What is a good price increment for kingdom lots?
This boils down to the question how many lots one can reasonably have as a project and how many people should be required from a certain size on to participate in the purchase of lots. If one ever only – by reasonable standards – to have one “private” lot and another 2×2 larger project lot, we have 5 lots that should be somewhat affordable for example. For larger projects one should either be really rich or have others support them in buying and building. The current 250k Uncs for 5 lots is a bit on the high side for that.
We can argue that larger builds need 3×3 as a size as well, so 10 lots would be the right number in that range. Specially when one needs to occupy land that is not along the lot borders such as a larger island, this becomes helpful. Beyond that 3×3 sice, I think that builds would become either unmanageable or ambitious beyond a reasonable level – as a single project to be done in a 1-man show.
Then there is the question how much one should pay for 10 lots – in the latter case.
[Update:]
Something completely different than just price limits:
One option that just came to my mind is to make a limit how many lots one can have by checking how many they gave back so far. This would mean that you cannot get 2 lots if you have not given one back so far. So with each lot that you give back, you can increase the limit of lots that you can own in the kingdom. Example:
Everyone is allowed to have x+1 (main) lots in kingdom. You start with 1+1=2. Once you give one back, you are back at 1, you can get 2 new ones (2+1=3). Give those 2 back, and you get 3 new ones (3+1=4) and so on. This way we avoid people starting mega-projects in 2×2 spaces that they can never finish because they cannot even finish a 1 lot build. We might still make incremental pricing, but the fact that someone has finished a lot of builds allows them to increase their size with the assurance that they actually do something with it.
[/Update]
Please comment below with your opinions on this matter.
I think that 1-2 Kingdom lots are more than enough for most 1-person projects. So, a reasonably high prices, allowing people to afford 2 lots during reasonable time frame (say, 3-4 months) is quite normal.
Fully agree. The question here is however how to prevent people from buying 2 lots EVERY 3 months and never doing anything worthwhile with it.
I know I mentioned something like this before, but I’m pretty sure the comment was accidentally deleted, and I’ve had a few ideas. What if the whole Kingdom Lot purchasing was isolated from the player entirely and new lots going forward were sold to a “project”. That way, Empire is for players, Kingdom is for Groups. I know this plan is rather ambitious so even just parts of it could be used.
When a new project is started, the initiator then chooses a name and writes a description and decide on a size that they’d ideally like the project build to be. It could be 1 lot (likely 1×1), 4 lots (2×2), or 9 (3×3) lots. These lots wouldn’t have to be purchased all at once, but it shares more of an intent. That should be enough for a project, and ideally if the project requires more land, they could apply for it as a 2nd project “expansion” after they’ve made significant progress on their first area. If we went this model, I feel like we could go back to a flat price, but 10,000 uncs seemed a little low, we could raise it to 25,000 or 50,000. Although, I also feel owning a Kingdom lot should allow ownership of the corresponding Draftlands lot upon a single purchase. (Only Elders, and possibly Masters would have World Edit permissions)
This also raises a question of if there’s a larger project, what should happen to it if a leader goes offline. I think for the number of specified lots chosen, there should be a required number of project owners, who are able to actually purchase the lots (up to the project’s maximum) and add/remove users to the lots. It could be something like this:
• 1 lot = 1 owner
• 4 lots = 2 owners
• 9 lots = 3 owners
And a user could only be an owner of 1 project at a time.
Regarding what’s involved in a project:
• The lots (Kingdom/Draftlands)
• Purchasable deposits (by owners) that project members can use and owners can see withdraw/deposit logs
• A designated in-game and discord chat channel.
• Purchasable warps (by owners) which project members can use to get to key areas such as storage and major build sites.
I fully get your point. In the end, the common deposits, accounts, warps are the only thing that’s tricky to manage as a group build. Everything else we have already managed with owners/members or they won’t go away even if we have teams (such as who gets rewarded etc).
If people don’t get the lots in a set from the beginning, it does not make a big difference since they will want to reserve them. Maybe they can pay later, but that’s just a matter of time, not actual price. You would essentially loan them the money since nobody else would be able to get those lots in question.
Not sure if we can create designated in-game chats that are linked to the discord in an automated fashion, but manually it’s surely feasible. The cleanup of this stuff is more tricky once people don’t work on a project anymore. I want to avoid that discord looks like a minefield with 2 dozen dead channels :D
The whole team dynamic needs to be treated carefully. First of all, I don’t want to re-write the towny plugin, this whole thing can get very complicated. Second, the whole issue of responsibilities is quite messy. You mentioned the “what if the leader goes offline” already, but there are several more. Can we have several “owners”? If the whole thing goes down, who takes what of the account, deposit etc? How do we treat theft/griefing? Who is tracking what?
Multiple owners does sound pretty tricky. But I do like the appeal process for additional kingdom lots with people who pledge themselves to a project. The members per project area Luke proposed sounds reasonable. A kingdom could start out with 2 users next to each other and expand from there. In order for those 2 users to expand they need to create a build group (possibly with one recruit).
Could this be done through the current interface? A certain number of users need to apply to a Build Group in order to have access to their own chat, kingdom lots, and warps?
My biggest worry right now is if we cannot even agree & setup a working system for 1 user owning a lot, the discussion on how to implement a group system is a bit out of scope, no matter if feasible or not.
So far I have not gotten any feedback if we want to make the lots expensive or limit the purchase quantity based on the amount of returned lots.
I think a blend of both. Maybe just a price increase with a lower limit on main, non-road lots. Like 25,000 or 50,000 uncs with a 4 lot limit at a time if we were to do one user?