G’evenin! First-ish time posting, but played on and off since day 1 of public release. ~6500 hours on my main Warrior, Horde Legionnaire (FOR THE HORDE)! One of the first on Doomhammer to get the Frostwolf, I still have my original OEB, and I am still keepin a Severed Nightelf Head in my bank from an AV nemesis haha. 17 years ago, I made a really cheesy youtube vid of the AQ gate opening event, and its still up there.
I’m an old gamer (42 years young), and I’ve been wondering why we don’t have Guild Halls or Player Housing yet. Yeah-yeah, I know there are a lot of kids whining and crying about not wanting them for whatever silly reason they pull out of wherever, I don’t care. I love this game. Besides feeling a HUGE attachment to all the memories I’ve made with WoW, I met my wife here and we are both still gaming, and will for a very long time yet. …there is no personal side to this game.
Blizzard… you are missing out on a huge revenue opportunity. Yeah-that’s right, money. You can make a lot of it off of those of us who want a small piece of the game to call our own who are willing to spend money from our jobs on this, and probably a great deal of it from the cash cows who have the ‘gotta have it’ mentality. Do it right by learning from other MMOs, and it’ll work. One critical component will be allowing others to visit the guild hall, too-so people can show it off… pride/vanity, and you’ll draw the competitive nature out. Let me explain…
Lets start off with something easier: Guild Halls.
Guild Wars 2 is one of the best in all the MMOs I’ve seen. Long term investment, team effort, continual work, non-expansion dependant existence, large area for personal modification. Set some fundamentals. They start off by requiring the guild to actually take over the area… this sets a bar so that not every 1 person guild can even do this. Its a team effort to open it, and that builds the first core memory of teamwork overcoming a difficult fight. My guild took over the Tarir, the Forgotten City in Auric Basin… and it is glorious!! There are daily repeatable harvesting nodes, NPCs, portals, interactable things, shops, etc etc… but you start off with next to nothing. You have to build it all. THAT is something you can implement to keep players busy in the game for a very long time, and promote trade resource viability interest.
Warframe does a great job building your clan Dojo and then actually promoting the “top” of all types for everyone in the game to visit… thus encouraging competition and revenue. When people add rooms or research patterns there is a duration for completion. This duration can be bypassed with Forma (buyable material… you know, promoting cash cows to buy stuff because who wants to wait?), but it is not required. In-game materials are required to build every single piece of decoration, but it isn’t overwhelming… if you have a group to work on it. I’m particularly proud of my Drydock and the Sentient theme I built. This game’s guild hall is unique in that it lets you modify lighting and set room colors (once you research the color pattern after collecting the materials to do so), and I think that is notable.
Star Trek Online. Yeah-even this old game has you beat in this, putting you to shame. Learn from them. And yes, one of their keys is the optional material and speedup options that are buyable… hint hint. So, this game takes advantage of realizing they can add Fleet (guild) assets for their specific expansions, thus keeping a perpetual system open for future development with expansion/area specific use. You have your standard primary fleet station that has the general functionality usable at all times. And yes, it is upgradable-and you can see it develop and grow in size-pretty impressive. One unique feature these guys have is that there are projects the guild master (admiral, whatever) sets up that everyone can contribute resources into, and these benefit which ever Fleet structure it is (I personally love the Dyson sphere stuff). I can fly my Herald Vonph Carrier Dreadnaught up to most of these Fleet structures… gives it a very nice personal feeling of being part of it.
