Excelsior

Keep in mind this is just a proposal, just something I was chatting about in global.

- Houses that are near the time to fall / decay

Perhaps make it a bit like Storage Wars, the TV show. People could get a look at the house around the outside, but cannot walk inside the house, or look inside any of the containers within.
The auction would be held either once a week or bi-weekly.
There would be a minimum silent reserve that must be met, and perhaps the same for a maximum?
If 2 or more players meet the maximum, then a roll of the dice to decide on a winner.
There would be a minimum increment the bid must reach.
The winning bidder has total and full loot rights to the house, and only to the house. The physical location and house itself is not a part of the win.
The winning bidder may bring friends to the house to help remove the items and containers contained within.
A GM will summon the winner to the location once, it will then be up to the bid winner to maintain a way to get back should they need to leave and return for any reason.
The house must be looted within 24 hours of the winning bid, after such the house will be decayed normally, leaving anything remaining inside free to grab.
Bids are non-retractable, those who bid without the funds to cover a bid will be ejected from the bidding process for that day's bids. The bider(s) must have either the gold coin or checks in their bank. Mithril bars are not acceptable.
All wins are final. In the event of a dispute, the staff has the final say. Period.
You may only win one bid once per bidding session. (be it weekly or bi-weekly)

Conversely, you could also make this a completely blind bidding process. All that would be known is the size of the house. No locations, names, or anything identifying the previous owner of the house will be given.

What I would like:
Feed back from players, young and vets alike, and even +GMs about this idea. I want to help construct this proposal in the best way that attempts to make everyone happy. I am not just gonna give to this +Colibri and hope. He's way too busy for that. I think that if we come together as players and really think this through, he may look into it. It would be a nice gold sink for the shard.

Space holding for now.

I dont believe any players items should be repossessed & auctioned off just because they havent logged in for a while. IDOCs dont need any more vultures.....

i like the idea.

pros:
reduces gold in the economy.
adds excitement *what does it hold*

cons:
more items into the system. *i know they were already in there dormant*
sore losers

i would suggest that the gm's also give an item count of the house. that way your not bidding on a empty house, or should we because that might be funny.


personally i like this idea sounds like a lot of fun. wonder if there is some way ingame (no staff help) which can be scripted.

Love storage wars!!!! And this is a great idea. Would add some more excitement to the game. Its kind of like the casino room we have. Really up in the air what you get. Could be afew empty bee hives or loads of good stuff!!!!
One idea. Put house up on the raffle stones with a gate to the house. Locked of course. And only one ticket per person so noobs and vets have the same chance.
really would like a GM's input.

I totally disagree with this proposal and I’ll tell you why:
1. Currently this reality show takes place every month and any player young or veteran willing to put forth the time and effort can identify and secure the contents of a collapsed house. It requires no staff participation and the rewards are related to the effort put forth. At most maybe 10 to 15 houses fall a month with most of those belonging to players who have played less then a year and usually the contents aren’t worth more then if u spent the time killing Balrons instead of stalking the house. If you don’t mind Omnipotent I prefer the term House Stalker rather then VULTURE, but don’t really care what you call it. Yes, I am one of the House Stalkers of the shard and enjoy doing it, it goes back to the days of live UO when house spots were at a premium and the house contents were just a secondary bonus. It is a side pursuit to my play style and to those of others on the shard.

2. Any type of auction/bidding system always favors the richer members of the shard regardless of any type of failsafe mechanism attempted to thwart it. Have you ever noticed how long a young player attends an auction, about 5 minutes after seeing the bids. Was it any surprise that Iago won the fireplace raffle today, not to me. Is it any surprise that premium grand auction items always go to the same players, not to me. Now we want to hand them house contents because they have the most gold, ack no!!! Would rolling dice for a tie at maximum bidding price even the chances for a less megarich player, nah, the megarich have guilds and friends to ply with gold to get them to bid on anything they really want thus giving them overwhelming odds in any die roll.

3. Would this proposal keep prime house spots from falling into the hands of the winning bidder, of course not, the winning bidder would have the inside track to the location and know when the house would finally drop. A house dropped two screens from town center yesterday and I was able to get a two day old player(Asheva) in that spot just for an example of prime spots not going to the rich!(Of course he had to follow me around and loot Balron corpses untill he had enough gold to place a house, hah!

