The community have been pining for player housing more or less since the inception of the game. Other MMOs have already made great strides in player housing, and it remains conspicuously absent from WoW - garrisons don’t really count. In this thread I’d like to start a conversation about what we really want from player housing, starting with my own views!
Why Player Housing?
Aside from the garrisons, there are no real places in WoW that we can truly say are our own, and the garrisons aren’t offering us a particularly good way of expressing who we are. You might wonder what purpose player housing is meant to serve, and the answer is: practically none. You’re not meant to visit your house in order to prepare for your raid, m+ or PvP, you don’t need to stop by to collect your daily quests, you don’t need to visit it at all if you don’t want to!.. so what’s the point?
From a roleplayer’s perspective, the answer is easy: player characters have homes in-character, and we’d like to actually use them to RP in. But there are reasons to use player housing even if you aren’t a roleplayer. Maybe you just like building houses and you want to show them off to your friends! Maybe you have collected some rare and prestigious rewards and want to put them on display. And maybe you don’t want anyone to see your stuff, but you really love collecting furniture just for the sake of it! The reasons are endless.
Does player housing have to serve a purpose in current gameplay to be worth investing in? I don’t think so - but simply by adding another layer of expression and collection would already greatly improve a lot of players’ experience.
How should player housing work?
This is a little tricker to answer, but I will try my best. The three most important aspects of player housing, imo, are collection, building and display.
Collection! Furniture and other cosmetic rewards for your house should be added as rewards from various types of gameplay - quests, achievements, raid/dungeon drops, vendors (including PvP), treasures, secrets, the list goes on - and some of these rewards should come from old content, giving us yet another reason to revisit the past. Most of the assets we could use already exist in-game, and I’m sure someone on the art team would love to come up with more ideas.
Building is more complicated, as I’m not sure what the technical difficulties would be. I think to start off with you should be able to choose a location for your house - perhaps at a few select predetermined areas, such as the various cities - and then choose from a selection of different sizes. Some people might want a small house, others might want a big mansion. Maybe even allow us to add more rooms to the house as we go. Furniture and the rest should be possible to place wherever we want, much like how we place certain toys such as the pillows - except that they would stay in place permanently, until removed. Maybe we should be able to resize, rotate and recolour some elements as well!
Display! You need to be able to show off your house, and I have some conflicting ideas about this. I love the idea of houses being open to view by the public - but I think that forcing players to show their houses off wouldn’t be great either. Perhaps the option to toggle between opening it for everyone and keeping it closed off and private. But if it is public, how would one visit it, you might ask? Should we have neighbourhoods with limited real estate space?.. No! That would be horrible, everyone should have access to this feature, and gatekeeping it behind a first-come-first-serve system like that would be awful. But - neighbourhoods are a good idea. What if you could connect your house with other players to create instanced neighbourhoods? You can walk through a street, see all the houses in it, and then move on to another neighbourhood to check that out. As long as it is an optional feature, I think this would be great. There surely are people who just want to be in their house, all alone, without anyone else coming by to prod at them - and we should respect that.
So - I haven’t talked much about guild housing yet. I think guild housing should not be the first iteration of player housing, because I know that in the RP community, this will be abused by everyone so that they can all have their own houses, and this would break up guilds their associated communities. If we are to get guild houses, I would rather have them function more like class halls and garrisons than player housing - it’s less about expression, collection and such, and more of a place you and your friends gather to do cool guild stuff!
Do’s and Don’ts
- Make player housing optional, and not required as part of your other game systems. You can have a vendor in there to repair your stuff, but don’t put a bank, auction house, etc. in there. We don’t want to drag everyone away from the cities and the rest of the community, like garrisons did.
- Bake the collection of player housing items into your reward systems to add another vector of collection into the game - but preferably add them to the pool of other rewards, so they don’t actually displace rewards like mounts, pets, etc.
- Give people privacy, but also the option to show off their houses without having to invite others into your house. And let us have entire raids visiting if we can somehow fit them in!
These are my initial thoughts! I’m going to sample some ideas from the RP community on this topic as well, and add them later on. What are your thoughts about player housing? Anything you would do differently, any features you’d like to see? And I’d love to hear suggestions of things to put in your houses :>