So…someone is again discussing Player Housing, but it made its way all the way to Wowhead this time. What do you guys like or dislike about this concept:
Fine work on the elements of customizing the house interior, but placing them anywhere in the world would be too much work. Instead housing should just have designated neighborhoods in each capital city. Im just gonna copy/paste my thoughts from the trading post thread in regards to how I think player housing needs to happen.
"Honestly I think that having a instanced ‘neighborhood’ within the cities would work. They create a specialized area within the city that you instance into and it’s a full neighborhood of homes in the style of the city. Cosmetic vendors, vendors there for aesthetic reasons, and maybe two really nice, Dalaran style or sized taverns.
There would be a couple streets worth of houses and each house could be purchasable by a player for a rather large sum of gold. They’re all the same on the inside and on the outside, but you get your own private little instance like the Garrison when you buy one. And then you can customize it to your heart’s content and make it YOUR house. But there’s no bank, there’s no internal vendors, there’s no trade or chat save for the channel that would load while you’re in your house.
At best you could have limited storage space for reagents and food, maybe a couple of armor stands, but everything about the house would otherwise be purely decorative. I wouldn’t make the houses any bigger that say the Rank 2 Garrison Hall, or maybe Rank 3. Couple of bedrooms, a kitchen, a storage room and a living space.
But while the outside of the house was fully locked to the aesthetic of the city, the interior could look however you wanted it, maybe even cross faction aesthetics. Want to turn one of your rooms into a library? Go for it! Want your kitchen to look like a butcher shop? Sure! Hang up your trophies, weapons, armor, decorate with some plants, etc.
Heck even go a little Sims with it and make it so that you have to maintain your house’s internal appearance! Plants die if they don’t get watered, cobwebs form, etc, maybe even, if things get bad enough, you have a ‘pest problem’ that requires you to fight a random collection of low level mobs that spawn at a certain level of decrepitude.
Or maybe you just hire someone, be it a person or NPC, to go take care of your house for a couple gold every day. I dunno, just something to make people care about the space they buy.
I don’t know about the tech behind it, but if there’s a way to lock out changes to you and you only, your houses could be accessed by anyone at anytime unless you otherwise deem it so. That way people could come in and say high and do stuff without needing to form a party to do so, but also gives the homeowner the ability to ‘lock’ the house when they want to just be alone or do something in small groups.
But yes, make player housing in a communal instanced area, give it a handful of vendors pertinent to cosmetics and aesthetics, and then make house interiors fully customizable and interactable with visitors welcome and no access to normal gameplay vendors or auction houses. That keeps the player population traveling through cities and gives us player housing without running into the Garrison problem again."
4 Likes
As long as it’s not handled how FFXIV does it where a small % of people on the server own a house and everyone else should consider themselves lucky when players allow visitors into their decorated homes.
I wouldn’t care if the house instance was client-based. Let everyone have the option of buying their own personal little space in Azeroth.
6 Likes
HALFHILL MARKET!
Had a neighborhood, and a short walk to your house. literal blueprint!!
6 Likes
Wildstar had the best player housing of any mmo I’ve ever played. It is the metric to which all mmo housing should be compared. I have yet to find any current game that even comes close to the creative freedom Wildstar had. If WoW could implement one feature that would draw me back it would be this. But I seriously doubt Blizzard has the desire much less the ability to even make the attempt.
2 Likes
I know it’s a controversial take but I don’t really think player housing is good way to utilize resources when developing an MMORPG. From an RP perspective it would be wonderful, but most people are not RPers. On most servers, players’ houses would be a permanently solo instance. The only way people would meaningfully engage with the content is if it were mandatory or very worthwhile for character progression - and that leads us back to the Garrison thing. Everyone sitting lonely in their little bases, while the major hubs feel empty.
Some sort of housing would be great, but I’ve always felt it would be better to have guild housing than individual player housing. Guild housing would incentivize sociality, not detract from it. It would be amazing to see how different RP guilds would decorate their halls, and to have a small hub where you can hang out with your guild would really compliment today’s more guild-centric social atmosphere
1 Like
Not necessarily, The Halfhill Market house only helped cooking for the MoP expansion, but there were trees you could grow and place (about a 2 min cd for each color) that was only used for RP.
The ppl who didnt do it cause there was no point, would be the ones in the future asking “Oh wow, whered you get that?!”
2 Likes
I want player housing x infinity.
That said, one of my main concerns with how Blizz would handle it is that I’d get stuck with themed options.
i.e. - want a Night Elf house? You get only Night Elf options.
