As news bulletins go for Dual Universe, this one is pretty important. Once the Demeter update goes live, territory holders will be required to pay weekly upkeep in order to keep their holdings functioning. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
The cost of this weekly upkeep is 1M quanta per week, which can be withdrawn from a territory-specific bank that holds up to 13 weeks’ worth of quanta. If a territory’s taxes aren’t paid, the structure will go offline and all mining and industrial operations will shut down until the tax is paid. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
If taxes aren’t paid for a total of two weeks, the territory becomes abandoned unless it’s categorized as a headquarters. Headquarters can only be assigned by player-owned territories, not guild-owned ones. The devs note that they will be monitoring how this feature works and may adjust it, particularly if the headquarters owner is no longer subscribed. Once a territory is lost, it can naturally be taken by another player and they can requisition any constructs still on the territory, but only after a two week-long window where the previous landowner can deconstruct any buildings still on the territory.
Furthermore, the Demeter update will add a way for players to tokenize an owned territory in order to transfer it over to someone else, though any static constructs on that territory will not be handed over.
All of these changes are fundamental shifts to the way land ownership works, so there will be a two week-long period of time where taxes are not going to be charged in order for players to prepare. If you’ve done this sort of thing before, there aren’t many surprises to this system, but DU players should prepare to pay the tax man.
