Excelsior

The official ones that +Nyx runs.

Like my suggestion of making a special area for people to have their deco houses in

Why not an area, probably green fields, for the competition houses?

You sign up, you get an 18x18 or joined 18x18 allotted (0 slot of course) and a house-house teleporter to place in one of your regular houses.

World teleporter access so people can go view. (Possibly limited to between the entries closing and the place being cleared)

Then when it's time for clear down, it can be done automatically with gold from customization going back to the entrant, and any items going to a moving box in the designated house. (ie: where the H-H teleporter was)

That is an awful lot of extra work for me; and for an event that is already more work than is really enjoyable for me. There's no real benefit to doing it this way, either.

it frees up housing spots on the regular maps!

culichi wrote:it frees up housing spots on the regular maps!

Not really, I'd just use the old deco house as a regular one instead so it wont free up any space there lol. I think its fine the way it is, we get few enough deco contests as it is without adding more work to +N's already full plate.

+Nyx wrote:That is an awful lot of extra work for me; and for an event that is already more work than is really enjoyable for me. There's no real benefit to doing it this way, either.

Not really more work for you +Nyx.

I envision it as more work for +Arden or +Colibri, like they have nothing to do.

Once the system is coded however it should be easier, and more configurable if they decide to go that route.

It would free up some housing, though not a great deal.
It would make it easier for newer players to take part in the deco contests. (The 0 slot houseing aspect of the idea)

Before got to last post, I thought yeah that's something we can do, quite easily now that we have instancing.

There can be a signup stone, it makes a fresh instance with 2 joined houses, zero slot, sets you as owner and creates a gate to it. Then just a little button somewhere to demolish the whole thing, after the event is over. Since the whole instance belongs to one participant, nothing can go wrong with either placing over someone else's house, or over some existing structures.

Though perhaps it's better if contestants decorate their own houses, so that others visit and there's some life to it. Not just a blank canvas that gets demolished after the event.

I like the way its done now, often I have accidentally wandered into a deco contest item and had a little tour.

I am not sure this is a problem that needs solving, especially since many of the more elaborate entries contain alot of unitubbed items, yard wand items etc rares. Beyond that the amount of time it takes to make anything remotely cool with uo tiles takes some time. I just can't see the same level of detail being put into a temporary house, with no potential to keep it permanently when the contest is over. I think in truth it would decline the quality of the entries.

I see no reason to reinvent the wheel in this way, especially since the results end up with something less engaging and interesting. The plans you have outlined for housing (+c), using instances etc will heal any remaining need for a such a change.

I like my deco contest entries woven into the world map more naturally, and see no reason to alter that.

There's nothing wrong with the way it is now, and I don't want to see these changes. If we're talking frivolous coding additions for deco contests, then I would rather have a simple way for entrants to add the house gates to their entry plots themselves so that I don't have to spend extra time placing gates at the display area and then at the entrants' houses. That would significantly benefit the efficiency of the contest and make it easier, and more fun (since then I can spend what time I have looking at the entries instead of dropping gates for hours), for me to run them.

I like that the houses are in places that people could randomly happen upon, I like that players can keep their house design forever if it ends up being something really special. I honestly wouldn't be interested in running them if they were more sterile - as Yoda said, people wouldn't put as much effort into something that they had no control over its destruction. It would diminish the contest, imo.

Furthermore, I'd really like to NOT see everyone throwing coding ideas at +C and +A. I have been waiting nearly 5 years now for Elysium coding, +V has waited slightly longer for Touria coding, there is an enormous pile of bugs with all the current things getting pushed out to the live server lately, and the server has been very unstable in the past few months. These are all things that, IMO, need to take absolute priority and the rest of us need to not collectively contribute to coder-ADD by distracting them with ideas that reinvent the wheel for no real reason.

coders have ADD?

gotta go there seems to be a shiny object waving in the breeze.

just relearned how to post images your all so screwed now