Currently, anytime you set foot on any piece of property, you get a giant, obnoxious full-screen warning that you are trespassing and threatened with expulsion (or promptly teleported away) unless the owner opts in to allowing people to be on their lot.
This renders a sizable percentage of housing zones essentially “no fly” or no travel areas, including when you are flying across to visit others. It also prevents people from even accessing public features easily that border the player’s property.
Other games to my knowledge do not implement such an aggressively anti-social feature. For example:
FFXIV: Players can wander freely around exteriors, but may be restricted from entering interiors
Ultima Online: Players can freely wander exteriors unless encroaching on a house they have specifically been banned from
It is also dramatically more aggressive than its real life equivalent – not that we need to mimic society 1:1, but it’s at least worth considering how people rationally have approached this problem in the past. That is, we do not arrest literally everyone who touches our exterior land unless we consider them bad actors. By courtesy, we generally tolerate a little bit of encroachment – think, e.g., unexpected visits by neighbors or friends, delivery drivers, and utility workers. We pay that back by being considerate about how we treat others’ property* and weigh their motivations (*YMMV depending on your neighbors I guess, but I hope you get the general point).
If you are going to keep this feature, I would propose one of the following less stringent changes:
Exteriors allow free travel, but interiors can be locked/unlocked (e.g. FFXIV’s style)
Exteriors allow free travel , unless the encroaching player is on the home owner’s ignore/property ban list (UO’s style)
Exteriors can be locked down, but this is opt-in, so the player has to consciously want to restrict their property (less stringent version of the current system)
The policy, in how it is currently implemented, is sociopathic in nature and has no place in an MMO.
Even just a couple second delayed timer before the full screen warning kicks in would be great to not break the immersion for a player just passing through going somewhere else.
Easier method. Home is set to private, phase it out from being seen by anyone not the owner or who they allow to see it. Anyone passing through just sees an empty lot, no need to kick anyone out moving through it.
I totally agree, I’m really hoping they change this feature before it launches because I don’t see the point of being able to fly if you are teleported out at every section. Maybe they didn’t realize when they added this in that it be that bad.
yeah, to be honest it makes neighborhoods feel hostile and antisocial. exteriors should be public by default, and the map should show each plot’s privacy
Interior private by default, yard public by default, seems a simple enough solution for everyone.ncolor code the icons on the map. Red (Neither), Gray (Only Exterior), Green (Both), Gold (Available to Purchase). Problems solved for everyone, Easy to implement, Easy to change settings still. Easily checkable prior to wandering for RP through town. Everyone wins.
I also find this extremely annoying. I have a compromise here, if a player wants me off their lawn, PvP should be enabled and they should personally do it.
I think that hiding restricted plots would result in a poor experience where large numbers of neighborhoods might be full of empty plots that aren’t actually empty.
I feel the OP presents the best options in this case. Make it default “anyone” for exterior, allow the user to control it for a conservative option. Specifically making a blacklist only system for exterior I think would be best to prevent breaking immersion.
Interiors I feel are fine, with except maybe making friends and party default to allowing access.
Housing is inherently a very social feature, and encouraging that socialization should be the default. Already made friends on PTR which hasn’t happened in ages.
This is the right solution IMO. Have some small N seconds elapse, 5 tops, before the warning, and then just a few more before the ejection. That would let you fly comfortably low and approach the town hub or a house you actually intend to visit.
I keep seeing this a couple times a day. I’m curious, are people flying on a snail when they go from one place to another? When I was flying over and around homes to see if they were private or not, I get the warning, but since I keep going I only ever got teleported once for lingering. Maybe it’s because I was using skyriding and you guys are using old style flying? Is it too slow and you don’t get out of the property line fast enough I guess?
I do think the time should probably be extended, it’s not like we can do anything on the property anyway. Also wouldn’t mind if the words were a bit less annoying in the middle of the screen, lol.
With Skyriding, if you fly low enough, it will trigger the warning, which is obnoxious. It’s a massive vignette on the edge of the screen along with the message in the middle.
There’s no real reason for this nuisance. It impedes how enjoyable neighborhoods are overall. With the current implementation, even if you kick someone off your property, they are… 10-20 yards away and can run right back on it. It’s not stopping anyone from intruding in your space.
My preference is that they eliminate it completely. Every other MMO with housing functions just fine without having a force field around the exterior of each lot.
Gotcha. I misunderstood your original message then, sorry. I thought you were commenting how it was annoying that if you lingered too long near a property you got teleported away and that it was happening a lot even when you were just flying to another location.
I was purposely flying close to trigger the warning to see if their home was public or not so I could snoop and only ever lingered too long and got teleported once, otherwise it didn’t seem too bad with skyriding to just keep going without being momentarily teleported.
That said, the words on screen are pretty annoying and in your face, so I hope they tone if down if they don’t get rid of them.
I’ve never played any other housing so I can’t speak to that, but I’m personally ok with a forcefield keeping people away if I want it to. People who don’t want it can turn it off, but if I feel like if you want to be left alone and not bothered by random people in your face while you are trying to work in your yard, it’s a nice thing to have.
I don’t see how that will cause any issues to people who are just flying overhead if they keep going and don’t stop, especially if they remove the in your face alert. /shrug
This is a video game lol. People do that in real life for good reason people be crazy out there. The worse some rando can do in your virtual house is walk around for a bit and leave unless you’re a streamer and they’re constantly following you.
My favorite part about neighborhoods in MMOs has always been going around and seeing other people’s houses and what they created and collected. It’s like that old school WoW feeling of seeing someone with Thunderfury or the best gear.
