Selling & purchasing new plots

[Finkledbody]

Er, my Idea #2 didn't involve reserving anything. Let me explain it again, in case you missed it:

Idea #2: If you own a current plot, you can walk up to a New Plot, buy it right now and you immediately convert your existing plot's structures to Novians, all items in storage on that plot are dumped in your vault, your old plot is sold and becomes available again and you buy the new plot all in one button click with a giant "Are you Sure!?" confirmation.

No reservations. You buy it on the spot.

The only difference? You don't have to go back and manually de-con everything on your plot and pull all that stuff out of storage structures; the system does it for you. This eliminates the "I saw a plot, but by the time I got my old stuff deconned, someone else took it" as you buy it immediately right there and then, and you sell your old one immediately right there and then.

No reservations with my Idea #2.

I'm not understanding why you think people should lose more novians, all of the stuff in storage, and have to pay triple (!?!?!?!) price to buy the new plot?

That's just ludicrous.

it is a great idea. the only thing i dont like is everything in the storage going straight to vault. especially where some people in the game (including me) have 30+ silos, 20+ storehouses, multi-gh/houses with way to much in them. this would effectively make it the istarias biggest and best way to stuff ones vault with 1000+ items and 1,000,000+ bulk... hell. id go buy a plot. have it stuff my vault. rebuild my 80x80 plot in a week. fill it again. then demo it agsin. and again. Do it enough times til i dont even need my plot anymore. sell it, than reduce my sub to a basic and the game loses out...


still not a good idea

(plz forgive lack of proper puntuation and poor grammer as im on my cellphone )

[Steelclaw]

id go buy a plot. have it stuff my vault. rebuild my 80x80 plot in a week. fill it again. then demo it agsin. and again. Do it enough times til i dont even need my plot anymore. sell it, than reduce my sub to a basic and the game loses out...

Meanwhile, the other players who aren't interested in abusing "return-to-vault" rejoice at the increased usability of the plot system and buy an extra sub (or upgrade to a plotholder sub), since they no longer see having a plot as a source of frustration.

If you're hell-bent on stuffing your vault to the extent you describe, there are already mechanisms in the game that will do what you want to accomplish. Since you haven't done this already, I suspect that you feel it's not worth your time, and, even given the scenario you describe, you still wouldn't feel it's worth your time. The limiting factor isn't how fast you can stuff your vault, it's how fast you can get the stuff to stuff your vault with.

Anyway, sorry for singling you out. Your extreme scenario catalyzed an important point: we shouldn't focus on the mere possibility of abuse as a sufficient reason to not do something. We need to consider the type of abuse (e.g. whether or not other players are negatively affected) and what lengths are required to execute it. In some cases, the existence of the possibility of certain types of abuse is tolerable -- the priority to benefit common players exceeds the priority to deny a perceived advantage to an extreme minority.

That's not to say abuse is insignificant, it's just another factor to balance in to a reward vs time/revenue/whatever consideration.

[Dhalin]

And even if someone did abuse this, action could be taken against them.

How many players would really waste ridiculous amounts of resources/novians/time/money to exploit this?

Wouldn't it be easier to just list that crap on the connie and let the consigns time out?

[Dragonboy]

First of I like Gimthen's basic idea...

My idea in this matter.
1. You own a plot/lair.
2. You spot a better plot/lair.
3. You buy the new plot/lair on the spot. No 25% or 50% downpay, but the full 100%.
(Coin from the old plot/lair will be returned the moment that you sell it to community)
4. You get max 12 hours to sell the old plot or it will be done for you @ 50% novians *)

*) Personally I would vote for NO novians returned when the timer runs out considering the game should consider it sold to community without being deconned, but I would leave such a harsh decision to the dev team.

Perhaps it would be possible when this option is used that a magical buff is being placed on the buyer so that the timer can be viewed at any time during the move.
Off course the timer should keep running while the player is offline to prevent exploits.

[Thicklesip]

I'd love something like this to make "upgrading" one's land-holdings less aggravating. I could see it encouraging more people to take advantage of subprime land when starting out, even.

The biggest problem I can see with the proposed "buy now, have a short grace period to finish transferring it all" is newbies/the uninformed engaging in bouts of Wild Mass Clicking or otherwise inadvertently buying a new plot they didn't really want, failing to read the warning about "no really your old plot is poofing shortly, go clean it out", and then running crying to Customer Service. I don't know what proportion of Istaria's land-owning playerbase has the... quirks that could lead to such incidents, but I assume it would happen at least once. And it makes my heart go out to CS.

I don't think it would be enough of a problem to mean this should never be done, but I do think there'd need to be some careful design with the potential snafu in mind.