Excelsior

I'm not suggesting all of this at once, but it's ideas you can take away from it. I have my own personal RunUO shard not online, just testing things out, and I also have the [townhouses feature you all implement on your server. I'm thinking why not extend that and actually put some use into it?
Make almost all the vacant buildings rentable/buyable. Not only that, but also be able to own the entire city itself by owning it's main building, such as a castle/city hall. When you own that building (Now this is when scripting gets rough), you receive most of the income of the people renting and buying buildings, and be able to buy vendors for the city with that money. And since pocketing the money you earn from a city is wrong, make a separate economy, such as tokens or EDs (not saying use them, just saying examples), where you can buy vendors for your city, guards, and in umbra and luna, there's 2 arenas outside of the cities that the king/president/etc can spend the money to spawn monsters for people to watch fight and etc. Plenty of ideas can be taken out of this, but I think it would be cool to actually own a city instead of the NPC's owning everything. NPC's take the fun out of games by filling places players should.

The idea is intriguing, and unique. Aside from the ridiculous amount of coding this would require, I'm skeptical of a few other things.

Firstly, owning an entire city in itself, would severely limit the amount of people who could "own" one. There are, (correct me if I'm wrong):
- 17 Trammel cities
- 3 Ilshenar cities
- 3 Malas cities (6 altogether, if you count the new map)
- 1 Tokuno city

Altogether, that would permit 27 players to own those cities, with roughly 400-500 people who play here. I've always been a strong advocate of a neutral economy, and this, beyond a reasonable doubt, would simply thwart any attempts at newer players making it anywhere. As for "NPCs owning everything"; well, that's customary. I've never heard of a game where the players own everything.

On a side note; I do actually appreciate the idea itself. But one factor you're leaving out, is that this shard isn't PvP, and that would mean that one person would consistently own one particular city, or however many others. These sort of ideas fall under guild wars, etc. I've always approved of any ideas to add a new land mass that would permit guild wars, (friendly of course), just to bring a true sentiment back to guilds. Now, they're all tree-house clans. The idea could use a lot of work, but as I mentioned above, the coding would be extremely strenuous and time consuming.

As I said, just ideas to take from it. And the fact that there's 27 cities, means that only vets can actually own them, instead of some newbie who came across a fortune and has no clue how to handle the city. And of course it would be expensive, so if the person wasn't making enough from income to handle holding the castle, and falls into debt, then he is removed from his throne. You can throw ideas in there and modify it to your liking.

I think if it was extremely expensive so in fact a guild would have to own it or a group of guilds. That would be awesome.

Ah, well the only thing that really concerns me in it all, is inflation. The "king" would be able to dictate vendor pricing, which means only the "kings" have control of the market. Whether it be a someone whose been here 2 months, or someone who has been here for years, no one person, or group of persons, should dictate the economy on Excelsior. A few people have moderate control over it, and we've seen where that's gotten us.

As I mentioned before, and as Craig suggested, permitting guilds to own cities wouldn't be such a bad thing. The city would be run by a combination of people, all the while the "king" being a vet. Reason I say that is, there are not many guilds in Excelsior that could pool the money together to purchase a city, without the assistance of someone who has been here for quite a while.

There are far more ideas I could throw into the mix, but what's here is complicated enough.

Would be a cool feature, but the coding... and it would increase the "differences between the rich and the poor". That is, a player who already has 20 mil in the bank, or let's say if it's 50mil, would be able to make an investment, and then stay rich for all eternity

Well it could also be that you rent a town, and set the rents, and then if it happens that you make a profit that's one thing, and if you don't even cover the town rent with the house rents, then you've made a loss. But anyway, it's not exactly a one-afternoon coding project, plus, it would most likely make rich folks richer.

As for inflation, well the gold wouldn't be created. The gold would just change hands, therefor in theory no inflation should occur (though the rich players would have even more gold, and the bids at auctions would probably be bigger hehe).

Also, many players are used of certain buildings where vendors are... although we could sacrifice a town or two, and get rid of the vendors, we can't just throw them all on the street and make it player owned

Oh and keep in mind, that townhouses are only rentable. (with an exception of a few that we sold at an auction). It's because, even if a townhouse is for sale, even at a very high price, eventually someone would buy it... and well very few of those players that played here 2 years ago, are still active players - but their houses still stand, since they refresh their account against it being wiped due to inactivity (which is all fine by me). But imagine if we sold out the houses 2 years ago... Today, most of the good town houses would probably be taken, and i don't think they would be released anytime soon. But if it's rent, the player either doesn't want to pay for it anymore and demolishes it, or runs out of money, and so it becomes available for someone else again.

Like I said, just ideas to take from it. I would like to see more townhouse features though. I see plenty of vacant houses in towns that I think people would rent out. I believe other players would love to rent out more houses in towns too. I like custom houses, but I also like having a house conveniently located inside a town itself.

Years ago, I played on World of Dreams. On that shard, which was run on a POL server I believe, just about all of the buildings were available for purchase. I remember owning one of the static homes on Moonglow. Many of the vendor shops were purchased so players could set up their vendors inside right next to the npc vendors. It was a really neat thing to go into the different shops and see how people decorated them.

-Cyric

I went around this and built my own city! would love to own umbra in the other malas think its magda can't recall and I live there lol...

I own a house in Lakeshire... So does my wife!

Yeah, Lakeshire is a rather exclusive community.

On the subject of "continuing wealth" for the owners of a city... Perhaps, (hypothetically, of course) coding could be implemented that would initiate random monster invasions of player-owned cities. If the current owner has not utilized his income appropriately (by spending a sufficient amount on guards, for instance) then he/she will suffer the consequences of seeing their investment burned to the ground.

Another point, since we're already speaking of a massive amount of coding, if I may... Perhaps a "popularity" vote could be utilized. Vendor prices too high? Vote against it. If the popularity of the person in power drops too low, perhaps npc vendors leave the city. Perhaps they revolt, and begin some other riotous behavior (let your mind wander on this).

IF owning cities comes to pass, it should be a great chore to be able to do so. The daily upkeep of a city is nothing to scoff at in real life, and in the interests of keeping the economy from spiraling totally out-of-control, some of the same issues should be faced by player-owners as well. Maybe after they've dipped into their own pockets for a fair while, they would gladly hand the city over to someone else, just to save what money they have left.

Just a few more ideas for the thread... sorry to whomever might decide to code stuff like this!

if the king says the prices are this or that and you don't like it go to another city. . the only thing i have concerns about is someone who doesn't mind donating 300 dollars to get 150 (depending on current prices) mil. . you could always faction the server into multiple universes like trammel/felluca. but... that takes resources. so really there could be infinite numbers of towns. it's just the coding (i don't know anything about it. but i could imagine what it would take).

invading monsters cool idea!! or hurricanes/tornadoes, opposing towns with spies. etc... sounds like another game i played. hm... daoc? hm...

I like the idea of owning and managing a city that has forces working against it (monsters, natural fenomena, and enemy NPC). This sounds like a fun addition that would require a mayor that's willing to put in the time and work into keeping his town running.

There is a shard that has an exclusive player run economy and a few cities that have the townhouses rentable so that people live in tight communities. There was also a unique voting system that had regular elections to vote the "mayor" in or out based on the decisions and policies that were set for each city. I found this to be an interesting concept. I also noted that people collected every resource on the shard and were very competitive on their pricing. Anyway the point is the code is out there and may already be in script form on runuo forums...