Thoughts and discussion on One house limit per account

[Pech]

So with the recent housing stream it was revealed houses would be limited to one per account. While housing is still not out and we dont know much about how this will all play out. I really cant agree with the decision to limit houses. While I understand 100% why they are doing this and how people could grief or overexpand. I feel like it directly goes against a lot of the sandbox elements of the game. I want to talk a bit about some issues that may pop up from this limit and would love to hear other peoples feedback on this limit. What pro's/con's does this bring to the game.


To start with I came from Archeage which also had an in world housing system that honestly worked amazingly. real estate in Archeage had a genuine value and people would place plots down just to resell them to other players. This added an entire real estate aspect to the games economy that I haven't seen really in any other MMO. Mortal is giving us the oppertunity to give permisions and keys to other players and potentially even letting us set permissions for specific doors and rooms in a house. So we can in theory rent out housing to other players without them needing to build it themselves.

This however isnt possible in Mortal. You can rent your own house out of course and rooms in it but the ability to just make a second house and sell it to a guild mate isn't possible. I can still help someone make a house, but the possibility of trading or selling land is significantly hurt.

Moving to another house will also be a pain. Because of the one house limit. I will be forced to travel back to wherever my hosue was build. deconstruct it, then transport all the goods back to the nearest town and eventually back to the house I want to make. THEN I can place the plot down. As opposed to just being able to build the second house then deleting the first house later. This is also the case for if I want to upgrade from a small house to a medium house. In any other game I could make the seccond house while using my first house as storage. In this game I would have to deconstruct the house first before even placing the planning down. Giving me nowhere to really store my items.

Any guild leader who wanted to make guild structures such as a dedicated Guild Bank house will be punished as well. Want to have a small house to serve as the guild bank like a storage shed? Cant do that because of the one house limit. So for me personally I will need to double up my personal house as a Storage shed and give permission to all my members to access it. I basically can never have a personal house wherever I want because I am stuck placing my guild bank in a central guild location so we can share a bankspace. If you want to own a stronghold for your guild you also wont be able to make a personal house.

To top it all off, Its not like this one house limit will actually stop anyone who plans on griefing with houses considering most people have a seccond account anyway. And those with 3-4 accounts will be able to place 3-4 houses. So this feature will only punish people who choose not to buy a seccond account. I personally only play with one account because Im just not sweaty enough to grind up two characters and dont want to pay two subscriptions. But others will do this and they will still grief other guilds by using their alts to make small houses in key guild territory.

A minor thing I hope they keep in mind when TC comes out. I really hope there's a difference between housing and player shops and structures. And if so I wonder how limited those will be. Will I be limited to a single store? Or will we be able to build those things freely?

To end off. I am excited for housing but worried about this one house limit. While I doubt this limit will significantly hurt the housing update, I am worried for all the frustration it may inevidebly bring. To clarify I have not played MO1 enough to know how the housing system functioned there so I am perfectly okay with being 100% wrong on this. But I feel like the limitation for houses should be the price and upkeep

If your an MO1 Vet I would love to read your thoughts on a one house limit and how that may affect MO2. Please be nice :c

 

[Najwalaylah]

My brief thoughts are

• that it's reasonable, if MO2 players are given more than one continent, to allow at least one house per continent.
• that two houses on one continent is a reasonable limit, one that would solve some problems @Pech mentioned without creating some kind of absentee landlord, mass vacancy, or other housing market -problem. Rent one out or migrate between both.
  • Six continents? One account could own up to a dozen houses, but no more than that.
  • The Royal Bank of Tindrem or any other conglomerate would find it hard to own the mortgage on 'everybody's' house at once, though I expect that someone will try something like mortgages.

 

[Farligbonde]

I think they could make it so the the upkeep for the second house is more expensive than the first one.
So if for instance the upkeep for the first house is 100 g per week the second one is 200 g per week, in total 300 g.
That way you can have one house and build houses and sell to other players, because if those players dosent have a house already, the upkeep would still be 100 g for them.

