Devs should have started working on player housing since WoD but recent interviews with Ion makes me doubt if there’s anyone working on that feature at all.
Garrisons aren’t PH. That would be like saying MoP Scenarios are the same thing as Mythic Dungeons simply because you are doing instanced content and killing things. It’s generally not a good idea to over-generalize things because there’s unique context, design intention, and design features.
Garrisons were meant to be a derivation of PH that was more ‘Warcraft’ and paid respect to it’s RTS origins. So it had stronger elements of base building, resource management (gold/wood/garrison resources), mission delegation, invasions, and even professions for a single expansion. It was then abandoned since 2016.
This is in contrast to an atypical PH feature with collecting, building/crafting items, and customization over the game’s lifetime.
So there’s two key points here: (1) traits, and (2) duration.
Garrisons: base management > customization, single expansion
PH: customization > base management (if it even has one), lifetime of game
Base management is interesting, because some games do it and some don’t. Usually games will either lean to one or another, but Lost Ark is an interesting case here where it seems to do both evenly.
Then in terms of customization, the list is endless. There’s a lot of variations of PH and it’s impossible to encompass them all. Although a third point can be made here which is how well it integrates to the game.
And then there’s also things like Guild Housing, which, again, isn’t the same as PH because it has it’s own set of identity that makes it distinct from PH even if they may share some features.
Another thing I’ve observed when people compare PH to Garrisons is that it results in a void argument that basically serves to shut down any discussion on the topic. It’s basically “well x died, so y will die,” when the entire basis of why x died was because it wasn’t even implemented as a core game feature which is what PH proponents would clearly want out of the feature. I doubt they want something that is going to be implemented in an expansion and then abandoned forever. If we can’t even agree on that, and how Garrisons didn’t serve that core need, then what’s discussing about feature wish lists going to do? It’s always going to get derailed.
WoD didn’t prove that. The Garrison hate-train was the punching bag for an entire embarrassment of an expansion since it was marketed as the main selling point.
Garrison was a useful feature because Blizzard designed it to be a progression system for WoD for the legendary questline, raiding and professions. And once people burnt out with all the other content (and there was very little of it) it ended up mainly becoming the only thing you did. So people became sour because WoD was great for alts, but when you have so little content, you’re basically replaying the same thing over and over again. That’s how the afk Garrison became a thing because there was basically nothing much to do but log in, manage your Garrison, raid, and log out.
Then Blizz, in all their wisdom, decided to make Garrison Shipyards part of the legendary quest lines. There was no turning back from that because people were already fuming from the lack of content throughout the expansion, and they were forced to use one of the most infuriating features ever implemented in the game (next to ToC jousting).
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garrisons wasn’t all that bad just some of the dumb stuff blizz implemented in them like the shipyards. at this point i don’t know why many of you are so against real housing which blizz could of just turned garrisons into enough instead of just throwing them away. no one is dumb here everything blizz is doing currently in wow sure ain’t bringing people back so why not? you can argue all you want is wow dead no but it sure is losing more players sales numbers don’t lie df sold worse than all the so called most hated expansions like wod bfa and shadowlands lol. but hey lets never do nothing new right?
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So WoD didn’t prove that Blizzard can make bad content choices?
I’m confused why you quoted me, cuz it seems like you agree with me in your post. I may of only used the flying part as an example, but clearly it was disliked for more reasons.
I was there, I remember when the wild fires were started when the no flying thing became reality. Then the scamper from Blizzard to save their burning game.
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FFXIV has a housing system, but Square Enix was smart enough to not make the housing terribly functional in the greater scheme of things. You don’t get epic quality gear out of it, you don’t get a mission table that will have followers bringing you 5,000 gold, there’s no garden and mine associated with it that lets you forgo mining and botany. Because the point of it is to facilitate social interaction and to allow players to flex their creativity while providing a gil sink for people to blow their money on.
