Housing Rule Changes
Eventually, responding to the needs of players, many of whom over time had lost thier house keys,
OSI began to implement a series of housing changes. By this time the world was a very different
place than in the early housing days. Prices for houses were 4x what they were in the beginning
if you bought a deed and 4-5x the deed price if bought on the open market. Space
to get a house is almost non-existant.
Sweeping house reform was put into place. Players gained the ability to change locks, ban
people from their houses, lock down items, store things in secure checks and more. As a trade
off, new spacing rules went into affect making a house need a larger clear area to place and
hence making it harder to place a house.
The affect of this on AD was minimal. The island was already fully loaded and its layout
and structure already set. The affect of this on the guild, however, was substantial. Since
the origonal owner of a house was hard to determine and since some had quit and some houses been "sold"
, OSI implemented a method to claim houses using the keys and who placed the house. You could
go around and each char could claim one house.
Since The Syndicate had successfully raided many pkiller bases over time and taken their
keys we had a bag with hundreds of keys in it. Scouring the world, we ended up
claiming several dozen pkiller houses as our own and turning them over to members for personal
houses. The housing patch turned out to be a great boon to the guild getting many members
a house in a world where it was nearly impossible to get one.
One thing all these housing changes did stop was "house looting". House looting comes in
two flavors. The first is the illegal kind. Players using bugs and cheats to loot through walls,
get over tables or get back locked doors. Alot of punk kiddies used these and
a great many houses were looted this way including Syndicate members houses (although
thankfully no guild storehouses were ever looted).
The Second method is the one the Syndicate subscribed to. The legitimate, time intensive,
stakeout of an enemy (in our case, pkiller) base to either steal his key or get into his
house. This method was hard and involved many members working together and often
hours or days of work. Houses were staked out. Attack teams would form up one gate
away ready to jump at a moments notice and the entire guild had to work together.
Killing a pk doesnt really hurt them. They kill so many innocents that they have mountains of
loot stashed in their base. The only way to really hurt a pk is to take thier base
from them or take all their loot. The Syndicate did this time and time again
looting nearly every base of nearly every enemy we had including the mercs, SSJ, CC
and many many others. In one week alone, we successfully staked out and looted 3
pkiller enemy towers.
All members we asked to participate and everyone benefited from the loot. Here are some screen
shots of some of the more historic enemy base lootings:
Looting a SSJ Members Tower
Looting the D*C Base
Looting ACDs Base Houses
