They love exploring and would rather explore then be tied to one location as a sort of "home base".... My game style is different then theirs... I like a home base and going out from there but always returning.... I like to accumulate things, they tend to keep the necessities and sell off the rest.... Different game styles help make multiplayer games interesting... I know it made games like Borderlands 2 with my friends more fun. Yes, starting out a small amount of people may be the sole ppl who own land, but don't forget.... there are future expansions that are planned... the world could grow by a high multiplier and suddenly 70% of ppl might have at least a village lot size holding...

 

I hold to my first post in this thread... let's try to be patient and see how things develop and how things end up.... speculation can cause more problems and just frustrate ppl to the point where the game becomes no fun before it even comes out....

 

Not sure I understand your first sentence with all the commas. However, it is unfair because the focus on Housing is related to funding the game. Its like saying PBS has no right to sell coffee mugs because that is not what PBS is about. Housing is a limited resource like rare cards. Its meant to be something with little use other than cosmetics which will be traded in game, and to give people something in exchange for funding the game.

I disagree this is a core feature, or even marketed as one. They are focusing on it because people have funded the game at high levels to get it, and I doubt people that put in that much money want to get little to no information on its progress. There are many features the game will have but we have only had 1 pre-alpha session which one could say was barely playable. Not sure where housing would fit in the final marketing for the game, but it would not be the first time something was marketed that was only available to a very small niche of the market.

You can never please everyone. No matter what people will mis-read reviews and make assumptions on advertising and not be happy. Until the game is in final form, it is hard to gauge how people will react. Toys have been misrepresented for decades and there has been little fallout over it.

Where is the conflict? I guess if a person can only have fun if they have a house then maybe that is the case, but I do not see what they are doing much different than what LOL is doing. In fact, RG has made direct references to it, but LOL was funded traditionally so there was no need for creating incentive to the community for funding. In SOTA you will be able to obtain a house in-game with in-game resources: the only difference is this is a limited resource. Not to mention there are mechanics in place so things can be recycled so those that are not active will loose their spots. In the end, there is a game there beyond housing. In fact I would say housing is even not part of the game itself: its more of a side activity. I think you are mis-reading Portalarium responding to community interest in their funding campaign to advertising and marketing a final product.

In the end, getting involved in a game this early is not for everyone. If you want guaranteed access to housing that is why they have the pledge levels to help fund the game. This model is not for anyone and I don't think anyone would fault people by not jumping on board.

 

Read my example carefully. I said: "If everyone wanted a house and worked the same hard", which of course includes putting the same exact work into upkeep, so at most city and town lots would decay (as higher upkeep is required) or all would decay.
The unjustified simplification I made was to assume there is only one type. So that is wrong.

I would also like to humbly ask you not to read things into my posts that I do not say. It makes discussion very difficult as you try to refute things I have not claimed =)

 

One aspect that is commonly overlooked is that this game attracts fans from all Ultima series games, most of which were not online. It also attracts people who have never played an Ultima game but are thrilled that a new old-school rpg is getting developed. Using myself as an example, I only played UO in beta (way back in the day). All of my other Ultima experience comes from U4-9. It is my U4-9 experience that lead me to this project, not UO.

I believe that there are a number of backers that have no interest in playing online. For those offline players, there is no competition for housing.

 

Oh I apologize. I am German and we love our long sentences.
More than 20 years ago, among my first exposure to Engish other than school, was reading The Lord of the Rings, where sentences 1 page long occur =)

Yet, it has been repeatedly called a "core feature". In fact this is my whole point: They need to make up their minds and consistently also use the same description in advertising the pledge campaign and the game.
Just look at the homepage right now: "Live and play here" and "Robust home decoration" take up half of the page. The FAQ linked is very superficial, making things no better.

My own experience is due to failing to recruit backers from my former UO pool of contacts. In particular after looking at the site for 20 minutes, two of them straight out said "I don't buy pay to win games". I spent another half hour argueing that this is not pay to win yet their impression persisted. This was on two different occasions and my wife had gotten similar remarks.

As far as LoL goes: The starting funding was traditional, but all of the upkeep and expansions are funded by artwork!
Once this game rolls out there is not much need to fund episodes 2-5 non-traditionally.

 

So how do you suggest funding the 2-5 episodes?

 

Any attempt at guessing any figures/percentages is FUTILE.

Besides. After R2, the focus may shift from housing to crafting.. or both..

I think maybe they are currently focussing on what they can say is implemented?

 

I totally forgot about the offline players... my father is a big gamer too... he was the one who introduced me to the Ultima series back in the 1980s... He plans on getting the game too, but for him it will be offline mode... so yeah housing is no issue at that point... Great call Koldar!!!

 

I am yet to hear a single solution from you to the thing you keep complaining about, the so called " problem " of housing.
There is nothing to discuss, as you keep making false claims based on your own assumptions about a problem that few people even see as a problem.

There is no such thing as a situation where everyone work as hard for the same goal, So i don't know what you're trying to do , as im quite sure its not trolling. Or?

 

Depending on how many copies they sell to non-backers upon release, no microtransactons or sale of in-game perks might be needed at all.
So the funding could be a mixture of the two models or purely traditional.

In fact I am an optimist: I hope they will sell enough copies to not have to worry and can subsequently pick the best model from a design perspective rather than out of a monetary impass, and of cousre also make a nice profit on top.
However people who regard this as an investment also for year 2-5 should be aware that like for any investment, the future is uncertain =)

 

'Cause we likes our houses of course.

 

I don't see this as any kind of investment. Unless you plan to sell your account on ebay later.

I think people wanted to contribute to a game they believe in and want to play.

 

If you would have access to the developers blog, stand-up corner thread, you would know the emphasis is about 1% on houses, they can't show you the code to make avatar do this or that, or even show you that because you haven't cared enough to pledge to that level, look at the prosperity items, there are more of them than houses & you can have one like it or better with in-game effort. Sometime you can take a.blank paper, put a small black dot in the center, hold it up to someone and ask what they see. They'll say a black dot, even though there is 1000 times more white to look at.

 

Housing is important to some people and not to others. I am again going to state: Most people, in my experience, do not care about housing. Now, someone who does 'need' a house can work to get a house in game or buy a house before the game begins.

PLUS, they surely will find new ways to create more housing options for people if the game is sooo big that 80% of the population is without a home and they actually want a home. AGAIN I will say, WE HAVEN'T EVEN STARTED PLAYING YET. How do we know there will even be any issues with enough housing?

 

I am sorry that I can not convey my thoughts better, yet what you replies suggest, is not what I talk about at all.
I will add you to my ignore list and suggest you do the same. This way we will not bothered by our mutual misunderstandings =)

I hope you will have a lot of fun on the forums and in SotA, both pre-alpha and upon release!