(Actual suggestion highlighted below) First off I just want to say that I understand why the 6 month timer exists and I support it. (For anyone that doesn't know, you can't /res forceclaim a res who's owner hasn't been offline for less than 6 months) The incidents of malicious forceclaiming that created the 6 month thing honestly just. boil my blood. Anyway, all that said, the 6 month timer on top of the old derelict system definitely feels like a "temporary" fix to that problem. It's not super intuitive and you have to run an additional command to see if you can foreclaim a plot after you've already checked that it's derelict with /res info. I don't really have any idea how to improve that aspect, but a feature of the old system that I feel like is lacking now is the shorter timer for new players. If you didn't know, until a player has been on EMC for a month or so (unsure of the actual time) they're derelict after 10 days instead of 30. Given that 90%+ of new players join, are auto assigned a plot, then leave forever, it makes sense to put those plots back in the rotation sooner. My suggestion is that those new players, whatever the backend bucket for "players with a 10 day derelict timer" be exempt from the 6 month forceclaim timer. i.e. those plots could be claimed after the 10 days is up (even 30 days would be an improvement tbh) instead of having to wait 6 months. Maybe this is so niche of a thing that only I care lol. But as someone who does a lot of town neighborhood building, as well as trying to get new players involved in the hopes that they'll become active community members, this would be incredibly helpful for me. The alternative is bothering SS way too often
agreed. I am both pleased and saddened that recently old players have returned from a long period and discover that their res is still there. This is my experience below - I am not blaming anyone here -- I have previously done a lot of reading on this and (currently cannot remember where) Aikar said that the newest players should have their res put back into circulation first, at least that was the hope. But that there was supposed to be some randomness to the entire process. There are only a certain number of res that are reclaimed by the computer to offer to new players and that number is routinely the same. The lower number of new players has just slowed the entire process to a walk, as opposed to a run. When I have run around town and check on some of the areas, it is easily possible to find res where the owner appeared for 2 days and then disappeared forever. Meanwhile the res has been sitting there for 2000 days. I feel like somewhere in the history, some of those new player res got missed and haven't been reset.
I'm down with this. On SMP6, around my original res, I see the same builds on derelict residences that gave been abandoned since 2017/early 2018.
This is not relevant to the suggestion though, is it? 6 months is a lot shorter than 2000 days, and moreover the suggestion is about force-claiming, not the automatic reclaiming system.