The cardinal flaw of WOD’s garrison system was two fold: It was far too useful for it’s own good, allowing people to forgo a host of what would otherwise be activities that get you out into the world, and it came in an expansion that was brutally lean for content. Garrisons were too good to be in, WOD had few reasons for you to ever leave.
I’d lay down four laws for what constitutes player housing-
1: It doesn’t directly, or at least it doesn’t massively interact with any core gameplay loop in the game.
2: You are allowed at least some control over the shape, size, dimensions and layout of the house. You are allowed to control it’s internal layout.
3: You have a choice of where the house is located.
4: Player Housing is designed in a way that facilitates or at least allows for organic social interaction.
Most games with player housing might violate or soft break one or two of these rules. WoW breaks all four. The problem with your house in MOP is that it was actually useful- it fed into your cooking profession and involved a slew of daily quests- you have no ability to customize it, you have no control over it’s location, and because it’s tied into the instancing system, you can’t even have people randomly showing up at your own house.
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So Garrisons were supposed to have so many options. You would have been able to pick where to put your garrison and the architecture of it. Instead, we got garrisons that were placed in SMV and FFR. If you were Horde, you got orcish huts. If you were alliance, you got SW castle. Yes, you could change the race of the guards that were there if you were max rep with that faction. But for all the talk of customization options, it was a major letdown.
Players who want player housing want to be able to pick where to have their house, even if there are only like 4 different places to choose from. Players in favor of it also want to be able to choose the architecture to match their character’s race or just their favorite design. If you think of it as another form of character customization akin to mounts, mogs, or character looks, garrisons just don’t do it.
The panda farm is just that, a panda farm. It’s nice for pandas, but it doesn’t really mesh with my void elf’s aesthetic and backstory.
Blizz could add rewards to player housing furnishing to achievements, dungeons and raids, and even PvP. There could be treasures around the world, crafted items, from rares, rep… It would give those who like collecting stuff something to want to farm to show off. Plus RPers would be thrilled too. Garrisons and the panda farms are like the prototype, and are nowhere near what players want in player housing.
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For something with that kind of investment, they’d probably make everyone have to engage. Just like Torghast and Dragonriding
Oop yea I think I must’ve misinterpreted your post
Which begs the question… What is player housing?
And what would it take to make garrisons player housing?
I was in one discussion where someone stated it wasn’t player housing because there was no bed. Ok, say the devs add a bed, would it then be player housing?
So what would it take to make the garrisons player housing? One person will want a quaint little house, another mansion, another a mushroom to live in. The only way to satisfy all the different versions people have in their heads would be to hand out the dev tools and let everyone make their own.
Of course the live game isn’t designed for that, it just takes flags and shows what ever pre-built model it’s told to show, not modify and save changes to the world design and then propagate those changes to every other player.
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SWTOR implemented player housing and has significantly smaller numbers than that of wows players
Disregarding that what’s your point about m+, raiding etc? The things that have historically always received dev attention above all else, I’m sure will continue to be just fine as I doubt the same teams would work on player housing as raids like they have different teams
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lol
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Doesn’t stop me from doing content in swtor either lol
And I think introduces for guilds RP more RP content
So casual content w personal houses and group content w guild housing, and the fleet still has people.
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I hope they do this as there has always been people asking for it. I would give it a try and see if I like it. 
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Garrisons. Just add this thing to garrisons and update garrisons.
Muting thread as I have nothing more to add.
To be fair, there are some fairly simple ways to avoid this, like integrating the housing into current expansion events and promoting socializing within said housing. Maybe, I dunno, make one of the monthly activities in the Trading Post be attend X number of events in player housing a month?
(Just one of the first things that came to mind, I’m sure with a bit more thought put into it there are several other ways to further get people involved)
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An apartment or house in Silvermoon!!! 
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And here we go with the 988th thread about Player Housing in the last 2 years.
Why can’t y’all just stick to 1 megathread about it?
“They should just add Megathread to the Title of THIS one.”
/grin
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I can do that !
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“Now we have our Main Player Housing Thread!!”
/salute
/cheer
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