Comments on Houses

With the recent Coming Soon items about houses, as well as constant discussion on the Crossroads chat boards and elsewhere, I have attempted to revise and expand my comments on houses to address a variety of new issues. As always, I am eager for comments from readers!

House Ownership

One reasonable and intuitive way to implement house ownership is with a new kind of deed. When a house is created, the builder receives a copy of the house deed in the bank. This deed is not a deed for building a house (like current deeds) but merely identifies the type and location of a building that already exists. The deed would be kept in the bank as all times. It would be used to change the locks on the building and as such it could be securely traded to change house ownership. The receipient of the trade would have the deed immediately transferred to the bank. By forcing the deed to remain in the bank at all times, it becomes very easy to check whether a person already owns a house (which is important if Origin intends to limit characters to one house; see my comments on converting existing buildings to the new rules, below).

The main drawback of this system of owner identification is that it does require the use of the bank, and would therefore not be accessible to characters who cannot access the bank due to their evil actions (except through exploitation of extra character slots). I do not think that house ownership should be limited in this way, and I am actively trying to think of a way to make this work for all characters. I would be happy to remove the requirement that the deed be kept in the bank if I could think of a way to ensure that people do not exploit this to purchase multiple houses, given that Origin intends a one-house limit. One suggestion (from Baxnal) would be to associate it directly with the character and have the character's building information be accessed directly from a button on the paperdoll; this requires a significant change in how houses are handled, but would be a good way to address the one-house limit if it is intended to be permanent. Another idea (from Psycho) would be to allow evil characters to have access to a banker at Buc's Den, who would only deal in building deeds (ordinary banking at Buc's Den would not be possible). I'm not sure if the code for that would even be possible, however.

Urban Sprawl

The ugly proliferation of houses in UO is a serious problem, and it will only get worse as time goes on unless some steps are taken to resolve it. It has become more of a priority since it is now apparent that the number of buildings and the items they contain are a large contribution to overall item count, which in turn is a major cause of lag. Briefly (and I may expand this section as I get ideas and suggestions):

• Improve vendors, a major cause of urban sprawl. As part of this, rework shops as discussed below, to allow people who don't want to have "shop" buildings to acquire the desired accessories (such as forges) for their existing buildings.
• Decay time time should be lowered again; eleven days is too long.
• Maintenance fees. My ideal take on this is taxes for buildings near town, and shorter decay times (along with other threats such as natural disasters) for houses in the deep wilderness.
• Make it easier to trade buildings -- many advanced players no longer want those 1-room houses they built, but do not want to let them decay into nothing. Provide a way to securely sell them.
• Make tents collapsible (i.e. you can break down a tent into a heavy bundle that can then be carried around, stored in a house, etc.). Use a blue-colored bedroll icon for the collapsed tent. In fact, all tents should be arranged this way (no tent deeds at all). Tents should decay much more quickly than ordinary houses.
• Consider a means of providing buildings with "hit points" related to their decay rate. These "hit points" could be decreased by attacks and increased by carpenters. Note that I do not particularly like this idea, as I see it being easily manipulated by evil players regardless of the limitations.
• Assuming the owner is identifiable in-game (see House Ownership, above), provide a way for the house owner to destroy a house. If PC-made buildings are implemented, make the destroyed house leave behind raw materials usable in a new building if desired.

Origin plans to address urban sprawl by limiting houses to one per character. Although I am opposed to this on many levels (it will be abused by the less-scrupulous, who use friends from other shards to circumvent it; there are better solutions) I think that it may have some positive effect on the problem.

