Player Housing. Again

I went back to look at how many times we on WrA have beat this topic into the ground. It’s a lot. A lot of discussion. Here’s 3 completely different threads just in the past year or so, not to mention the number of other threads I found comments in as part of Blizzcon spectulation or what we want in an MMO.

Some of my comments over the past year or so, but in other threads:

  • Terra-forming and housing. I have the most fun when I can collect mats for building, put together a shiny new base and fill it with my stuff. If I can personalize the stuff, even better. If I can waste time watching videos or looking at pics online of other people’s personalized stuff for more ideas, that’s chef’s kiss. Give me a decent plot of land and let me diggy diggy hole, set up a mine, a pond, a mountain with a base jutting out the side of it. Let me add trees, building foundations, walls, ceilings. Let me populate it with NPCs I choose.

  • And this is going to sound weird, but…something to spend spare time and money on. Specialty pets, mounts, transmogs, companions, housing. Give me shinies. I’ll buy shinies. With actual money! I’ll work in-game to earn shinies. I’ll do old content for shines. Just…don’t lock them all behind top tier raiding and arena ranking. That’s just a turn off if I see something I really love that I’m never going to have the time or skill to get.

And

  • Player housing. Not just one model. Could be attached to the major cities to start, so SW, Org, Dalaran. Additional player housing drops with major patches. None of these would be content limited or RNG type things. We wouldn’t have to complete a specific raid to get them. They wouldn’t be limited time offers. They would be attached to questlines in some way. You could invite a 40-man raid to your house. You could give permissions for others to visit when you aren’t online.
  • Guild housing. Same thing, but do not lock content behind guild achievements because some people have single player guilds and that’s not fun for them.

Blizz had better plans for garrisons. They apparently just ran out of time to do things. Garrisons were supposed to be movable to whatever zone you wanted. The buildings were supposed to be customizable so if you wanted an entirely Forsaken garrison, or Elvish, Tauren, Dwarven, etc., you could do that. The most we got were flags and guards.

And

With the resources and assets that are supposedly in the code, there are different walls, doors, windows, roofs, lighting, furniture, etc. I could see finding “plans” for some of these either in the zones they currently exist in, or learning architecture as a new profession and getting some things as a base recipe. Then you make the assets by gathering materials and processing. Then you assemble and decorate.

I could see the plot we’re given as being the same size as our garrison, but completely bare. Or it could even start with our Garrison if Khadgar found a way to magically attach them directly through portals in the portal room. The story could be that our Garrisons were abandoned and fell apart, but the economy of the area is relying on them. So we have to go back and steward the land.

Neat things could be added such as the Pandaria farm (remember that?), a brewery, a portal room. You could do entirely unexpected things like make the dock area a seaside resort, or theme the entire build to look like Drustvar with spooky witches. You could remove and replace things so as a DM, you could set up different RP scenarios to fight through. This would work well if we’re given placable NPCs. At this point, WoW is starting to look like a different game, and people who used SWTOR or Divinity Original Sin II to set up electronic D&D type content would be interested in trying this out.

And

In-game economy is stimulated as people find new reasons to play. Every character can have its own housing so there’s a reason to level your alts (and there’s the metric, Blizz), and guilds will have an even larger plot of land that can be built on. Guildies can attach their homes if they wish - regardless of faction - and while in the guildhall, everyone can speak and understand each other without an elixir. New plot sections can be given out with major patch content. Entirely new bases can drop per expac. Characters can have up to 5 bases each.

I’ve messed around with building in ESO, SWTOR, Ark, Pixark, Minecraft, Conan. Valheim, 7 Days, Icarus, LOTRO, Raft, Sims, and Divinity among others. I like Conan’s system because there are modders who drop everything from entire maps to furniture lines and building sets, so the base game is crazy customizable. But with games like Conan, the servers limit things like how many characters you can have, how big your builds can be, etc. There’s never enough to do once you’re ready to take a break from building. Conan world content is highly limited. Here in WoW, that’s not an issue. I can have 25 characters with 25 different background ideas, run them through different zones for content, farm transmogs, etc.

Do I think they’ll give us this? No. I’m not even asking for terraforming here, but I feel like Blizz is still having that “you think you do, but you don’t” moment and haven’t learned that every time they actually give us something we’ve requested for years, it’s a big positive for the community.

Right now their marketing department has the issue of finding something that will appeal to new and existing players, but will also draw players back in who aren’t playing right now. Some things like Classic expacs and Hard Core are a good start. Player housing as an ongoing perk and not just something that drops with the next expac and then gets abandoned would appeal to:

  • people who have limited time in the evenings due to work and are too tired to come in and bust through a raid or RBGs nightly.
  • people with kids who play things like Minecraft together.
  • people who don’t want to chase mythics after they level cap.
  • people who look at WoW as currently having repetitive or stale content.
  • creative players who like to design and build.
  • artists. Modders. Streamers who can give tips and tricks for creating impressive builds.
  • people who hang out with a small group of their friends in WoW and aren’t looking for progression at all.
  • RPers and non-RPers.
  • tabletop gamers.

And

My overall take away is that if no player housing is coming for 3 upcoming expacs, that means no player housing. Guess I’ll keep spending my disposable income in Conan and ESO. I’d rather spend it here, but WoW won’t give me a reason.

At this point, I no longer expect player housing.

Ever.

They really think the Garrisons counted.

And

I’ve already given up on player housing. It’s not coming. If it was, they would have announced it for the next expac. It would have been a nice topping on the anniversary cake, being probably the most asked for feature in the history of the game.

There was no announcement. The Blizz devs can’t figure out how to add it, where to add it, etc. All they see is that they think we’ll all go “hide” in them. Right now they’re using capitol cities like Valdrakken to prove to players that there are people on their server. They think they have to keep doing that.

We should just stop asking before one of the devs crawls out during a stream and tells us that if we want player housing, garrisons are there waiting for us…

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