Refunds for stations and vehicles after the initial 24 hours is something that has been discussed a number of times on the forum, and I wholeheartedly appreciate why it has been shot down on those occasions. The short answer is it would allow players to “cheat” the system. And the devs and other players simply don’t want that. But I think I’ve found a way around it which would benefit the community and the dev team as well.
The short answer is there should be some cost associated with refunding stations in exchange for the credits we would get back. Initially I thought that a simple “spend 10 coins, get your station refunded for half its price in credits” would work. And maybe it would. The trouble is when a station is worth near a million credits to build, even half of that refunded would generate enough credits to buy multiple extensions or vehicles which the player may have chosen to buy with coins if the refund wasn’t available.
Instead, I propose a 2-part feature which might be more useful!
1. The feature should only be available to premium members. This is where the cost for the player comes in.
2. It should be restricted to a certain credit limit. Rather than having a per-day or per-week limit, which might preclude certain expensive buildings from ever receiving a refund, I suggest this:
The first building is refunded for half its payment cost in credits, regardless of how it was initially bought, once the 24 hour limit for the full refund has expired. If the building was worth 200,000 credits, the player receives 100,000 credits.
This initial refund then activates a timer, which is equal to 50,000 a day. So this example’s timer would last 48 hours (2 days). Whilst the timer is activated, no further refunds may be received for deleting buildings which are older than 24hrs.
After the timer runs out, the player will be able to refund another older building for half of however much it costs, and must then wait the respective number of days until they can do it again. So a building worth 1mil credits would be refunded for 500,000 and the player must wait 10 days (240 hours) until they can earn any more credits from building refunds.
The refund will not be available to any players whose premium subscription will run out before the end of the timer which would be started by any refund they receive- so if a player wants to refund a building costing 200,000 credits to receive 100,000 credits, which is 2 days on a timer, but has less than 48hrs left of their premium subscription, they will not be able to get that refund.
I believe a refund feature is needed, and I believe the premium feature needs more incentive for players to subscribe. This would definitely be worth considering as a feature of the game.