Importantly, Origin has stated that the new restriction will apply to existing houses as well, which means that a method must be devised to identify the correct owner of all houses and convert old buildings to the new ownership-based model, with the new restrictions and features. I propose the following:

• Current keyholders of a given house are allowed to "claim" the building, as long as they do not already own a house or have claim pending. Perhaps the claim could be done by speaking to the house sign, as is done to set the house name; however, I would prefer something where the claimant must drop the key onto the house sign. This second method would make it very time-consuming and annoying for people who have large collections of ill-gotten keys to try them all.
• When the claim is issued, the sign notes the claim ("[claim pending]," plus a short comment provided by the claimant where they can leave a name and a means of contact) and the claimant's bank account receives a scroll noting their pending claim.
• If a real-life week passes after the claim, the (sole) claimant is declared the owner and their claim scroll is converted into the deed to the house (see House Ownership).
• In the case of competing "owners," all claimants must add their claim within a week of the original claim. After that time, no further claims are accepted, and the claim must be resolved:
  • The house is then unable to be maintained until all but one claimant "disclaims" the house by trading their claim scroll to one of the other claimants.
  • If the conflict cannot be resolved, the house decays; if there is a satisfactory resolution (most likely, one party buying out the others' claim scrolls) then the remaining party's claim scroll turns into the ownership deed for that building. (See the comments about selling houses below for how the large amounts of money involved here could be handled.)
  • An optimization would be possible here whereby someone with a master key (one that was created when the house was first placed, and which has the name "a house key" instead of "a key") would have priority over someone with a copy, which should reduce the number of conflicts to almost none. A potentially serious problem arises if the only copy of the master key is in the wrong hands, especially given the recent fiasco with vendors selling keys for a few gold pieces each, but overall I would expect the number of affected players to be very low (perhaps zero). The "master" key, although no different in function from other keys, has a unique component of the name which is not possible for players to alter: i.e., before the customized portion of the name, the "master" key says "a house key". The code for the claim process could use this component of the name and allow such keys to override claims of copies, for which that component of the name says merely "a key," assuming that both keys are otherwise valid.
• This proposal works on the assumption that most cases of stolen keys fit into one of these two categories:
  • The person with the stolen key doesn't know what house it belongs to, and as such the key is worthless, and the owner feels that the house is secure.
  • The owner knows that the house is compromised because the person with the ill-gotten key knows where it is. In this case the owner probably doesn't trust the house anyway, and would rather have it disappear than see it be used by the illegitimate keyholder; also, it is highly likely that the other keyholder has other houses to claim, and will probably not use up their only claim (or even one of their four extra-character-slot claims) for this.
  This assumption implies that there will be few conflicts, and those that exist won't end up any worse off than the legitimate owner is already: if the lost key had been matched to the house, the house was all but useless already. In the best case the real owner would be able to buy the claim scroll from the competitor at a price much lower than the price of a new house because the building, which will disappear if the claim remains contested, is worth very little to the competitor.
• After the house is finally claimed by one owner and the ownership deed is created, the locks on the house are changed and a new key is generated.

Shops

It seems much more realistic to be able to purchase "shop" props such as forges, looms, and the like for normal buildings (probably with a limit of one per room, just to enforce some semblance of reality). Such props would be for personal use (and the use of anyone who has access to the building) and would significantly reduce demand for new buildings, many of which are shops created simply for the prop inside. On the other hand, "shop" deeds should be more expensive than a normal empty house, and come with the appropriate item installed (optionally; a generic "shop" deed which would create an empty shop would also be available for a slightly lower price), and possibly a vendor as well. Vendors should be modified such that shops are the only types of buildings that can have vendors. Because the building would be for the specific purpose of running the shop, the vendor could be inside the shop, walking around, acting like a normal NPC shopkeeper (including the addition of the nice NPC-style shop signs, and perhaps even accepting money in exchange for training in the appropriate profession, as defined by the type of shop). A permanent, unpickable chest (with the same code that currently applies to vendors, such that the owner need not carry a key in order to operate the chest) in the shop could contain the vendor's inventory as described in my vendor essay.

The shop door could be left unlocked, and the building would not decay as long as the vendor was maintained. Failing to maintain the vendor would simply require the purchase of a new vendor; the items held would remain safely in the locked chest. Successful shops could use multiple vendors if necessary, in order to increase the amount of items available. Using a vendor deed would not place the vendor, it would place the vendor's chest; targeting the chest of a vendor who had died would create the new vendor based upon the inventory of the original.

