“Oh, look, honey. A roleplay guild.”
“Keep walking and don’t make eye contact, dear.”
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Joke’s on them, we have content year round 
“Roll up the windows.”
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Probably because it wasn’t much work.
You just told him not to compare apples to oranges and immediately did so yourself.
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It’s kind of a simplified version, so that helps things on Blizzard’s end. It’s like if you mashed the skyscale and griffon together. Gotta say though, I prefer it in WoW. Griffon is insanely fun in the right zone, but it’s not nearly as useful.
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Mmo features to mmo features. Big apples and little apples are still apples. Don’t be so desperate.
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“Trust me bro” isn’t an argument. You’re also ignoring the initial investment needed to bring it in game.
So no it won’t be enough to make it profitable imo
You’re telling me I can’t do exactly what you just did.
Ironic.
Do you know how much the investment would be that it’d trump what the microtransactions and engagement player housing would bring? Genuinely curious.
Nothing wrong with seeing what competitors are doing and taking the best of that and applying your own spin to it.
Thing worth noting is there’s a choice in what to take and not to take.
Blizzard chose to implement dragon riding because flying mount transportation was outdated. Also because expansion theme.
Blizzard may not choose to implement player housing because Blizzard probably believes it’s not worth the effort.
Riding around on a dynamic mount in an open world is cool.
Sitting in player housing, not so much.
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Nothing like this has ever been a part of player housing in an MMORPG.
They can call it innovative then.
Of course. We as players have no idea what the extent of that effort would be since we don’t know how hard it would be to implement into their engine.
But, whether its worth the effort or not also changes based on how much of the playerbase would engage with it. So threads like this are good, and having discussions about the pros and cons are good.
So far the main points brought up against it are either “its lame” or “it could be forced with player power”.
The forced part is valid but its worth noting that the pro housing people also don’t want it to have any sort of player power.
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I believe Ion or one of the other leaders point blank said the reason they will very likely never do it is it requires work on par with a major expansion level feature that, from all the data to which they have access, only a very small fraction of the playerbase will ever engage with.
I mean, just from sheer anecdotal data of the close wow friend group I have only maybe 1 of the 7 or 8 people would engage with it at all. I think it’s a case of the people who want housing really really really really want housing. But for everyone of those, there’s 10 who would kinda engage with it and for every one of those, there’s 50-100 who wouldn’t touch it at all.
Edit: The poster below me hit what I was trying to say well. Nothing in the game is designed in a vacuum, there’s always developmental cost. Not to mention, housing would come with the expectation of further updates. So it compounds the issue by not only does a tiny fragment of the playerbase interact with it, it’s something that by its very nature must have subsequent updates to it to even keep that small section.
My argument is it’s a disproportionate waste of developer time when that same time could be spent on actual gameplay content.
I want developers working on class / spec design, PvP balance, dungeon and raid encounters. I want them improving the shared world and making it more dynamic and interactive.
An instanced player house with no real skill expression has nothing to do with any of things in which I place value, so it’s not something to which I’d developers committing their time.
Not too concerned with other peoples’ arguments
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You could say this same thing for remix, classic, or plunderstorm. But people engaged with it regardless even if it was new. There’s no data that suggests only a “small portion” of people would be interested. Did they do a questionare we all missed?
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It really stands out when another competitor or WoW adds a feature that it still lacks. People take more notice, case-in-point the recent boom in threads about housing.
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This subject has come and gone in waves since 2004 I think. It’s just the most recent wave.
I’m fairly confident that the perfect housing that people think could be immediately inserted into the game with no drawbacks and without costing a raid tier (likely more) isn’t coming to WoW.
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Given the mass encompassing nature of data available, they wouldn’t need to submit a questionnaire. Between industry trends, data from other similar games, the data is present. You could argue that, sure, maybe wow players are a special subset dramatically more interested in player housing than any other type of player. However, that seems unlikely.
Plunderstorm and remix are good examples in contrast. Both, from everything they’ve said, were created with relatively small teams and have been quite controversially received. They’ve had engagement, but mixed reception if we’re being generous. In contrast, housing would be an expansion level feature.
Generally the “Expansion Level Features” are something they expect everyone, or almost everyone, to interact with on some level. Whether that’s a new class, or a system like Hero Talents and Artifacts. I fully agree there’s a lot of people who really want housing and probably have it as their number 1 want, and nothing else is even close. It’s just that “a lot” likely isn’t very much in the grand scope of the game’s playerbase.
Edited to Add Sourcing: The “expansion level feature” comment is from an interview Ion had with Hazelnutty. Basically, the context of his comments are that “while nothing is ever technically off the table”, it’s extremely unlikely for the reasons I summarized. Primary feature of an expansion, a lot of work, large risk.
Incorrect. I know not everyone plays the content I do.
But the majority play the content I do. Just not at the highest level.