Player Housing Request from Roleplayers

Community General Discussion
1

Player Housing Request from Roleplayers

Dear Blizzard,

We are writing this to you as an open letter as longtime WoW roleplayers and leaders of roleplaying guilds and communities. We are all extremely excited about the prospect of player housing coming to WoW. This is a dream come true for us! Thank you for bringing this feature to the game!

We want to request that a critically important and relatively small feature be included with player housing that will be essential to roleplayers being able to fully enjoy this feature: the ability to have public access listings for your home, similar to the group finder.

Summary
This feature should allow a person to optionally publicly post that their home is open for visitors, and should ideally include a space for them to describe the home, e.g. “The Thirsty Fish tavern is open for business” or “The Gilnean Farming Club meeting is now in session” or anything similar.

From the side of the potential visitor, there should be a way to browse open listings, either in a local area, worldwide, or both. This should ideally also indicate how many people are currently in the home, so people can know if a potential roleplay space is active without having to visit a bunch of mostly empty homes.

Reasoning
A critically important part of roleplay in WoW is the potential for spontaneous interactions with people you haven’t met yet. Naturally, roleplayers will love player housing and want to build and roleplay in these houses frequently.

However there is a serious downside to this, it will pull roleplayers out of public spaces where it’s easy to meet new people and make new friends. This is why a “public listing” option for visiting houses is so important, it will retain the ability for roleplayers to spontaneously meet each other.

The most ideal scenario for this is, if the player housing allows for it, roleplayers will build a huge variety of very interesting custom roleplay spaces, and then roleplayers can easily go browse and visit those spaces that other people have made. But if player housing access is limited to only friends or guild members, it will be significantly harder for those crucial, spontaneous roleplay interactions with strangers (or perhaps better to say, friends you haven’t met yet) to happen.

On behalf of the thousands of roleplayers we collectively directly represent, and on behalf of the broader roleplaying community, we respectfully request that you include a feature similar to this when you launch player housing. Thank you so much for your consideration!

P.S. We are often able to gather upwards of 100-200 people for large RP events (or even more for the especially large events). If it is at all possible, we would appreciate it if the largest homes could accommodate numbers beyond a single full raid, but we also understand if technical limitations make this impossible and require us to hold such events in the open world.

Yours most sincerely,

  • Zydrik, GM of Kingdom of Gilneas [Moon Guard], Admin of Alliance Military Campaigns
  • Ashlannd, Assistant GM of Kingdom of Gilneas [Moon Guard]
  • Maxen, GM of The First Regiment [Moon Guard], Admin of Stormwind Law Project, Grand Alliance, Warcraft Conquest, Tournament of Ages, and Moon Guard Wiki
  • Mathilan, GM of Kingdom of Stromgarde [Moon Guard]
  • Aidòs, GM of Operation: GENESIS [Moon Guard], Moderator of Council of Gnomeregan
  • Dresindra, Officer of Operation: GENESIS [Moon Guard], Admin of Council of Gnomeregan
  • Banshih, GM of Undercity Nexus [Moon Guard], Admin of Eternal Court of Lordaeron and Dance of the Dead
  • Apocalypia, GM of Valdrakken Accord [Moon Guard], Admin of Vigilant Wings and Warcraft Conquest
  • RoselovĂ© (Lady Rose), Stormwind City Guard [Moon Guard], Admin of Stormwind Crown Administration, editor-in-chief of Stormwind Daily Newspaper
  • Kohatan, GM of The Stormtalon Tribe [Moon Guard], Admin of The Horde Vanguard
  • Thulmane, Admin of the Assembly of Three Hammers
  • Thaela, Officer of The Dwarven Vanguard [Moon Guard], Admin of The Grand Alliance
  • Rufaic, GM of Vigilants of Tyr [Moon Guard]
  • Seriphene, GM of The Silverguard [Moon Guard]
  • Martyrette and Aldarithus Voidsong, Community Leaders of the Thalassian Embassy [Moon Guard]
  • Taliesin/Oraeria, GM of Forbidden Lore [Moon Guard]
  • Lurhtz Blacktusk, Warlord (GM) of the War Wolves [Moon Guard]
  • Momijigari, GM of the Argent Onslaught [Moon Guard] and Coordinator of the Tournament of Ages and World’s Faire Carnival
  • Agonyn, GM of The Residuum of Icecrown [Moon Guard]
  • Vladdimere, Assistant GM of The Residuum of Icecrown [Moon Guard]
  • GiGi, Admin of The Society Circle, and Glam Gatherings, editor-in-chief of Azeroth Times Newspaper
  • Orion, Admin of The Horde Vanguard
  • Ranstrom, Officer of War Wolves [Moon Guard], Moderator of Warcraft Conquest
  • Sereneia, GM of the Shanari, [Moon Guard]
  • Highvalor, GM of the Silver Covenant, [Moon Guard]
  • Noa, leadership of the Silver Covenant, [Moon Guard], Warcraft Community Council
    (I continue to add names as people contact me wanting to be included in the original post)

And any other players who wish to sign their support below.

