Citizens,
We have a few property updates for you today.
Upkeep & staff charges
Until today, property upkeep was deducted from your wallet every night, even if you didn't have enough funds to cover it. Since a lot of people keep their wallet balance pretty low, it meant most users would login to a red negative balance every morning. It also caused a lot of confusion and bug reports; users think they're missing money or not being paid by their employers - forgetting about daily property costs.
We've implemented a new property upkeep system. Instead of the money being charged directly to your account every night, it is charged to your property. These fees build up on the property and can be paid whenever, at your convenience, via the properties system. You should be able to leave the fees building up for many weeks before there are repercussions.
If a property's fees build up too much, the upkeep icon on the properties page will begin to change colour and/or flash. After a certain threshold of unpaid fees, the maximum happiness that the property provides will gradually decrease - all the way to 0 over a long period of time.
If a user is overwhelmed by fees, they can sell the property back to the estate agents (with the remaining fees deducted from sale value).
If someone who's renting a property fails to pay all of the upkeep before the rental period is over, the fees are passed over to Duke as debt (they'll have to pay him instead). There should now be no way for any user to have a negative money balance.
Shared vault
Property owners now have the ability to share their vault with their spouse. This is disabled by default. By enabling it, your spouse will be able to deposit and withdraw from the same pool of money. There's also a new log below the panel, displaying transactions to and from the vault.
You can also now move into a different property without removing the funds from your old property's vault (this is a necessity for vault sharing). The funds will remain inside that property until you move back in. This means if you really, really wanted to, you could utilize multiple property vaults - although it'd probably be a hassle.
New vault upgrade
We've added a new 'Extra large vault' property upgrade. This costs $215,000,000 and will allow you to store up to $1,000,000,000.
Thanks.