So next to the cheese vendor you can open the SW Real Estate office. I can go there and see all the other places I can rent. Rent is for a month and costs gold. If I don t pay the next month I lose the keys and my stuff gets stored for a month. If I don t come to collect it then it gets lost.
My heartstone is bound to my room once I pay for it. My friend is a carpenter and can make things for me. He goes to the forest and gather wood from trees. With those he makes picture frames, beds, tables. Once I buy those from him from the AH they appear in a tab called housing where I can select them and place them in my room. He has hundreds of items he can craft some more rare than others.
I can let either anybody get in the room or just my guildies or just myself. When I walk to the stairs I get phased into my room and like other places in the world sometimes the inside is larger than the outside.
I have bought a manequin that can exhibit an armor set and since I am looking to complete my set from Molten Core when I get in my room it is a reminder of that goal. Next week I think I will invite my guildies for a drink because they have been nice and sent me a couple tables and chairs via the mail when I was low on Gold.
I want to rent that room above the inn in Stormwind…can you help?
So you don t have to create a new piece of land for this, just phase areas and zones. Guilds can have underground guild halls not as big as the class halls but still nicely sized for holding 100 people if necessary. Being underground and phased allows for a huge amount of space to be used.
The entrance to the guild halls can be like the rogue entrance in Legion, knock on a door if you have access the issue is to not give everybody the exact same thing with little variations unlike what you did with garrisons. Provide 25 different or more layouts and let guildmasters choose.
To prevent people from buying guild halls themselves you should have a minimum of
5 members and a tax on all members of the guild of 1% or a small amount on looted gold to support the rent because it is quite expensive. If the rent is not paid at the end of the month the guild hall goes for rent and another guild can rent it. If someone manages to buy a hall for themselves it is going to cost them a lot of upkeep per month.
Bosses drop paintings of themselves that the guild or the player can collect and add to their room or house or hall. Rares also drop paintings but smaller ones. The bosses ones are 6 foot by 3 foot and the rares are half that size and those go into your Housing tab in the mog window and you can have them on all characters now that you killed the boss. The frame also change color based on the difficulty. Kill a boss in mythic during content and the frame is gold etc…
The top of the mage tower in Dalaran and Stormwind for example are also for rent. You have a couple of those places in the world that are not phased entirely. You can fly to those and once in it open a door leading to a larger place phased so that you could be in the tower watching outside relaxing with a drink with your guildies without being phased. If other people fly there they would see an empty room and would not be able to open the door and would not see tables and chairs.
The taverns and bars can also be rented by guilds or people who have the gold. You can sit outside the same way with others but you can send people invitations to be able to enter then VIP rooms.
Later on you will be able to buy finished houses you can put anywhere in the world provided no NPC paths there. Devs can select a hundred + house sizes areas on each map where houses can be built. Once built the house is visible to others but closed and only the owner can open the door but they could also leave the door always open.
Now a discussion needs to happen to see if people would be open with the idea of stealing the stuff inside a house while the owner is not there and the door is open. To steal a table you would have to physically lift the table and be reduced to 10% walking speed until you have walked 2 minutes away from the place without being stopped by someone who could just touch you and you would drop the table and be flagged PVP from both factions.
This would be an interesting mechanics where people could play evil and risk getting caught. Once you have caught several times you could have restrictions put on you like no flying for a day etc or inability to buy house, room etc for a week giving you an incentive to take risks and enjoy it.
Once stolen a common item appears in your housing tab but you only get one. If you want more you need a carpenter to make them. To combat theft you could buy a guard dog or mech (or just pay an angry gnome) with an elite frame that would protect the house/room.
On one of your walls you would have a board that when clicked would show your reputations like shown in game. On another wall there would be a dresser that when clicked on would show all your collected transmogs. Another wall would have a chest and when clicked would show all your pets. If you have a house you could chose to display one mount at the entrance outside and one pet inside.
