Currently storage rent is due weekly in real time.
If a player doesn't play much they end up paying an effectively higher amount then a heavy user who is online all the time.

I would prefer to see rent due based on time spent in game so that everyone pays about the same rate.
I realize this will be a bit harder to implement but it will also be a lot more fair.

(For the record - rent should also be increased )

If a player doesn't play much they end up paying an effectively higher amount then a heavy user who is online all the time.

I'm not really following you..? The rent payout should be the same whether you play an hour every day for a month, or don't play for a month and then log on once.

I see what PaK means... Lets assume player x pays 1000cr/week rent. if that player only plays for 1hr/week, they are effectivly paying 1000cr per hour of gameplay. If they played for 10hrs/week they would pay 1000cr per 10hrs of gameplay.

Personally, I disagree with the idea. I rent the house I live in, and have to pay that rent whether I am in the house or not. While VO is not real life, it does need some frame of reference to the real world to give a sense of reality in the game world.

EDIT: Besides, why would you want to penalise players for playing a lot?

For players that only sign on an hour or so a night, this makes sense. But like Faille said, punishing players because they played longer isn't gonna work out very well.

I had a break of a few months, despite been a current LTS, and the first thing that greeted me on my return was a nice bill for all the storage I had used whilst being inactive.

Not complaining, but it illustrates PaKettle's point.

What if I wanted to store a whole bunch of stuff on the cheap using an alt, how could I exploit this idea, how could we prevent it?

Rent should only accumulate while your sub is active.

If it accrues while your sub is inactive, it actually discourages people from rejoining the game after a long hiatus.

So f2p get free rent?

To be fair you only get charged for storage over a pretty decent amount; it is enough to store about 25 equipped marauders at a single station without being charged rent. Unless you are building a Trident or something of equal magnitude then apart from stockpiling ships and guns, there really is no real need to use the actual rented storage, so someone who only plays a few hours a month is not going to hit these limits easily. If they do and really do not want to pay the rent, then they should learn to spread stuff about. There are 5 stations in Odia, 3 in Latos and 3 in Sedina - which is a lot of FREE storage (right where stockpiles need to be) - if you are not lazy.

You cannot be someone who plays 24/7 and makes a suggestion about "only playing a few hours" when you yourself do not do this. How would you know how much storage the average "few hours" person uses? That would be like me making a suggestion about being a carebear.

I do understand that historically there have been a few who didn't realise they would get charged the storage while offline; I think the problem there is the fact that they were not aware, which got addressed a few patches ago no?

-1

I don't like this 25 crystal thing, as I don't play often enough to gather the damned things,and I don't really sub that often. and I stockpile worse than a damned squirrel. So I'm kind of annoyed at that.

-1, at least in so far as credits are concerned. I've no experience with crystal, so if there's a crystal component to f2p storage, I can't really comment on that. But as far as the credit cost of rent goes, it's totally insignificant. And I'm saying this as somebody who has only been logging in a few hours a month lately, if at all. I have no concern about rent eroding my wealth while I'm offline. I don't feel like I'm being unfairly penalized. It doesn't feel burdensome at all. It's too cheap to register. I might even +1 an increase to rent.

That said, I do think that a consolidated one-line billing statement would be better than the current approach, because paying rent to a lot of stations can result in quite the wall of bills when you log in. But I'm not sure I'd prefer that over the spam unless it was backed by a means in the interface to look up the individual bills. Anyway, don't take this as a big complaint or anything. It's a minor annoyance, and the current state is definitely preferable to the before times when rent was less transparent.

It used to be a one line "total" amount, untill people asked for it to be itemised...

We asked for the charges to be itemized so we could track down their source. What can I say - Some of are cheap ass penny pinchers. :} As long as the itemized list is available in the log I agree there is not a reason to spam the display with it.

I don't see it as penalizing the heavy users but rather as not penalizing the light users. The current method punishes players who don't log in all the time and spend all their free time in game.

PaK, I have, in the past, gone completely broke from rent while on a sabbatical from VO. It's really no big deal. You simply can't unload more at the stations you've got rental storage at. Takes bugger all time to get some creds and fix the issue.

Still a -1 from me. System is fine as is, IMO.

-1
Storage rent is fine, its cheap, and if you are using over 20,000 cu of it you most likely can afford to pay for it. Be happy this isn't luke Elite where we get to store 60 modules and only 35 ships, and cargo has to be kept on you all the time.