Wills and estates

Why is it that when a player dies, their accounts simply vanish? If a real bank treated its dead customers’ assets like this, there’d be a massive scandal with hundreds of lawsuits and probably some criminal charges.

I propose a coded system for players to will their bank accounts and ships to others, or a clan, so the stuff actually goes somewhere when people die. Put a 10 day "probate" period on it so restored characters can keep their stuff.

The syntax would be something like:

will account <#> <player>
will account <#> clan <clan>
will ship ‘<ship>’ <player>

and so on.

If there were a working citizenship system, governing clans could set up an inheritance tax. Unwilled assets might revert to the governing clan, balance issues allowing.

There’d be problems then with players having more than one phome and breaching the three ship limit and who’s to say the stuff just won’t end up multiplayed across to an alt. Having it all drop off and end up for sale means people have an opportunity to scoop up ships for bargain prices and open up possible advances due to navs and the like being kept onboard the ship computer.
As nice as it’d be to have all your stuff go to someone i’d be more inclined to have it set to all go to a clan which you could consider a "charity" of sorts. Clan homes would be a cool addition to the game, you could use them like abroad offices/franchises and the like without having a shop keeper in the room all the time with people coming and going.

I don’t think homes should be heritable, at least without a complete rework of how homes work. The three ship limit can already be breached and isn’t that big of a deal in my opinion. As far as alts are concerned, the command can check if the beneficiaries are on the same account as you. It should be easier to enforce the rules with something like this than more basic mechanisms like leaving a locker open or a pile of goodies on the floor, since there’d be a 10 day window in which imms could discover the cheating.

Navcharts are another issue entirely; I’m of the opinion that they should be cleared whenever a ship becomes unowned.

Question: How to prevent people from abusing this system? Will <ship> aimbuddy

10 days later…

"OMFG LOL IMPERIALS KILLED THIS DOOD SECRETLY! I KNOW BECAUSE I INHERITED HIS SHIP!!"

Same thing happens now when ships go unowned, without a 10 day delay. If we want to obscure people’s exact time of death, things could be inherited at a certain time every day, and it could be random (something like 8+d4 days).

Meh. I see where you’re coming from, but in general I don’t think it’s a good idea. Sure, there’s potential for abuse, but that’s the case with every system. My objection is just that money is easy enough to make without inheriting tons of crap from dead friends. It just seems like it’d be a lot of effort to add a feature that really wouldn’t enhance gameplay in any way.

Why don’t we have notarized wills deposited in the file library up on the Fourth?

Oshit.. wrong forum.