And i think guilds should have a seprate system for houses, connected to the guild that dosent affect your private house count.
So if you for instance have 2 houses you can build a 3rd one that is tied to your guild.
If the guild cease to exist, the guild house will decay and cannot be used anymore.

 

[Dracu]

what you mean? Just buy more accounts = more houses... ez... pay2advantage? Who cares!

 

[Tzone]

Yeah I would like to see instead higher cost per second house and beyond. I will have multiple accounts but if you make it only account based couldn't be fair to the people with only one. The fairest way is to tie it to time instead of IRL cash. The upkeep on extra houses would make it possible for active players to have multiple houses with one account like people with multiple accounts but keep the house limit down by upkeep cost.

 

[Dracu]

Why would a limit of 1 even be needed? Could be a limit of 3 perhapts 3 Per account seems fair.

 

[ArcaneConsular]

Idk I actually like a lot of the limiters on the game like one char, book reading and houses just because it prevents people who play all do from having a massive advantage. Most players aren't going to have more than one house. It also forces people to be local which is the route the game is going I guess so it might as well stick to it. Unless they want to change and then just add teleportation

 

[Tzone]

Idk I actually like a lot of the limiters on the game like one char, book reading and houses just because it prevents people who play all do from having a massive advantage. Most players aren't going to have more than one house. It also forces people to be local which is the route the game is going I guess so it might as well stick to it. Unless they want to change and then just add teleportation

Its only gonna hurt you. Everyone who is serious has multiple accounts, there for multiple houses.

 

[Amadman]

I agree %100 percent that the one house limit in MO1 was broken.

Being able to make a living off of building, buying and selling houses should definitely be possible to do in the game.

I would have done it in MO more but the limitations where much to restrictive.

 

[SirVirtuo]

TLDR, i like the one house per account limit. With the expected 10,000 people, that's a LOT of potential houses! And more continents are a long long long way off, so that argument has nothing to do with release, and can be changed later on in the game.
This game is made in a way that decisions are important. What points to spend, what guild to join, where to put your one house. Can't just get greedy. Yeh some people have 3 accounts, but crying that that's not fair won't change that they're paying starvault for three accounts.

 

[Xunila]

I agree %100 percent that the one house limit in MO1 was broken.

Being able to make a living off of building, buying and selling houses should definitely be possible to do in the game.

In the early years of MO1 I used one account with my fully skilled architect just for house and keep placement. I placed the deeds, helped building and later transferred the house (or even keep, I placed two or three keeps in MO1). It has been a job for guild mates and for alliance friends and even for other players.

So, please, allow two houses per continent. And it would be fine for me to restrict the two houses by a distance limit with a minimum distance between both houses and larger than let's say 30 minutes travel time.

 

[Yeonan]

The 1 house per account made sense when housing spots were pre-set and limited in number.

If they are going to have free placement again, there shouldn't be a hard cap.

Design the system in a way that it's naturally limiting, not arbitrarily.

 

[Amadman]

In the early years of MO1 I used one account with my fully skilled architect just for house and keep placement. I placed the deeds, helped building and later transferred the house (or even keep, I placed two or three keeps in MO1). It has been a job for guild mates and for alliance friends and even for other players.

So, please, allow two houses per continent. And it would be fine for me to restrict the two houses by a distance limit with a minimum distance between both houses and larger than let's say 30 minutes travel time.

Right! The character that dedicates their life to such a profession should be able to have a house of their own as well.