Elder Scrolls Online. Take a HUGE look at this system, Blizzard. Every player can spend money to buy a place, but they will offer some locations during the opening of some expansions as a game-wide level achievement IF enough progress has been made on the event’s… by the players (which means you’ll draw MORE attention for people to play, more often). There are selections from apartments, Inn rooms, small houses, mediums, manors, large places. I have a huge mansion because of this: the Grand Psijic Villa. Seriously-go look it up, its friggin EPIC. There is an exterior and an interior to this place, and specific decorations to go in either. Some of the decorations are harvested from archeology style efforts on my own part around the world… and that is something ALREADY in the game, Blizzard 
You can tie this into the home decoration thing without too much trouble, and make Archeology something people might want to do again (even making some decorations a thing to sell on the market, stimulating several aspects of the game). ESO brings a few unique features here: NPCs (which can be expensive), and because of all their trade skills, you have everyone able to build lots of different things based on those trade skills. Consider this: rugs (tailors), couches/tables (blacksmiths AND leatherworkers), floating illumination crystals (enchanters), etc. I suggest having some, SOME things to be multi-stage cross-profession decorations, thus promoting trade skills, market, social interaction, guild crafter cohesion, etc etc. Eve Online did that well. And speaking of which…
Eve Online. Not so relevant to this discussion except for the manufacturing side of this, maybe. I played that game for 8 years as a highsec carebear miner/industrialist. I eventually built components for capital ships, specifically the Providence Amarr freighter (Amarr ftw! I laugh at your rusty duct taped ships, silly Minmatar fools! haha). To prove my near, go to youtube and search for “eve online adam smith”: that is my Political Econ final project from college 12 years ago hahaha! So as it relates to guild hall/player housing, I built myself a high-sec Sansha tower (space station) and Tech 3 component manufacturing (I was on the front lines of ‘new’ Tech 3 ship manufacturing, making HUGE piles of ISK with my station and my excel sheets hahahaha). The point is that it was a HUGE personal touch for my own claim in the universe, and I could do my own stuff there that gave me a massive financial boost. That is, until it was war dec’d by mercs because I was making waves, and the 0.5bil+ ISK installation and all its materials, components, defensive turrets, etc, were destroyed (but I almost destroyed the Guardian of the group by aiming the turrets myself-which would have won me the battle, oh well). THAT is what you should learn from this: the personal side of the game can draw out a lot more time, money, and effort from your players… just to have/keep/use their personal piece of your world.
Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted. This game pre-dates you. Their system is not a viable option for WoW, but look at what they do: huge crafting system to support the construction of all components for standardized housing structures and workstations. Their system is to set up open world plots in areas and let people buy the plots (not possible with WoW’s size, I get that). There are rents on these things, which means turnover… and frustrated players when they miss too much-but I do no suggest that kind of thing. Having rent will stop many players from even starting the whole thing: don’t do that. Even playing as my dragon, we didn’t build bipedal homes: we dug into caves and developed our lairs. Point is, we were all able to do something… even being very different species. Harvesting stone, sand, metals, lumber, etc, it could all go to that (watching a dragon dig is hilarious).
I haven’t played FFXIV for long, but they have player housing islands with limited lots of availability… its not a good system, but I can see why it was used. It isn’t nearly as modular or personable as other games, but its something, and its usable.
I played Dysnasty Warriors Online for the brief time it was available in the USA, and yeah… we had player housing there. Had a garden too.
Everquest apparently had it too-never played that one, sadly.
So… c’mon, Blizzard. There is no excuse these days. You can build in guild halls or player housing and have us, your players, pay for it. Look around at the MMOs around you: they are keeping people interested and the money flowing because of things like that.
I have 19 years of memories, and I still have a lot of dusty things in my bank that really beg for display. Plaques for major events that you already track in stats and achievements. Garrison trophy stands were a great initial idea for this.
There is about an hour and a half of ideas for you. And yeah, just opinions-but I think you can make money off of this if you do it right. There are some loud players who want nothing to do with it, ignore that-can’t please everyone. They won’t earn you any more money or draw more attention to your game: this can.
TLDR
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-No excuse these days. Your old player base has memories and jobs to fund such things.
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-Research GW2s event/group base acquisition and ESO’s purchasable/event driven model.
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-Combine Warframe modularity with GW2/ESO profession based decoration creation.
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-Consider STO expansion specific additions vs primary location functionality.
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-Instanced guild halls and player housing, tie in expansions-but not limited by expansion.
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-Tie in professions for decoration construction to facilitate interest/market aspects.
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-Implement repeatable projects to maintain interest/resource expenditure (STO and GW2 style).
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-Sustainable Blizzard revenue: purchasable speedups for delayed construction (Warframe forma example), store availability for unique/etc decorations, etc.
C’mon already.