151 Likes
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Bumping this post because I feel it’s important that Blizzard gets to read this bit of community feedback.

10 Likes
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This has the potential to be such an incredible feature, as long as there is a way for people to find each other and help keep RP in the open world! I fully support the above statements! I hope BLizzard takes this heavily into consideration
Signed - Veralidaine Officer of [Moonguard]

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I, Rizo, Officer of the Kingdom of Gilneas [Moon Guard], Officer of the Skyheart Tribe [Wyrmrest Accord], and roleplayer of over a decade, sign my support.

5 Likes
5

This would be an awesome idea. And let’s people customize RP venues.

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I mean, SWTOR does this with Strongholds. In think FF14 does this. There’s no real reason blizz can’t either anyways. I too would like to support this idea!

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The one change I would make from FFXIV, is to make sure it is not limited space and provide an optional menu to port into the instance. The housing market in FFXIV is awful and making sure everyone has player housing is priority.

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I mean, I don’t have any real objection to it either, I just don’t particularly care nor will it be a feature that I ever use, even as a roleplayer.

Do you really think you’re going to have more than forty people over to your house at a time?

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Sae’themar Bloodfeather, Officer of the Undercity Nexus and Admin of the Lordaeron Night Market - I support this message!

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Consider me signed on to this as well! This is a crucial feature that roleplayers need and would greatly appreciate!

Signed,

Pheric Brightwood
Officer, Kingdom of Gilneas

4 Likes
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Definitely consider me signed.

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12

giant goblin Stamp of Approval. This. ALL THIS

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The largest RP event we’ve hosted so far had over 200 people a day :slight_smile: So, yes!

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This honestly, and I’m being serious, sounds almost like how club penguin allowed other players to visit each other’s houses. Towards the end of club penguin, there was a board you could advertise your igloo so you could have other people visit. This idea is also good for those who want to show off their house if they put a lot of time into it along with the rp possibilities. It’d be a mess trying to find housing of friends or public rp spaces without some kind of searchable list.

Edit: there were also “mascots” and known moderators who had public igloos you could visit and get a signed mascot background card for your penguin. Idk how blizzard would implement mascots or anything of the sort or lore character housing you could visit, but it would be cool

2 Likes
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I wholeheartedly agree! Please, Blizz, consider this! When I RP with my new friends in Kingdom of Gilneas [Moon Guard] or when hanging out with my guild mates in Wild Wild Westfall [Sargeras], this feature being suggested seems almost completely vital to maintaining ease of access to a social environment.

Spoonielove [Sargeras] / Esher [Moon Guard]

4 Likes
17

This is a fantastic idea blizz! Please use this! And possibly add fun unique decorations to buy from the travelers post!!!

4 Likes
18

I guess my concern with the attempt to make personal housing into guild housing/private server layers, then, is that they’d need to throw enough server resources behind the individual instances to hold that many people at a time in a single layer. An entire zone might creakingly support that, like Icecrown during the TOA, but who knows if they intend to get that spendy on a feature like this, and what downstream implications it could have if the servers are inadequate?

It doesn’t hurt to ask, I guess, but I’d kind of like to have them focus on personal housing before a few big guilds come in asking that they turn it into something else entirely as if they represented the totality of roleplayers who very likely largely just want their own spaces.

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WoW Roleplayer since 2006, participant in multiple events, member of multiple guilds over the years, and purveyor of various IC RP goods via a plethora of roleplayed vendors, I wholeheartedly back this.

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I’m pretty confident the housing system will be implemented well. Players need to remember that Holly Longdale is from eq2 which in my humble opinion has one of the best housing systems in all of gaming.

5 Likes
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This would be of amazing use to us here on Wyrmrest Accord as well! Unfortunately I’m on mobile so I can’t change my character on the forums, but chiming in as Eleeria (IG: Eliana/Divining), co-GM of Blackheart Accord on WrA.

Our guild has our own personally created spaces within the Warcraft universe that we certainly will use our housing for - pizza restaurants, taverns, even subsections of military complexes or buildings. Currently we use stand-ins around the world for these places, but I would LOVE to be able to use my personal housing as a place open to everyone that I could customize to fit the aesthetic.

Having it be large enough to house big groups is also critical - we don’t host gigantic events, but our guild generally sports 30+ people at our most attended occasions, so please consider allowing a large number of people to be present in a housing area.

10/10, a housing directory people can opt into is a much wanted and loved idea.

5 Likes