Player Housing Feedback

Community WoW Community Council
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Here’s my feedback for player housing. I’m going to assume that the Devs will pull inspiration from FF14, Star Wars: The Old Republic (unfortunately, the only housing system I have personal experience with), ESO, and other games that have housing systems. So, some of this may be stuff they’re already thinking about and/or has been suggested by others but here we go. In no particular order…

Professions - Obviously (IMO), professions need to play a huge part in the housing system. Both crafting items to go into your house and having a workstation of some sort in your house. This could just be adjustable worktable that you can set to your crafting profession or something separate from the current crafting/work order system.

Tailors can make upholstered products, carpets etc; Leather workers can make leather derived products, items using bone, certain metal products that can be linked to chain; Jewers can make mirrors, chandeliers, candles, jeweled goblets, etc; Blacksmithing can make any and all metal related products not covered by other professions like tables, armor stands, training dummies (if not done by leather workers), silverware, etc.

You could even use gathering professions to make things if you really wanted to. However, wood products would seem to be a class of items that needs a home. The most logical place would be leatherworking but that’s a little bit of a stretch. But… In Warlords, logging was introduced. What if we brought that back and then either created a new secondary profession for creating wood products or made something that you had to use NPCs for?

Profession tables - Having current profession crafting tables in your houses would be very handy but it also might seem too similar to garrisons and the complaint that some people have about things being too convenient. It would depend a lot on how professions are handled in general (my suggestions above).

Vendors/AH/Xmog/etc - I think certain things like training dummies and a transmog NPC are definitely must haves for housing. Having an AH in the house would run into the too convenient conundrum as well plus might tick off people who just shelled out a lot of money for the AH mount.

But on the topic of other types of vendors you could get pretty creative. If you’re doing professions inside the house you’re going to want an NPC that sells you crafting materials. I think a NPC that sells max level food water would also be really good to have. You could also have various roving vendors on some set schedule (similar to garrisons) that show up outside your house to sell things. Which leads into…

Instanced neighborhoods - It would be really cool if we focused not just on individual player homes but entire neighborhoods. This would allow us to decorate outside our homes, chill outside on a chair, stable favorite mounts, and be an interaction area for people. I imagine this would be very popular with people who RP. How the devs decide who gets to be your neighbor would something they’d need to decide though. But we’d also have…

Guild housing - This. Is. A. Must. Having a guild hall or whatever where your guildmates can assemble would be awesome. You should also be able to decorate the heck out of this, have training dummies, all the profession stuff, etc. You could also add in cool things like dance floors and any other wild ideas that people come up with to make it a focus of social interaction. Guild housing should be pretty big to accommodate having lots of people inside it at the same time. And anything that’s available for personal housing should be available in guild housing.

Portals - I’m sure this will be a topic of great discussion. Should personal homes have a portal to your capital city? That gets back into the debate about convenience. Garrisons had portals to Warspear (and whatever the Alliance equivalent was) and there you could use a portal to your capital city. So, having a portal to your capital city wouldn’t be too different. It also helps future proof homes no matter where we get subsequent housing areas.

Allowing friends to visit/key system - I imagine having multiple people “owning” the same house would be complicated from a coding perspective but you could do a key system like they have in SWTOR that allows you to grant access to your house to other players. Whether you want your friends to be able to visit/use your house or you want to RP having a family, something like this would make that possible.

How we access the homes - Other than walking in the door, it would be nice if there was another way to quickly access your home(s). Whether that would be a separate hearthstone or something else. Obviously, you have to think about how you’ll access different homes in the future as the games adds more housing areas.

Homes as rest areas - This almost seems obvious, but all homes should function as rest areas for building rested XP.

Decoration acquisition - The main thing I don’t like about the housing system in SWTOR is way too many of the items come from their in-game store/microtransactions or through acquiring currencies to purchase them. Please don’t repeat that mistake. The items or patterns for decorations in the in-game shop should be few and very far between. I imagine you’ll put stuff on the Trading Post but I’d like to see most things come from in-game content (raids, dungeons, open world, PvP, crafting, etc). I think any goodwill that you gain from finally giving us player housing will be spent very quickly if you try to make it a cash grab.