I don’t want that. I want all the options and all the themes and all the individual assets available to me. Maybe I want a huge Goblin style garage with Tauren-themed art and Night Elf furniture? or something? I don’t want to be stuck with only one style.
It’s like the hair situation they have going. I still believe every race and gender should have every single hair style and color available to them.
3 Likes
Ok, who among us came up with these ideas? Gentarn? lol
I think you underestimate the “wow factor” of seeing something new and shiney and wanting to have it. Yes, good chunk of players wouldn’t interact with the content for RP purposes, but they would just to be able brag about the stuff they have collected.
Alot of players in lotro don’t use the housing for RP, but just dump their trophies in the yard/house willy-nilly.
There’s also the “guilty-pleasure” aspect of housing. The biggest naysayers the ones just as likely to sneak off to their house to decorate it and pretend it’s not happening.
1 Like
Sticking with Wildstar as an example for features WoW housing could offer. There were objects that could be placed in your lot that acted as instance portals to 1 to 5 man scaling mini dungeons. They were only accessible through housing.
There were also instance portals to the endgame raids that could be unlocked and accessed through housing
too many features and were back at WoD Garrisons
Oh yeah, Wildstar’s housing was fantastically good! It’s too bad the devs tried too hard to “reinvent the wheel”, I think that’s part of why the game face-planted so hard.
1 Like
I want to be able to make my own NPC servants to inhabit my player housing so I can build a glorious estate full of hunky shirtless draenei fellas
1 Like
My deal with player housing is that the world itself has become less exploration friendly and more speeding without detail to the small things that people loved. All those people who call WotLK the best expac for one reason or another , a lot of them now are still long time players, but have become hardcore, opinionated and a lot focus now is on competitive gaming. But I think if we look back at Wotlk, and really analyze what made it great, it was still during a time where they were telling a grand story connected to the past. It had a huge zone, memorable music, and a sense of grand adventure that recaptured that feeling of running out into a zone as a new player and the trees were huge and the visuals (at the time) were cozy. It made you feel like an adventurer. And I feel I can say with confidence that most of that player base was younger, or young adults in an era when the internet was finally finding itself. So most people still had traditional forms of fantasy to look at on top of strategic gaming. People from the 80s and 90s who knew the awe of DnD , fantasy books with painted covers and I feel that early era of WoW was still being played by people who were in this headspace of humble adventuring and leveling up your character where you can just go along for the ride and enjoy the sights or really fall in love with the stories. Whenever I hear people talk about their favorite zones, it’s Grizzly Hills and being able to listen to that music. Nothing about the mechanics. The environment.
I think Dragonflight is actually , in a way, recapturing that sense of wonder of exploration and on top of it A LOT of little things that embellish the world with things that make it feel living. Empty picnic spots, random empty towers. Tables. Bars. Chairs. Toys and items that someone might go ‘Well I guess an RPer might like this 
’ , when I’m sure that person , when they were 14 playing WoW in the early days, would have loved a rug to sit around the fire with their friends. Not really RP, but something connecting with people maybe after questing to just talk on skype or ventrilo or mumble or what have you. You would laugh and tell jokes, it wasnt RP, but it felt like you had a space to use the world and slow down.
I think this is what should be remembered. What it was that made questing and playing so great. Why people begged for Vanilla in the first place.
Because while I do fully support housing, I think it can be a great addition to the player experience. Not everyone is going to let it sit there. People like my father, who quietly enjoyed his farm and would show me all the time how pretty he made in MoP was content doing that. So will other people. There are more kinds of people who play this game than “blizz is an indie company fix pvp gear pls lmao you say this when night elves still get nothing its not a big deal git gud im commenting on this forum with only a joke and not addressing the person looking for a question isnt this funny now why are you upset i dont even play”
So housing I really do think can be amazing. But I want the world to be more immersive. I want to explore. I want to find hidden things. Dragonflight has given me the exploration I crave, and I think beefing up old zones with just more sense of living like npcs, empty homes, fishing docs, unphased instances and more opportunities to use what is there will do millions more for RP that will benefit everyone. Even the casual to speeders will feel less like theyre just running through a zone and more a living community. That feeling of wonder and maybe sitting down with your friend might be more attractive like it was when you were 13 when all you wanted to do was fill notebooks with your ideal adventure, drawing swords that are covered in flamed and lightning. Disconnect for a moment on why you liked certain things, and why housing is talked about extensively, no matter how many people say it’s just an RPer thing.