4. As per house contents if shown the location, the majority of the time the relative value of house items can be gaged from just a cursory trip around the perimeter of a house. Hrmm, well there are 280 ED’s locked down on the roof I guess I’ll bid this one, this one has 5 mill mithril inside the wall I guess I’ll bid this one. More practically it’s like well this house has 15 dead beehives and some dead plants and a few 100lb chests, some crappy furniture and a dragon statuette. I’ll give ya 10k for it. Not much of a gold sink. Now there are some premium houses that fall I won’t lie, but they’re few and far between. Having players bid blind without any inspection will only lead to player discontent as many, many houses that fall have little or no value to their contents.

5. In conclusion I believe there already exists enough hand outs to those who are more financially well off in regards to Grand Auctions, Young Auctions and raffles. Leave it to those young or veteran players who are willing to put forth real effort toward being there in that one hour(yes only one hour) when that houses contents is sitting on the ground before it all goes poof. Now that’s a gold sink!!!

I am gonna have to agree with Arrow on this one, after attending my first auction a few weeks ago. I have never been there when a house falls, but I can just guess the time and effort that goes into figuring it out and keeping track of it. I have been by quite a while after a house has fallen and was happy to grab a few items that helped with every day stuff for me.

I have tried to House Stalk/Scavenge, whatever you want to call it...I suck at it! I always forget !!

So...that's my 2 cents (which is about what my bank balance looks like compared with the people that bid at auctions )

How about we go back to the old days of just [wipe ing the house and contents ? Less items on shard and instant free house plot to the first that finds it

From a player standpoint, the old system of house drops events was the best and so much fun. However, I think mainly due to item count this was changed to the current system.

I have no way of verifying it, but i believe staff use their inside knowledge of what houses drop and when, then go harvest the items with their player characters and then either sell or use the high end items. I have a few reasons to think this, but sharing them would likely only get me in trouble, so i'll leave it at that.

Highly doubt it, I believe our staff has alot more integrity then you're giving them credit for. Rarely do I see anyone I don't know at a house collapse, and those I do know that are there are definately not staff members. If you did happen to see them around a house spot that collapsed it was because I called them to remove any leftover yard items or Christmas trees.

Melkor wrote:From a player standpoint, the old system of house drops events was the best and so much fun. However, I think mainly due to item count this was changed to the current system.

I have no way of verifying it, but i believe staff use their inside knowledge of what houses drop and when, then go harvest the items with their player characters and then either sell or use the high end items. I have a few reasons to think this, but sharing them would likely only get me in trouble, so i'll leave it at that.

The original system was fun..

And nothing against staff but anytime you have staff that also are players this usually does happen, sorry no one is perfect.

Omnipotent wrote:I dont believe any players items should be repossessed & auctioned off just because they havent logged in for a while.

While i'll agree with Omnipotent here, if IDOC's do exist there is no reason why it can't be done via auctions. This said, Mithril should always be accepted as payment in all cases. It's currency, isn't it? An easy way of handling very large quantities of gold. Double clicking on Mithril redeems these bars.

If gold consumption is the goal with auctioning IDOC's, then you may find an open biding process more apt to drain larger quantities of gold. And if this is the aim, then gold coins, gold checks and Mithril, aught to be removed from the auctioned house.

If all this should be done, it would only be fair to account owner to relocate any ED's from owners house to their bank box. Primarily because ED's have a high chance of someone paying Real Money for these and should not go to the pockets of those who did not labor for it.

Trygg wrote: If all this should be done, it would only be fair to account owner to relocate any ED's from owners house to their bank box. Primarily because ED's have a high chance of someone paying Real Money for these and should not go to the pockets of those who did not labor for it.

Only the original owner labored for the items. Why should the EDs be sacred?

Rich greedy people crack me up, mithril and ED's in payment for IDOC's, what gold-plated world are you living in. Get up off your over-stuffed wallets and earn it if you want it, not everything is going to be handed to you on a silver platter.

arrow wrote:Rich greedy people crack me up, mithril and ED's in payment for IDOC's, what gold-plated world are you living in. Get up off your over-stuffed wallets and earn it if you want it, not everything is going to be handed to you on a silver platter.

I'd like to ask that you do not confuse the middle class with real rich people.