Sounds and music - Having default songs for the housing but with the ability to change it (like with garrisons) will be good. It’s something else we could collect over time. Maybe one default song is tied to the area the housing is set in, and another is more generic, almost tavern-like or whatever. Also, having specific things in the house that create sound will give the space character and life.

Generic stuff -
Allowing all or most of our pets in our homes (even the outlandish ones, no pun intended).

Don’t let the fireplace (or other sources of light) be the only thing in the home with animated movement (for example: pets running around the house; if we’re allowed to have open windows then things like plants moving with the breeze; that sort of stuff).

I’d take a look at the grid and anchor systems SWTOR uses for placing objects as a start for coming up with ideas on how to place decorations.

Giving us themes (both as a starting point for decorating and overall for inspirations) would be a good idea that you could continually add to.

Maybe give us some minigames we can play when we’re home for fun.

Make housing faction neutral (meaning people from either faction can enter into personal housing and obviously guild housing).

I’m sure I’ll come up with more later but this is a good start.

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Honestly, just take the jukebox from the garrisons and extend it into this. Would add more value to the garrison while also providing the same options to player housing, aka a win-win.

On the topic of this, the ability to place mounts/pets, either as idle with some animations (such as /special) or with some casual roaming (perhaps the ability to say “roam within this area”).

Also, looking at professions, I think that it really should encompass materials and professions from all expansions. Give the player a reason to visit old expansions and raids, add new recipes, maybe even rare materials etc just to create a market regarding it. It would also add a secondary value to doing old content, you could simply sell your reagents on the AH.

Make the items for the housing system AH-able. Don’t make them warbound on craft, let players build their own economy.

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I would like to see more of the rift design of it. Where the objects can overlap. In rift you can place an object, and then stack something on top of it example - they give you a pond and a bridge you can place the pond, and then put the bridge over top of it. I don’t know if that is something that the devs would be interested in doing or not, but I would like to see that.

I would love to see unique items drop off of bosses that you can hang on the walls. Ony’s head, Nef’s head, something off of Lich King. Things from iconic raids like ICC, Molten Core, places like that.

Also I too would like to see the pets, even if its just like in our garrisons where its random favorited pets that follow you around. I would like to see more perm. objects for them like a pet bed, toys for them to play with. Just generally more interactive.

Oh and one last thing, I would love to be able to see my player house in one of the capital cities, not just out in the middle of BFE Azeroth. Which nothing against that, as that is something that a lot of players are going to want. However personally I would like to see some of them in capital cities like Ogri, SW and Darn pre Sylvanas. Just generally an ability to pick where our houses are going to be.

I think it is great that we are getting this finally, just like you I have a wishlist of things that I would like to see in them.

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I am hoping for a lot of customization in terms of architecture/themes. For example the human/orc themes for the Garrisons in WoD did not fit the theme for most races. If a blood elf player wants a a Sin’dorei themed building or a Draenei wants a crystalline home I hope those are options.

I also hope we have a variety of places to pick where our home is. There’s a lot of places I’d like to have a house in like Azurespan, Eversong Woods and Nagrand to name a few. If players could choose other details like if there is a pond or river nearby that would be lovely.

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I definitely like the ideas presented.

Another game I would like to toss in the mix as an example would be Wildstar. You had a “plot” that you could essentially fully customize. There were predefined houses that you could pick from based on the different architecture of races, but everything else was pretty open.

You could place any of your decorations anywhere on your plot of land. You could put them in the air, you could stretch/skew/resize, you could even rotate them upside down. This made certain building block type decorations really versatile as you could make fences, gates, buildings, etc. Also each decoration increased the speed at which you gained rested exp, with higher quality items giving more.

I forget the name of them, but you had specific spots designated for functional things. For example, target dummies, crafting stations, portals to different places in the world, etc.

Obviously Wildstar was built with a lot of that in mind and I don’t know if that kind of system would work in the WoW engine. But I do hope we have some type of plot of land outside the house and a good amount of decorative and functional spots to add things like crafting tables.