Tents would also be able to support a vendor, but would be subject to a more strict decay rate (ideally, only one or two real-life days: tents should be set up, used, and disassembled as described above) and be limited to a single vendor, working off of the tent's built-in chest.

Existing vendors that would be invalid under the new system (vendors beyond the limit of vendors-per-building, vendors at the wrong type of building) would have to be handled as well. To do this, the shops could sell (cheap) "vendor conversion deeds" which would recover an old-style vendor for conversion into a new-style vendor. Using the conversion deed on an existing vendor would create a (normal) chest containing the vendor's inventory and a deed for a new vendor, and would refund the vendor's remaining time. Old-style vendors would be rendered inaccessible (even to the owner) and would decay over a period of one real-time week after the conversion deeds appeared in the game.

House Security

My idea goes something like this: if you ever need to change the lock, you must double-click the building's ownership deed, which would provide a targeting cursor to be used on a key. The key would then be the new key to the house, and all old keys would be invalid (since the code is likely to require the door to be nearby in order to change the lock, most likely the new key would require a special flag labeling it as a "lock-changing key," and the locks would be changed the first time it was used).

This has the additional benefit that you could now sell a house. Currently, hardly anyone would be crazy enough to buy a built house from someone they don't know, since that person could easily have another key. With this system, the buyer would receive the building's deed, and immediately create a new key for it. Avoiding death at the hands of the original owner would be up to the buyer.

Another great suggestion for building security (courtesy of Faceless) is deadbolts. This would enable Origin to make house locks less than 100% secure against lockpickers, because the main objection is that people can't always be logged on to protect their homes. Deadbolting would occur if the player locked the door from the inside, and the lock would then be secure against lockpickers (or even keyholders!). Attempting to Recall out of a deadbolted house would fail and incur a warning of some sort ("You don't want to leave the door deadbolted..."). This would also have the positive side effect of discouraging people from owning multiple houses (since a character can be inside only one house at a time), and would promote player cooperation since characters who share a building would have to agree on the times that the door would be open. This system would probably be exploited by mule characters to some extent, but is still an excellent idea.

Finally, it would be good to see keys wear out (this even happens in real life, of course). As long as some method for displaying the key's condition is provided, this would be a good way to discourage PKs from trying "found" keys (especially if they wear out much faster when used on the wrong door) and at the same time enhance the usefulness of the Tinkering skill.

Regarding security in general, I would like to make it clear that I strongly agree with Origin that nothing except bank boxes should really be 100% secure. Given that, I think Origin needs to devise ways to allow highly-skilled lockpickers to have a tiny chance of breaking into houses (for some ideas on this, see Faceless' rogue skills treatise; take his requirements for lockpicking houses and make them even harder and you reach my view on the situation), while simultaneously improving house security options in the ways discussed above and elsewhere. This would go a long way towards ending the constant complaints about break-in bugs since players would realize that their buildings are not intended to be 100% secure in the first place. Also, players' current reliance on the apparent 100% security of tent chests is, in my opinion, not a good thing; for 100% security, use a bank box.

Selling Buildings

In order to facilitate building sales (which, as discussed above, is a much-needed feature that would ease the demand for new buildings), it should also be possible to create a "For Sale" deed. This would work much like the deeds explained above in House Ownership, but would provide a way to create a For Sale deed that changes the door locks and does not issue new keys, thus invalidating all existing keys for the building. One way to implement this would provide a selection window: when you double-click the master deed for the building, you can choose to either re-key the house or convert the master deed into a For Sale deed. The deed would show the exact sextant coordinates and a description of the building, and the house sign would say "For Sale by..." and name the owner.

The money involved in a building transaction might be very large (more than anyone can carry; thanks go to Caligari for pointing this out), and might require the implementation of something like a "cheque" where a character can trade gold to a banker in exchange for a piece of paper worth that amount of gold if handed back to a banker. The cheque could easily be implemented using existing graphics and simple code, and I hope that Origin will consider it.

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