Phase 3 news

[Steel DarKnight]

Last week, as mentioned in a previous FYI, our housing system began tracking houses that were owned by inactive accounts (accounts that have been cancelled or suspended due to non-payment for more than 10 days are considered “inactive accounts”). That same FYI also mentioned that, starting today (Wednesday, October 29), any house owned by an inactive account will become condemned. However, we have made a change to today’s proceedings, and the global auto-refreshing that began on September 11, 2001 will not be turned off at this time.

Extending the global auto-refresh means that:

Primary houses, grandfathered houses, and “condemned-inactive” houses on inactive accounts will continue to refresh daily.

If you place or are traded a house, your old house(s) will still become condemned and decay.

If a grandfathered account becomes inactive for more than 10 days, then only the most recently placed house will become condemned-inactive and all other houses owned by that account will become condemned (and begin decaying).

This extension of the auto-refresh is only temporary. After additional research and consideration, we have decided to treat grandfathered houses on active accounts in the same manner as primary houses on active accounts. Once the final adjustment is implemented, both primary and grandfathered houses will auto-refresh themselves—any non-condemned house owned by an active account will auto-refresh itself. This change to grandfathered houses will not be immediate, and therefore the continuation of global auto-refreshing was required to ensure these houses remained on each shard while we make the appropriate changes. We are currently planning to have these changes activated by Publish 21.

The most important thing to remember is still that an account that stays inactive for more than 10 days will condemn all houses that it owns, although for the moment one house per account will temporarily continue to auto-refresh even if the account is inactive.