It’s a fair point, but the question that only data can answer is how much of a component of the population this particular crowd accounts for.
If the RP community that want to RP “tea at my place” are, say, 20% of the population, it’s worth hearing.
If the community is .05% of the player population, they’re not going to get what they want, because the remaining 99.95% of the population is going to ask “why are you committing development time to this instead of providing us more content?”
I’m inclined to believe that GD is not a reliable sample of the population at large, so only blizzard data analytics can confirm whether this is a population worth hearing or ignoring.
Ultimately, all we can really go on is what we see in game.
What we see being introduced in TWW is delves.
That’s not RP content. It’s (optional) solo content.
That tells us that RP’ers still don’t have priority where player housing is concerned, but people who like solo-play opportunities are a priority.
The Garrison and Mists farm both prove that blizzard DOES have the ability to do some kind of instanced housing.
Casuals make a huge portion of player base, regardless of the egos of those who dont want to accept that reality.
Casuals would absolutely use player housing, including those who currently say they dont want it…just like they use mogs, even though they arent putting in a lot of effort into farming mogs.
Whether a housing fanatic…or just messing around with here and there…or crafting stuff for housing to sell on the AH if they really took it in the right directions…absolutely a huge percent of players WOULD be active in the player housing system if done right.
Pandaria’s farm was clearing quests/reputation, and specific things appearing as a result in specific places once a specific quest or progression was found, wasn’t it? Was there much customizable with it?
Or am I mis-remembering?
The major problem I think is the tech. Object vs object placement. Object vs wall/ceiling placement. Object vs land placement. Worse, every single race has their own structures…
Objects with interactions (stack a lamp on a table. Stack a rubber chicken on the same table. Stack a bed on the table).
There’s physics, object shape, character vs object walkthrough, etc considerations here.
There’s an editor system there that needs to be built, and applied to eventually every single doodad being included… and worse, any house shape that is racial will require new considerations.
Other games have pulled it off, sure… but WoW is old. It’s an old software base being built upon… and if the possibility for furniture/objects hasn’t yet been accounted for… That may cause problems on the tech side.
So…hey not trying to step on any toes here but here’s how I see Player Housing working out so it’s not Garrisons 2.0. They make it a special mount that you can park and roam and customize…and maybe make it fly so you can set up your home anywhere you’d like. Like a mobile home kinda thing that wouldn’t require them to reformat most the game to fit in some out of place houses. Make this mount like how dragon riding dragons were where you can change what it looks like with a special platform or spell and this maybe also opens home decor mode to do the inside, the outside, how many floors you want, maybe the option to make stuff grow outside of it when you land somewhere. You know…make it unique and not a phased thing but you can only have guests if they’re in your party or invited so randoms can’t just break into your mobile home like how people see an Auction mount and use its auction house without asking. Maybe have it count as a resting zone too so it’s a mobile inn you can have like a barber in or something. Key point is to have it work like Guild wars 2 boats where you can park it, leave it be for a few minutes and come back or even explore it all you like without it being dismissed unless you get too far away from it
I’m not really in favor of player housing because I think that’s gonna cost a lot of time and money to implement for what is ultimately zero content. Content might feed to it, but it in and of itself is largely not content. More than anything, it creates an environment in which players can make their own content.
Which, that’s great, but it doesn’t really seem to be the direction WoW is going any more. Hasn’t really been since Vanilla, I’d say.
All the same, I still acknowledge that comparing garrisons to player housing is absurd. I think that just leads to dumb splitting hairs arguments.
Player housing is not garrisons. Clearly. A garrison isn’t a house. I mean you can just stop the convo right there, lol
That is 110% wrong… it is so wrong I don’t know where to begin with how wrong that is. I’m going to heavily medicate, meditate and think about where to begin about how incredibly wrong it is.
Don’t feel that troll. He is not worth your time, as every take he has, or idea he puts forward would actively kill the game. Did you know that he tried to advocate for a erasure of the Alliance to force everyone to be Horde? That’s the kinda person you’re talking to lol.
I dunno if I’d agree with that. They added transmog and have supported it more and more with purely cosmetic rewards and options, especially lately. And what is housing if not just transmog for a space instead of a character?
If added, I bet it would serve a similar purpose, too. Cosmetics for it would come from all other content as rewards, some would probably be in the shop and/or trading post. And using it for expression would be up to us.
I’m a roleplayer and I’d like player housing but coming from a roleplay standpoint if it existed, we’d literally have NO roleplay left on the server because everyone would be ERPing in their own private domains.
On the other hand, it might actually clear out Goldshire.
It would, I just don’t think the (lack of) value-add justifies the time, money, and opportunity cost of implementing it.
Would it make the game better? Sure. Almost any addition would make the game better.
Would it make the game better given the resource and time constraints when measured against other opportunities for development? I don’t think so. I think it serves an incredibly niche audience and the grand majority of the playerbase would become very, very quickly bored with it. There’s only so much you can do with a house, really
uh…the point was…and Im sorry…I figured it’d be easy enough to figure out…was that they CAN make an ‘instanced’ house area we can use, clearly even outdoors as well.
Same with the garrison.
No one even implied that there needed to be huge questlines involved inside…in fact ive ACTIVELY spoken against that and literally said player housing should be cosmetic only.
so they dont have to mimick ESO housing…‘problem’ literally solved.
nonsense. There are things you can position in pre set spots in the Garrison.
Even the Farm has a couple things that ARENT there in the beginning that are added later…thinking a little incense alter that sits on one side of the farm.
Oh baloney, lmao.
They add new buildings every expansion. Theres your housing external.
They can do instanced content…theres your housing internal.
Being old isnt a road block to doing player housing.
Theyve proven beyond argument that they can do a LOT with this old engine.
They pulled off dragonriding and all those mods for the mounts themselves…player housing isnt a matter of not being able to do it…its whether they are willing to do the work or not.
Not true at all for reasons already stated.
The garrison had endless things TO DO INSIDE the garrison…that is why everyone was in there all day long.
DONT…DO…THAT, lol
NO quests inside the housing
NO AH inside the housing
NO bank or transmogging inside the housing.
COSMETIC ONLY.
Do that, then put hundreds of things to farm for the house in content all over the game you have to GO PLAY THE GAME TO GET…and suddenly NOTHING that was true about the garrison is true about housing.
The problem with guild halls, or Guild housing in general…is that the technical sole owner of it is the guild leader. Your things get placed their on their whims, and if they decide to remove you, there is a very good chance you will NEVER get your stuff back if you placed anything.
