Curious: How does Glitch deal with players who stop playing the game
The title says it all. Someone starts playing glitch, gets stuff, buys a house and then drops out. Do they ever get foreclosed on, or is their house just permanently owned by someone who is no longer part of the game.
This was a huge problem in a mud I used to play (largely because it had been around for 15 years, but the principle still applies), and I've been waiting for someone else to ask this question!
Some time ago there was talk about a tax or something of that nature put on homes and if they were not paid in a certian amount of time the homes would go back on market, this was just speculation so I do not know if it will be something that might be used in the future.
Miskey: Sounds a lot like the shop tax in Puzzle Pirates. If they player had enough money set aside for weekly taxes, then it was taken from the coffers. If not, they had a week to pay or they'd lose the stall/shop and the things in it.
If it's just a question of housing...AFAIK, they keep the house, but there's going to be such an immense amount of them it won't really matter. If you think about how many streets there are, and then multiply that by the amount of quarters there can be on each street, and then multiply that by like 10 (the amount of houses there usually are on each quarter), and factor in apartment buildings...well, that's a lot of houses.
I do think this is an issue. However I also don't think it is something that would be fair to enforce for anything less than six months, minimum. Sooo... considering the game hasn't been "live" for even two weeks... Well, wouldn't really solve that problem.
It is not just the number of houses - it is the potential of having whole streets vacant. It would be sad to be the last standing player on my street, when in 5 years I am the only one left Glitching.
The issue of how to disposition a house's contents also would be a concern. Now, the game could automatically just 'wipe' abandoned house contents before putting them up on the market. Or, a whole new facet of game play could emerge, where 'expired' houses go on an auction of some sort, and glitches compete to buy them sight unseen. Who knows what might be in that cabinet....
As far as I know, items left on the ground never 'expire' so for example if I were to stop playing, the piles containing dozens of full stacks of meat and milk on the floor in my house would persist indefinitely. The trees and animals would eventually expire.
If you were to assume that a user profile that was inactive for 6 months was 'expired', then the home of an expired player along with the contents of their inventory could be auctioned off, sight unseen, the same way that storage areas are auctioned off in RL.
I think that in a social game like Glitch, you don't want the landscape littered with abandoned housing any more than you would in, again, RL.
I think if they implemented some form of a person losing their house for inactivity, then the items should go in an escrow. It would suck to lose an irreplaceable item like Senor Pickle or the GNG Musicblock because you couldn't/wouldn't log in for 6 months or something. And heck no to the idea of having people's character inventory auctioned off because they are inactive.
I don't really like the idea of a house being taken away for inactivity, but I can see the reasons it might be necessary. At least it should be a very long inactivity with multiple warnings by email before it happens. And the contents, or at least irreplaceable contents, going into an escrow (even if it costs to get them out of it).
The way Three Rings handles this is if you've ever spent money on the game at any time, your account gets marked as immune to all cleanup processes. So if you never spend money, your account can get deleted for inactivity, but if you buy something even once your account will never be deleted for it. I think this game could possibly benefit from pursuing the same strategy.
@Toksyuryel, that could be a good start, though I'm not sure I'd implement the exact same strategy... Seems a bit arbitrary and not necessarily useful to restrict dead blocks of housing (etc) to inactives who've once upon a time bought clothing. I can understand the reasoning. I'm just not sure it's a complete solution.
If you've bought clothing, increase the time between cleaning would be a simple solution there. Say cleaning happens once a month, give them 6 months if they've spent money.
How about the inactive player only loses the address? House gets stored intact on the servers... Not sure what happens when player returns - sells and buys something with a normal address?
I'd go for returning player gets to select an equivalent home from the currently available stock. You might not be able to live in the same neighborhood, but your house would be restored.
Then if it were that important to you, you could try to find a house in your old neighborhood, sell the restored house (at the standard 80% rate) and buy something else.
I'd say after a certain inactive period (1 month? 3? 6?) you lose the house, the money you paid for it, and anything growing inside/laying on the floor. Anything in the crate I'd save; automatically place it into the crate of whatever house they buy when they come back.