Phomes

I had a string of ideas for updating the phome system to fall into a similar vein as past MUDs I’ve played. In prior MUDs, you had to spend whatever variation of the “quest point” system they had to buy and upgrade your homes. Since the only form of currency we have is the Credit system, and since credits are rather trivial to obtain, I figured this could be something either tied to someone’s bank account, or cost a rather large sum of credits to do. Some of these ideas would require some extensive work to the phome and structure system, but then again the phome system has been needing a nice update.

1) All player homes would have to be made within a structure flagged for something like to “Apartment” or somesuch. This would require adding or updating a flagging system for structures (honestly, I don’t really know if there are flags for structures) to separate “Base” structures from “Apartment” structures. The reason for this is because this would tie into the survey skill that engineers have. Instead of surveying for suitable structure locations, they could instead survey a VALID direction (N, S, E, W, NE, NW, SW, SE) within a structure for phome placement. The initial phome cost from survey could be the same as actually purchasing a phome (100,000 credits). Now to prevent abuse, this home would be “bound” to the person who surveyed the same way that buying phomes do now…only one per character. Now you may ask how people who can’t get survey are supposed to get phomes. Easy: Tradehome <amount>(maybe) <target>. This would allow the engineer to sell the rights to his home to another player along with all the rooms created within (more to come on that later). Should the engineer wish to simply get rid of his home, it would refund 75,000 credits just as it does now and untunnel every room that was created (again, more to come on that later). That way, anyone wanting to create another phome there would have to pay the initial cost and “retunnel” the room in that direction.

2) Survey within a phome would bring up a list of options:
Add a Hotel flag
Add a Locker flag (I have a reason for this)
Add a room in a VALID direction
Add various upgrades to the home (More to come on that later).
Each of these options would cost a specific amount to add to the home. You would be able to add more rooms in various directions up to a certain point…let’s say four or five rooms total including the initial room. Included with this would be the ability to desc and name every room to the engineer’s desire. Obviously, you would want to have one of the rooms to have a Hotel flag so you could sleep there. Now the reason I added the Locker flag is because with the way the phome locker system works right now, along with the ideas I will list later, it is way too easy to simply peek into and raid someone’s phome locker even though everyone knows the latter is illegal. With what I have in mind, it would only make it that much easier with the current locker system.

3) Phome Upgrades: This is something I would like to get some thoughts on.

Home Guard: The reason I have this as an upgrade is because my idea is to no longer have phomes be no entry for anyone but the owner/residents anymore. Instead of having auto-privacy, you would pay to hire a guard for your entry room who would immediately eject anyone who isn’t the owner, isn’t on the resident list/doesn’t have a pass, or doesn’t have the warrant empowerment.

Alarm System: Either along with the home guard, or a completely separate and mutually exclusive, upgrade would be an alarm system that would warn you with maybe a beep and flashing light on your datapad that someone attempted to/has entered your home without permission/warrant.

Keypad Entry: Sets up a keypad lock to your home. Extra credits could be paid to upgrade it to shortproof, but not bashproof or cutproof.

(Need more ideas)

This is something that just kind of swirled in my head over the past half an hour. Considering that engineers could potentially be involved in something like this, it could pave the way for “Contracting” clans, Housing Development/Housing Market clans, etc. I think it would be a cool addition and would welcome thoughts on the matter.

–Kirash

I’ll go ahead and say the reason I like this is that it would open up a chance for more phome availability. What I mean by that is, Joe snuffy buys a home on we’ll say Arkania. This his alt buys the home next to it, and so on and so forth. When Joe Snuffy dies, Geoff Snuffy (no relation of course) runs in, and buys the same home. This story, while it might seem pointless, has some merit. At the beginning of each TL, people rush to buy homes, and they are all bought in the first couple weeks. This cycle continues, where homes stay relatively bought, and those who weren’t fortunate enough to land a home, never get one <see large homes on Mon Calamari, Corellia, etc>. So, I’m all for this.

At one point after a few of us voiced a concern about the very topic of ‘home squatting’ the imms went around and unowned any home on Coruscant (possibly other planets as well) that had a owner inactive for more than x months (I believe it was 6 months at the time.) I suspect if we were to do this again many homes would be freed up.

The issue isn’t inactive home owners. It’s home owners who die, run to the same house with another alt, and jump on it again. You’ll have the same person live in the same house with 8 different alts and have other alts who have lived next door all era. Not to mention to make your alt considered ‘active’ you only need to sign on maybe once every couple days, then sign right back off. Maybe make it 1 or 2 houses per account. That would clean up a bit of mess.

We’ve actually had a way for quite some time now (ever since a new phome system was introduced) to ses the past and present owners of a home, and how long an owner may have been idle for. So yes, if you are someone who constantly camps a home across characters I guarantee you its been noticed and noted 😉

Addressing kirash’s OP, one of my current pet projects is a phome expansion (500 Republica, for thd canonically minded) with apartment upgrades based…well, the easiest way to describe it would be similar to how home decoration works in the most recent ‘Fallout’ games, where purchasing upgrade packages from the concierge will apply a cookie to the apartmemt and furnish/upgrade it with various items. We’ll see!

Ralen, my whole thought process behind this was actually finding a way to integrate survey into phomes since it seems entirely unlikely that player-built structures will be a thing anytime soon. Restructuring survey to allow it to work on player homes would give it some better functionality and allow for a wider spread of player engineers instead of your basic ship botter, armor botter, and weapon botter. You could throw in a feat that would reduce the cost of upgrading player homes or such, but with how fluid the credit market is, that would be kind of pointless. However, I think we both can agree that the player home system does need a revamp.

Edit: Someone may suggest adding a new command to facilitate a new phome system, but why add more commands and skills when we have one or two collecting dust that could be repurposed instead?