Petition to fix apartments & economy - stop the sprawl!

[sundae22]

1. Allow main city apartments to be regioned
a. Enforce strict regioning and quality requirements.
b. Charge a fee for region requests (substantial, such as 5k per apartment) to limit the requests & staff effort. This will also serve as an important money sink
for the economy.
c. Apartments not meeting the requirements should be phased out over time by the community and staff in a fair manner as they become inactive
d. Require apartments to meet certain criteria such as having a lobby, restaurant, pool, and plot size requirement.
2. Fix regions
a. Why does nibble own like 200 inactive properties? Why are there plots that have been unregioned completely (z-tower for example)? There are quite a few
towers by /warp city with no owners.
3. Stop the Sprawl!
a. More plots, cities, and islands won't fix the economy/the playerbase. Using rent as it's meant to be used and bringing the community closer together will fix it.
b. More trade, PVP, roleplay, and economy sinks. Don't make apartment ownership a profitable activity, but a fun one for veteran players to help new players!

1. This would level the playing field - however, the last time I checked there were 80 pages of 18-per-page unrented apartments, so there's around 1,440 vacant apartments at any given time. That's insane, so we don't need more apartments at all.
a. I generally follow guidelines that apartments need to be at least 8x8, but perhaps this can be changed. I completely agree that there's too many low-quality apartments out there. We should have more requirements for apartments, like requiring an interior or setting a new size limit of at least 150 square blocks or so.
b. If there's a $5,000 fee per apartment, it would be a deterrent for having them regioned, which is great.
c. The plan was to unregion bad, small, etc. apartments and reimburse the building owners. The big problem with that, though, is paying for the reimbursement. We don't really want to bring money into the economy for that.
d. Having a lobby with wall space for apartment signs is already a requirement, and forcing people to waste floorspace with a restaurant or pool isn't that good (in my opinion). But it's something to consider.

2. N/A
a. I'm slowly selling his 80 properties, keep an eye out I'm not sure why some buildings are unregioned, they must be super old.

3. I'd love to reduce the city size, but it's kinda hard to implement, especially with apartment buildings. We'd have to remove all the regions, then move the building, then re-region the building and all the eligible apartments inside. We'd also have to keep track of who rented the apartment & for how long, then physically do that as well, along with setting the landlord for all of the apartments. And moving the houses would mess up the 'naming system' (it's already inaccurate but it'd do it even more). Personally, I'd love to consolidate the city. Perhaps the regions could be renamed as well - we'd just have to mail all the players... TL;DR I'm willing to organize the city and fix the region names, just say the word @nibble. It'd take quite a while to do, but I've always wanted to rework the city.
That being said, there's cons to 'fixing' the city. Players may be kinda hostile about it and say that they loved the location of their homes. Also, renaming regions isn't ideal for the same reason - personal connection. But if everyone's willing to take a sacrifice so the city is actually navigable, great!
a. No argument from me here, we need to bring the community together (in my opinion).
b. Apartments wouldn't exactly.. exist if there wasn't some sort of monetary gain. Most people are greedy, honestly.

 

[ItzJazzMade]

At this point there is no gain either. I would say higher standards. In my mind 10 apartmentbuildings on a nice location hosting 200 apartments in total with facilities like restaurants, pools, cinema etc etc.
Good looking 15x15 minimum apartments.

These buildings could be sold but for a lot. Apartments should be something for the rich.
These apartmentbuildings would be so good looking that new players dont crave for a house. They would provide services like public sf and crafting so people dont need more space.

Just a small vision on what apartmentbuildings could be.

 

[virek]

1. This would level the playing field - however, the last time I checked there were 80 pages of 18-per-page unrented apartments, so there's around 1,440 vacant apartments at any given time. That's insane, so we don't need more apartments at all.
a. I generally follow guidelines that apartments need to be at least 8x8, but perhaps this can be changed. I completely agree that there's too many low-quality apartments out there. We should have more requirements for apartments, like requiring an interior or setting a new size limit of at least 150 square blocks or so.
b. If there's a $5,000 fee per apartment, it would be a deterrent for having them regioned, which is great.
c. The plan was to unregion bad, small, etc. apartments and reimburse the building owners. The big problem with that, though, is paying for the reimbursement. We don't really want to bring money into the economy for that.
d. Having a lobby with wall space for apartment signs is already a requirement, and forcing people to waste floorspace with a restaurant or pool isn't that good (in my opinion). But it's something to consider.

2. N/A
a. I'm slowly selling his 80 properties, keep an eye out I'm not sure why some buildings are unregioned, they must be super old.

3. I'd love to reduce the city size, but it's kinda hard to implement, especially with apartment buildings. We'd have to remove all the regions, then move the building, then re-region the building and all the eligible apartments inside. We'd also have to keep track of who rented the apartment & for how long, then physically do that as well, along with setting the landlord for all of the apartments. And moving the houses would mess up the 'naming system' (it's already inaccurate but it'd do it even more). Personally, I'd love to consolidate the city. Perhaps the regions could be renamed as well - we'd just have to mail all the players... TL;DR I'm willing to organize the city and fix the region names, just say the word @nibble. It'd take quite a while to do, but I've always wanted to rework the city.
That being said, there's cons to 'fixing' the city. Players may be kinda hostile about it and say that they loved the location of their homes. Also, renaming regions isn't ideal for the same reason - personal connection. But if everyone's willing to take a sacrifice so the city is actually navigable, great!
a. No argument from me here, we need to bring the community together (in my opinion).
b. Apartments wouldn't exactly.. exist if there wasn't some sort of monetary gain. Most people are greedy, honestly.

Thank for replying! I appreciate the response. Just a few notes.

I understand the optics of asking to allowing regions again while there are pages and pages and crappy apartments. I'll give you some options to consider:

1. You can remove the regions and give the owner the opportunity to bring the apartments to standard by making them bigger & improving the property. No new money in the economy and it's fair, and ultimately lower amount of apartments.
2. You can enforce a rule where if a user wants new regions, all of their properties must already meet the requirements. This will motivate apartment owners to fix existing before building new--or they can simply sit on what they have until they become inactive.
3. Thanks for selling the properties! And yeah--there are many simply unregioned plots in the city or areas that were started and never finished.
4. I don't recommend moving apartments, I think we can solve this without doing that over time

People love the city, and this is sold as an RP server. We're losing those elements I feel and it's becoming more of a "own & build properties" type of server.

People are greedy, absolutely, which is why this needs regulation. In the past, people tried to make apartments as profitable as possible by squeezing 1000 apartments into a square box. I actually do think apartments would exist (I'd participate for example) without monetary gain. They could work more as trophies or community hotspots. It gives this server something to do endgame.