More houses available!

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More houses available!

Post by Warrior » Sun 15.11.2009, 17:28

Starting today, all houses owned by characters who have been inactive for more than 12 months will be reset. This is a change from the initial 6 month limit, which was deemed to be too strict. A handful of players were affected by the initial limit, if your character should happen to be among these and you would like the action revoked, contact me and we'll discuss it.

15-16 houses reset so far. The contents of the houses are either placed in the character that owned it, sold, or placed in temporary characters, the exact solution depends on the amount of contents, the quality and worth of the inventory and so on. An inscription has been placed on an item in the inventory of the previous owner, stating that the house(s) were sold due to inactivity. If items were moved to a temporary character the charactername/password is also inscribed on an item.

We appreciate that our players may have the need to step away from the game every now and then, but for the greater good of the community we consider it fair, as long as there is a housing shortage, to reset the houses of characters who have not played within the last year. If anyone have strong feelings for or against this, please discuss below.
-- Mangband Project Team Member

Thorbear
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Re: More houses available!

Post by Thorbear » Wed 18.11.2009, 17:34

I must say that this is a thing I like.
Altho, I'd say 12 months is a little too long to wait, but then again, we're not THAT many players.
I'd suggest 8-10 months.

If I had not played MAngband for 8 months (that's January 1st - August 30th) I'd hardly expect my char to exist, and would probably start a new one anyway.

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Re: More houses available!

Post by Warrior » Wed 17.03.2010, 22:13

More houses (around 10 iirc) reset the last week or so from long-time inactive players and/or players who had more than the max allowed two houses. Items inside houses 3-n either moved to the largest two houses or put in the players inventory). For some characters (where there were more items in the houses than room in the two largest houses + inventory) the extra items were put on sale as a one-month "limited offer" - whatever is still in houses 3,4,5 etc after this month (started a few days ago) will be sold with the house.
-- Mangband Project Team Member

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Re: More houses available!

Post by Thorbear » Wed 17.03.2010, 22:23

I believe I found one of the "special offer" houses already... And I do advise others to look for those... Excellents at low cost ;-)

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Re: More houses available!

Post by Warrior » Fri 30.04.2010, 21:11

The last few houses were reset today, now no characters have more than two houses.
-- Mangband Project Team Member

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Re: More houses available!

Post by Warrior » Sun 27.06.2010, 21:48

60 houses reset over the weekend.
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Re: More houses available!

Post by Thorbear » Thu 10.10.2013, 19:01

27 houses reset due to players being inactive for 500+ days.

If you think you've wrongfully lost your house, or cannot log in to your character, let us know.
I am Thorbear...

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Re: More houses available!

Post by Warrior » Fri 29.11.2013, 13:45

9 houses reset due to inactivity.
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Re: More houses available!

Post by PowerWyrm » Tue 03.12.2013, 12:31

The big problem currently is that the house code is quite crappy. Looking at the current instance, you have too much wasted space:
- more than half of the houses have pathetic sizes (less than 10 spaces)
- most of the town suburb levels are not grass land
- many "public" houses generated instead of normal houses

The first thing to fix is the code. I bet you can easily double or triple the number of available houses:
- rebalance house size: most of them should be medium size (same as in the town)
- town suburbs should be hardcoded to be grass land (wilderness generator should reroll until so)
- non standard buldings should be moved out of suburb

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Re: More houses available!

Post by Warrior » Wed 04.12.2013, 12:00

Good feedback PW and yes, we're very aware of these things. Which is why we've got house buiding lined up for the next version!

The idea is to have small houses (maybe even smaller than today) that can be expanded. But that costs money.

So basically:

allowing users to expand their houses = almost infinite money sink
smaller houses by default = fewer items for sale in player stores, especially early in the life of the instance. People have to give more thought to what they will house/sell
custom houses = just very very cool, an instance as old as ours now will definitely look different than what we have now, which is pretty static

So I think this feature should help with balance but also be fun for the players
-- Mangband Project Team Member

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Re: More houses available!

Post by PowerWyrm » Wed 04.12.2013, 12:38

What is fun is that I already implemented the custom house code in PWMAngband... but didn't even test it yet! I should do some testing, because IIRC you need house foundation stones to be able to extent your house... and I've never seen such item generated, ever (IIRC the depth of the item is 127 with a rarity of 100 or something ridiculous like that). I don't recall the feature costing money either... I guess it will have to be "polished".

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Re: More houses available!

Post by PowerWyrm » Wed 04.12.2013, 15:41

As I thought...

The current code for house creation doesn't work very well. First, you don't need money but materials that are rarer than a PDSM (and you need at least 9 house foundation stones to be able to create anything). Then the actual shape is not properly drawn (hard to even build a plain rectangle, not considering that wilderness areas have trees, water tiles and of course other houses). And when you have added a little back room to your house and pierced a wall in it, the house engine considers it as a completely new house... which you can buy and sell at will for 0 gold. And, of course, since each new area counts as a house you own and the limit you can own is two houses, you can only create one...

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Re: More houses available!

Post by Avenger » Thu 05.12.2013, 00:04

Just made a post about using the existing vaults as the basis for building houses. Not sure where it went, doesn't seem to have registered yet. Will expand on this idea if it never shows up.

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Re: More houses available!

Post by Warrior » Mon 09.12.2013, 10:17

Doesn't seem like the post made it, can you create a new one?

Might be a good idea to write it in a text editor first and then paste it here. Unfortunately the forum software is a bit outdated and could probably do with an upgrade. But we're hoping to get a "big" update going instead of just doing bits and pieces...
-- Mangband Project Team Member

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