People crave adventure, people crave a universe that looks livable even if you’re not interested in being in it. It’s just about the feeling of getting away and slowing down. I can still see a future for housing, but there is so much more about the entire world I want to sit down and relax at. I have a home where I sit in all the time, I’d rather return to old zones that have been given a touch of life and reasons to linger.
Wildstar died for alot of reasons, mostly mismanagement from the execs. Housing is one thing they got outstandingly correct and is damn near universally praised. I maintain that housing in that game could have been excised and made a stand alone game in and of itself and it would probably have survived longer than the mmo portion.
4 Likes
I don’t disagree, but the problem with player housing is that most players will never get to show their house to other players, ever. I just don’t see that being gratifying enough for most players to spend time on.
My honest speculation is that player housing, even if it’s an extremely robust system, would be regularly utilized by a very small fraction of the playerbase. But the alternative is also a little scary. If it was somehow the best thing since sliced bread, and everybody is shacked up in their cozy house, now you’re taking players out of the overworld and putting them in their own instance. A new player would visit a capital city and it’d be JohnTravoltaLookingAround.gif
1 Like
As for making housing not just for RPers, this is something that would probably never happen and not be technically possible in WoW but the coolest thing I can imagine is some sort of frontier zone which plays like, ARK or Rust or something.
Maybe there’s a peaceful housing district in SW and Org, but let’s say there’s also a frontier where you build forts and can squabble with players for territory (either through direct PvP, or maybe a PvE mode where the fighting is done by player-created NPC troops, the aforementioned hunky draenei blokes). Frontier has resources that you can use to build structures and siege engines and stuff in the frontier zone.
This is obviously far, far outside WoW’s wheelhouse and this sort of thing is much more the purview of sandbox games like Eve, it is just the first thing that comes to mind when I think of “housing” that goes beyond just RP hangouts.
3 Likes
That’s for sure, and no one likes to be told they don’t know what they are talking about after the devs asked for suggestions and feedback.
That has been a popular scare-tactic since EQ2 and it just never materialized. Wildstar as already mentioned is lauded as having the best housing in any mmo and the hubs and overworld were still teaming with players.
FF14 also has really good housing and you can do a lot in it that you can do in cities, yet there’s more people in cities. It’s still a fun side activity that generates a lot of market activity and a fair bit of cash shop revenue too.
In the end the worry about “JohnTravoltaLookingAround.gif” is just an excuse used by devs to not implement something worthwhile in housing.
I’ve long said that Blizz is just missing out on exploiting us for cash shop money by not shoehorning housing into the game.
That was a thing in Age of Conan (Funcom)! You could build houses in pvp houses. Of course a lot of fortresses ended up wasting away and cluttering up the landscape because Funcom didn’t know what they were doing with the game…
1 Like
This is a major point I echo all the time. On top of what I said above, its why I want the world to have a lot in it. Because if housing is amazing, theres no reason to leave for RP for anywhere else. People who have anxiety will never get to be a part of the fun things in the public because it will all be instanced and miss out on chances to grow, random encounters will go away. Because…trust me. That will happen. Sure people will get bored and hang around the cities…but I have a feeling that the obnoxious people will cause the people who truly want to RP and be immersed decide to go to their home usually, and then the RP dies down, and people who want connections and friends will be harder to come by because the majority there will be ooc conversations, other faction griefers, people pvping and usually that leaves people with less than inviting attitudes toward people trying to be in character. It’ll be like populr rp hubs toward the end of SL when all people did was just make it insufferable.
Im sure at some point itll even out, but I think the dent will be made. So …I’d rather see the world beefed up and the cities too. But unfortunately, there can be no talk about RPers without someone mentioning that rper accomidations are not important and will only be used by a small amount. I think this is a useless to the conversation because I find it too pessimistic. New things will ignite new interests, and the better the RP tools are in WoW, the more people who immerse themselves into DnD will want to come try. If you can tap into the large player base of table top RPGs, then you will get a lot of interest the more interesting it is.
1 Like
Eh… that already happens. Maybe it’s gotten better recently but it does tend to get isolated, and trolls interrupting it being a general garbage fire. Not saying you’re wrong, I just don’t think RPers are going to vacate cities for housing instances. It might for a while, but then people will just go back to their old haunts. It happened in lotro, and ESO, and ff14.
I just don’t believe housing is the big boogeyman that’s going to kill off city hub activity like it’s always claimed to be.
2 Likes