Let's talk about apartments

[mansa]

...
B) Locks don't work, I want a physical guard. If it costs more cool, if it makes the other places cost less okay. The amount something costs can always be balanced.

Interesting concept.

You would need to have the NPC guard be the same "clan" as you, to make it prevent people from entering and coming.

You can either:
a) Have a "merchant house employee / noble house employee" apartment complex, that includes guards for select rooms - it won't protect you against other merchant house employees stealing from you, though. 
"Do you want to rent the Tor room?  The Kadius room?"

b) Write code that would automatically clan you for an "apartment clan for room x", and the NPC guard would only allow you to walk through.   Requires code to invoke auto-clanning and auto-kicking you when the rent is over.

[Windstorm]

There's no reason to hold that as the expectation for players. Not every character is a half-elf ranger who visits town once in a while. There are very valid character concepts where it should be possible to have multiple sets of clothes or a large amount of tools or just a place to go and discuss matters that can't be talked of in public. People don't "suck at inventory management" or "have too much crap" unless you think the lone ranger experience is the correct way to play the game and the city-dwelling person with a real job and social life is the wrong way to play.

I'd say the game is suffering because too many players do play untethered lone rangers who don't lead lives where there's a reason to have a real home and more belongings than you can stuff into a backpack. Living out of a single set of gear and rarely visiting a city is not some virtue that people should strive for. This game would benefit a lot from being better at facilitating a playstyle where being able to say 'this is where I live and this is what's in my home' is not a liability or simply unviable. At the very least, it would make crafting/buying things other than weapons and armor a lot more appealing.

Unfortunately, since apartments are only marginally more secure than a tent on Skid Row, it's an exercise in futility to play that way. It encourages playing the lone ranger who owns nothing but the shirt off his back and weapons on his belt. That's not the "correct" way to play Armageddon. The fact that too many play that way is one of the biggest problems this game has. While I wouldn't go so far a to tie a direct and exclusive causation to it, city life was way more popular and attractive back when it was relatively feasible to have an apartment because A) they (some of them, at least) were much harder to break into, and B) very few characters had the lockpicking skill or the means to make picks.

This is one of my favorite posts ever.

Soooooooo agreeeeeeeeed and how has this not been noticed? It seems like a rather glaring hole in which city based and social players are just left out in the cold where basic functionalities of play should be.