 

[AssassinOTL]

I sat down to think about this because at first I also thought it was not a good idea and a lot of economy like real estate agents would suffer lol, but then I thought about it a little more, and If you give this community an inch they take a mile. The houses are free place, so lets say there's a FF that doesn't like fighting a specific mob, they will place their house on that spawn, and if it's a rare spawn, goodbye mob until you can siege it. and we know this community has players with alts, who might try to use free placement assets to block stuff off, and now they have to think more carefully so they don't use their one house unwisely, or have a throwaway to annoy the population of players, unfortunately this is the community we have, less QOL because of actions this community has taken in the past. so I'm torn on the subject. if there's a thriving community and they hit that 8k to even out, and that's a low ball estimate, that's 8k houses at some point o.0 if you double it and we get a high amount of players numbers start looking silly

 

[Banespike]

If you have 1 house = 100g tax fee per week
If you have 2 houses = 150g per house to a total of 300g per week
If you have 3 houses= 200g per house to a total of 600g per week and so on.
for small houses it could work, scale it up if people got bigger houses and it’s fine I think.
It’s just a idea, but it could work without limitations for players.
If a player is super rich let him have 2-3 houses with a big upkeep
It would be a natural limitation.
iam also fine with 1 per account. But if players can own more then 1 house per account it’s also cool content for house traders

 

[Najwalaylah]

This is why I did not venture to suggest more than two houses per user account per continent, keeping in mind that 8k palyers for Mortal Online 2 would be the minimum the game could get along with, according to Stuff Henrik Said.

The houses are free place, so lets say there's a FF that doesn't like fighting a specific mob, they will place their house on that spawn, and if it's a rare spawn, goodbye mob until you can siege it. and we know this community has players with alts, who might try to use free placement assets to block stuff off, and now they have to think more carefully so they don't use their one house unwisely, or have a throwaway to annoy the population of players, unfortunately this is the community we have, less QOL because of actions this community has taken in the past. so I'm torn on the subject.

If a thing can be done within the rules, it will be done:

• Free placement on top of a spawn, as part of resource-based warfare
• Free placement to block a specific point, where (IF) any chokepoint exists

And that's why I like this idea,

make it so the the upkeep for the second house is more expensive than the first one.
So if for instance the upkeep for the first house is 100 g per week the second one is 200 g per week, in total 300 g.

.... which gives a small incentive to sell one of those two houses when money is tight.

• Without knowing if, either at 1 or 3 hundred gold in upkeep a week, the financing will ever be tight for house-owners.
• Gives me the notion that maybe if you build the best house that's possible in the best location, you might rent it out for enough to cover upkeep on both your rental property and your personal domicile elsewhere, and then some.
• How important is location, location, location going to be? That kind of depends on how well the 'regions' idea works.

Bug it's hard to think it fair that architect characters had so much trouble owning their own houses:

I agree %100 that the one house limit in MO1 was broken.

Being able to make a living off of building, buying and selling houses should definitely be possible to do in the game.

I would have done it in MO more but the limitations where much to restrictive.

In the early years of MO1 I used one account with my fully skilled architect just for house and keep placement. I placed the deeds, helped building and later transferred the house (or even keep, I placed two or three keeps in MO1). It has been a job for guild mates and for alliance friends and even for other players.

So, please, allow two houses per continent. And it would be fine for me to restrict the two houses by a distance limit with a minimum distance between both houses and larger than let's say 30 minutes travel time. (Emphasis added for a fine additional suggestion.)

Right! The character that dedicates their life to such a profession should be able to have a house of their own as well.

... and it wasn't just these two players who had that problem. The system that creates this situation should be avoided, somehow, in Mortal Online 2.

I'm sure everyone who cares about being housed at all is looking forward to playing with building Houses after the next patch,
as per the Housing and Building Stream form Henrik: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1209170328

 

[Bernfred]

So, please, allow two houses per continent. And it would be fine for me to restrict the two houses by a distance limit with a minimum distance between both houses and larger than let's say 30 minutes travel time.

i think only increasing upkeep costs the more assets you have or/and like you said a radius around an existing house as non-build-area but no artificial limit which you can abuse anyway is the best way imo.
its still a sandbox game and artificial limits should be the very last solution to fix smth in MO2.