Automatically assigned rooms.

**21stcentury** Sat Mar 24, 2012 9:47 am

This is something I saw integrated well in an OA server I used to play on.

Basically instead of F2ing apartment doors once you create a character it is automatically assigned a room number just like you're assigned a CID (you can see in the F1 menu alongside your CID). Your keys only work on the housing door you were assigned (which remains constant if you leave and rejoin).

Their would be a system where it cycles through the numbers so that there is a mostly even number of people that have to share a room. I don't think overcrowding would become a problem because most of the people that were assigned the same number as you might not even be on at the time, you might only have 1 or 2 roommates on the server at once, and also people don't spend too much time in their rooms anyway. And if ever there were about say 6 people on at once that had to share a room, well it seems like the sort of thing the Union would force you into anyway, and if it got too bad perhaps there could be a way for an admin to manually change it.

Also: Certain apartment blocks could be left nonassignable, they could be reserved for CWU workers or something like that, or left free in case an admin ever wanted to set something up in them.

Potential Pros:

- It opens up good opportunities for passive roleplay, it's common for new players on rp servers to get stuck in a boring loop where it's hard to talk to people and passive, with a system like this they'd have a good opportunity to have some good passive rp meeting their roommates and their character could form good (or bad) social relationships for future passive-ing.

- Everybody gets a room! No more being homeless cos you joined too late to buy one!

- It removes the awkward "Oh um... my rooms here today instead of downstairs", I normally rp that the Union has a bizarre room assignment system that makes it hard to have a room on some days, but even that is abbit iffy, this system simplifies it and gives it a nice consistent reason.

Potential Cons:

- A gave a few reasons for why it might not be too bad, but at the same time overcrowding could become a problem.

- You might have to share your apartment with an idiot.

- You might just prefer being able to buy your own apartment, that's fine. Your freedom is already restricted enough by the combine.

Potential Points of Conflict:

- I can see prop spawning getting abbit conflicting if you have to share a room, please if you have P or E flags be responsible and considerate of the fact that other rpers share your room and try to keep the furniture generic.

- This can be used as a different type of inspection, inspections are announced which means people have to go to their room (MPFs can see your assigned room on the data pad), this means you can lose points and potentially be detained if you're not in your room after a set amount of time when an inspection is called. Potentially this could be good and an inspection might be an interesting way to break up a slow night, however your mileage may vary and it might make it abbit too hard to rp partaking in any sort of criminal activity.

- On the server I played that had this system you could get in trouble for being in a room that wasn't your room, say if you were visiting a friend. Even though this is realistic I think we need to draw a line between what is realistic and what is fun, it's illegal to talk or converge in public which makes sense but that's okay because good social rp can happen in private. Making people struggle to even talk to each other inside the apartments might be too much of a deterrent to any kind of passive.

If you managed to read this far, thank you.