Adding in a good player housing system would make them so much money it’s honestly baffling that it isn’t their top priority. I have to assume that it’s because Ion’s raid-or-die elitism mindset is getting in the way, and nobody who knows better has been able to countermand him yet.
Why renting? You just mind control the owner to let him think you paid him.
Aside from that, I’d rather be able to buy instead. And it’d need to be an instance for that because if they open the houses of SW only, then all of them would be booked/bought in the first 3 seconds after implemented. Too many players for such a small city in comparison.
One issue is that I do not think people should be able to put a house anywhere they want. For example you don t want people to be able to put a house on the beach in STV or if you do it has to be an enormous amount of gold.
One other thing to think about is density. Would you want 20 houses next to each other eating the beachfront and bothering people who are questing? I think this is the most difficult part to decide. Either you allow houses everywhere or you preselect certain areas but ultimately EVERY map and zone needs to have options for players unlike the garrison that was only giving one option and the same for all.
Housing is about individuality and showing it. Halls are about community and fostering it. this is what needs to be focused on not just gimmicks
The phased option allows hundreds of people to rent the same room like the one I want to rent. Buying is a problem because you can t just buy a place and not have hoa dues or taxes etc. With a rent system you pay those with the rent and if you stop playing for a month you lose your lease incentivizing people to keep playing and keep their subs. If you buy something then you are done and just farm more gold to buy more places.
The idea I think is not to have 40 different houses and flats but one place you work for. Maybe you could have a house on a beach and a flat in a town but I wouldn t go the route to buy and forget because those are part of the world and require maintenance
Blizzard does not need to implement taxes. I know a game with housing. First was without instances, but then the house was a different instance for every owner that had the house when they merged servers.
You buy and is yours forever, no taxes. Unless you stop playing for 6 months. There the house becomes abandoned and can be purchased.
I’m going to echo something Josh Strife Hayes emphasizes in a few of his videos. Any sort of player housing system that’s based entirely on land-grabs or exclusive claims is bad game design. Period. Some players will have a blast, but the majority will have nothing but envy and no way to engage with a system into which your developers are investing time and energy.
In the case of World of Warcraft that will be a VAST majority. So if there is any kind of player housing system introduced to World of Warcraft, it needs to be exclusively instanced areas that are accessed from a shared entrance like a front door, a gate, or something similar. Something like ESO’s housing model, only hopefully not as cash-grabby.
I love XIV to death for a lot of things, but the housing system is not one of them. =/
Also, the Goldrinn Pack has dibs on the second floor of the Golden Keg, we’ve been there for so long the barman has named a child after one of our engineers.
Totally agree this is why the rooms in cities are phased and in the world the places are predecided so that you can not just place a house in the middle of the beach unless it is part of a designed community because some areas are for questing and require NPCs. This is why the Gnomes & Goblins Home Association has designed areas for construction.
One question I wonder is if the houses should be timed to be built i.e a day or something or are they just placed instantly?
I like the eso/new world model for housing. I really have to hope the reason wow doesn’t have it in 2022 is that it’s extremely difficult to implement in this engine for some reason. Would be nice to hear them make …any? comment on it though. Maybe I’m not paying attention
They’ve made a comment on it before, it’s because of how much overhauling it would take for a housing system to work. I cba to find the blue post on it but it was pretty much this.
There are already so, so many things that are arbitrarily time gated. If there’s any sort of housing system, let it just do stuff automatically and immediately. Pay for the space, the instance is created and reserved, and officers can go in and start decorating.
If you must put in some kind of time gating, make some kind of upgrade system so that the room/area can be made bigger on the inside and you can expand into a basement, attic, second floor, stable, kitchenette, billiards room, whatever that’s on separate “You can see we’re working on it, but it’s not ready!” timers like the Garrison+mine/garden/lake had.
One thing to consider would be that you can t put a gilnean style house in draenor for example or a orgrimmar hut in goldshire…that type of restrictions based on the map. So westfal would only have human type houses so that it would not clash with the map.