Can I just build ROADS in my cities to prevent decay? Awesome!

Nope. Roads are just spacing.

You have to have a facility in the city.

The facility can be under construction if you so desire.

So I can prevent city decay by starting construction of a fountain and pause it with only 1% completion? Awesome!

..and then abort later when I do decide what I wanted to use that slab for..cool

That should be perfectly fine.

Doesn't sound perfectly fine IMHO.. :/

Perhaps paused/aborted entities should decay over time too.

I'm curious as to what the main point of the city decay feature is admin?

I mean, at first it appeared to be a way to help out the little guys get a piece of their own property, which is totally awesome. Now it appears that the only thing this feature will do is clear up slabs owned by inactive/banned players. I just want to confirm this is the purpose of the feature...

Because as has been pointed out nothing is really achieved otherwise, govs and such can simply build a fountain or some such, which is very easy, and nothing changes.

The far better way to clear out cities owned by banned players is to simply delete them or send them to the NPC market, and simply implementing the monthly "debt" feature (like taverns) where three months of unpaid upkeep will result in NPC seizure would take care of inactives.

Perma-banned individuals you mean.

Hhmm, so that means that that's not what this feature is about?...interesting.

I guess it was about making people actually build on and use their slabs. But is that really accomplished by this feature? I'm sure you (admin) didn't have a paused fountain on the slab in mind when you made this, right?

Not trying to stray into a suggestion here, just trying to ask and figure out what the goal of this feature is; but wouldn't it make more sense to add some type of credit sink for slabs? Something cheap enough that an industrious individual or someone wanting to own their own home can afford, but that increases exponentially (logistics reasons?) that would make large factions (i.e. governments) pay more credits - that would probably make them be wiser stewards of their slabs (i.e. actually build cities on them) and use them thus accomplishing what I'm assuming is the goal.