What I propose is an alternative to the current house building system. What this would entail is the creation of quite a few 'cookie cutter' rooms in hometown cities. These would either be branches off of existing inns or townhouse style rooms branching off of streets. The townhouse style homes would all have the same room description and the inn rooms would all have the same description. All the rooms have lockable doors that are open and unlocked by default. The rooms are also designated as storerooms, so their contents are saved.
The actual use of these rooms would be as follows. First, a player must find an unused home or room. They enter the room and enter a command like 'rent' or 'claim' (these might not be the best options for commands since 'claim' is already used in the game and I think 'rent' is a command used in other muds for some kind of save/quit combo). Upon entering this command, they are told what the price for the room is (probably around 2 platinum per RL month for an inn room, since a RL month is an IC year and 3 copper/night for a year is a little more than 2 platinum). They either agree or disagree about renting the room. If they agree, the price for the first month's rent is taken from their bank account and a key for the door is put in their inventory. The room is now 'theirs' as long as there is enough money in their account to keep paying for it. They can leave items there and they will be saved. They could buy furniture, chests, armor stands and weapon racks to keep in the room.
There are a couple issues I could forsee arising with this system in place. First is the problem that there might be a huge rush on housing. In other words, these rooms come into the game and suddenly everyone who plays logs every one of their alts and buys a room. To help balance that urge, I think there should be a minimum amount of kismet, a minimum level, and a minimum number of hours on a character before that character can get a home. This prevents totally new players who may not stay with the game from snatching up housing and it prevents rarely played characters from snatching up housing.
Secondly, what happens if someone buys a house and never returns to use it? The first problem with this is that someone might rent a room, put things in it, then run out of money in the bank. My feeling on the matter is that if someone can't manage to keep 2 platinum in the bank to pay for their home, they shouldn't have the home. In this situation the room reverts to its unowned state and any items that were inside are lost (sold to cover unpaid rent). The second problem arising from this is that someone might rent a room and have loads of money in the bank, but still never come back to use the room, depriving active players of the opportunity to use it. There's no easy solution for this, but the best thing I can think of is using some kind of modification of the 'finger' command. The game already keeps track of the last time a character was logged on, so by using some sort of modification of this, it might be possible to create a command whereby a player could stand outside the room (let's say for this example that they're west of the room) and use a command like, 'status east'. This would check if the character renting the room to the east has logged on within the last 6 RL months. If they have not, the game keeps a notice for them so that the next time they log on they are asked if they wish to keep their room. This notice stays in the system for one month's time, after which the room reverts to its unowned state. Items inside the room are purged (donated to charity due to the 7 IC year absence of the room's owner).
This is all just an idea I had today and I haven't given it a terribly large amount of thought, so if you see any flaws or have ideas for tweaking the system, please comment. Some of the solutions and systems I mentioned here are not ideal and could probably benefit from additional perspectives. Furthermore, this whole thing may or may not even be feasible, so comment on that too
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