If you thought you were coming to virtual worlds to avoid the stresses of real life – like, say, paying off your mortgage – think again! Plenty of MMORPGs have super fun mechanics like taxes and rent and foreclosures to keep their economies and territory in balance, and sometimes a bug in the code can result in a minor headache.
So learned the players in Legends of Aria’s early access version this week, when a bug with housing taxes resulted in players being informed that they were overdue on their rent much sooner than expected, causing some homes to run afoul of foreclosure mechanics. Citadel Studios did tweet that it’s being fixed.
“Foreclosures and auctions will be disabled on Verdant Earth this week due to an issue with taxes. Nobody will lose their house. We’re working on the problem, and we will reimburse any above normal taxes prior to turning it back on.”
But according to players, some houses have already been lost and the auction/foreclosure system is continuing. Presumably, players affected will need to petition for the reinstatement of their home. Hopefully it’ll be easier than dealing with a real bank!
Massively OP’s Chris Neal has been deep-diving Legends of Aria as part of our Choose My Adventure column; check out his thoughts so far here.
And as for claims that foreclosures happened before the compensation was doled out? He says he doesn’t know of one. “We always investigate every report regarding house foreclosure and have not been able to identify a single house that was foreclosed that had their taxes paid up fully.”
