Maybe rentals should be audited, to see if they are being used appropriately, or being abused.
I'm not one to double post usually but I have seen a few posts now that are along these lines and no one seems to be replying to them. I think this is indicative of a deeper problem and it doesn't have to do with just rentables, but I'll try and keep it as short and sweet as possible.
Not to assume your stance on it (this post goes out to everyone as a request to disarm and be more thoughtful about all this), but this is not a new opinion, that rentals are going unused or underused and the people who use them need to be judged. Player perceptions are distorted because we (not me - I don't have any or want any) are "competing" for rentables, because there's a finite number of them. We also compete for dungeon spawns and people get upset about having those "stolen" from them too, which is also an unfortunate consequence of the way these systems are built.
That said, I don't think it's a rentables problem currently that Dementlieu hosts just 15-20 concurrent players on a good day out of 100+ players online and I don't think that if more rentable properties are added, that the situation will change from "if I find no one on the Terraces, I'll find no one anywhere else in the city, so I'll just go back to the Mist Camp" flow chart of RP in Dementlieu that most people follow - which has an alternate route of asking mates to jump online for RP or asking if they are okay with letting you join in any ongoing RP. Now, on a server where you log in and are immediately IC at all times until you log off, this understandably does not jive well with a lot of people.
Bringing concerns into this thread that rentable properties are going unused can be taken as disingenuous jabs at players who have those rentable properties and pay a not insignificant sum of ingame money & attention, creativity, and time toward keeping them as active as they possibly can, passing out many keys and inviting people to come roleplay in them when they cannot find contact ingame.
You can play for 8 hours a day - completely missing someone who plays another 8 hours out of the day - and even if you take breaks no longer than 15 minutes at a time, interacting with people all day long, there are people who will perceive you as, and call you out as inactive, invisible, and nonparticipant. It's happened to me before while solo-crewing the Morninglord temple, especially prior to joining the faction which took me over 4 months of active play in the same time zone. It is very frustrating to see this kind of rhetoric go unchallenged on the forums, and then later be reiterated back to us through private channels by staff members who end up believing it. That we're not doing anything, that we're not inclusive enough, and that what we have should be placed in the hands of others even though we've been trying to be giving from the start.
It's not about what we're doing. DMs do not need to monitor this feature any more than they already do, they do not need to count the hours we've been online when they themselves have a quota to meet. Understand that at some point there will literally be a busywork feedback loop where DMs clock their 10 hours a week on this server doing nothing but trying to fulfill generic requests - and that we have already crossed that threshold with the amount of bugs and glitches inherent in the engine already. Now think of how much time is spent judging applications already and ask yourself, if you feel you don't get enough DM attention, do you think you'll get more when the DMs are asked to do even more administrative work instead of creative work?
RP is not something you can put deadlines on. I guarantee you that if any time limits and event quotas are pushed, they'd be filled even if we stay the course. People wouldn't be happy about the assumption that they're "failing" at some "responsibility" they have, but they would do it because they really want to RP regardless of the stress they have to deal with. But despite the quotas being filled, those who are unsatisfied with the performance of current rentable property owners would remain unsatisfied, because what this is actually about is people not having a rental of their own when they want one. You can only solve that by requesting the developers add more rentables, although this may take time as they may not be interested right now. Taking things away from people because they're not using them "the right way" (when was the last time someone passed arbitrary judgement on you and you felt good about it?) just changes the places of the pieces on the board, which is just about the only thing that applications would do, and that is an unnecessary step in the wrong direction.
