So here is a thought that could possibly work for housing decor on the store.
As a rough example: say that you want to build a Tauren theme home/settlement and you want to add more themed decor. You could farm X, Y, Z, content to collect the items you want or you could buy them off the shop as a complete set theme. Like everything would/should still be available in the game without having to pay but if you need it all right now (some people may prefer it) you could pay for the convenience. I mean is it perfect? Nah. But itâs an option that could in theory work for everyone. Maybe? I dunno. Just an idea.
This is what ESO does as I recall, and I didnât really like that approach⌠you could buy and furnish your house with gold, or buy and furnish it with crowns, the premium currency. The most expensive houses cost >$100 in crowns.
The non-cash-shop route was so prohibitively expensive that there was a lot of pressure to pony up cash. A house could be hundreds of thousands of gold in a game where I donât think I ever breached 50k even after spending quite a bit of time at max level: the only housing accessible to me was a studio apartment.
Idk maybe I wouldâve had enough gold if I actually liked the core gameplay of ESO and played a lot more (I donât really like it, I always just sort of suffered through it due to affection for the universe). But Iâd feel a lot better if the whole system was designed to be bought and crafted in-game rather than in-shop.
This gives me so much hope. They understand that you canât tie a gameplay loop with progression involved to player housing. I let go of a breath I didnât know I was holding.
God, but wasnât that a train-wreck, the more he got exposed, the worse it got, and the harder he went to justify the horrors being brought to light. And worse still, Shad the Bad would have fit in perfectly with the Cosby Crew, wouldnât he?
There was something I did on ESO that ended up netting me so much gold just to buy furniture, but ESOâs economy felt more like Neopets so it ended up feeling worthless anyway.
thereâs no way blizzard doesnât monetize housing lol
Monetization plus engagement are the obvious selling points from a business perspective. Iâm sure theyâve taken a look at ESO, FFXIV, and GW2 for ideas. I havenât played GW2 in years, but ESO and FFXIV both have large housing communities doing some insanely creative things and organizing house tours and the like.
Oh yeah. Not sure if youâve seen reviews of Shadâs books, but synopsisâ sound beat for beat like your typical WoW plot of that era. Right down to the âWoman Character who had a grave injustice done to her learns not to seek justice, but to learn to forgive and move onâŚoh and she also falls in love with my totally not self-insert because heâs just that cool.â
The âNot Instancedâ thing feels like a bit of a red flag. Again, neighborhoods in the capital cities, people âshareâ house fronts but you phase/load into your own house that you can decorate to however you like with the exception of vendors or any sort of farming or core gameplay loop. The only vendors in the neighborhood would be like food vendors and the shop where you buy new stuff (likely with a Reknown type currency).
This centralizes the playerbase and forces them to utilize vendors elsewhere in the city, thus keeping the houses from just turning into Garrisons 2.0.
Worse yet, the Self Insert is the one who performed unspeakable horrors to not just her, but potentially thousands of other women, most at knife- or gun-point, but also seducing women at the top of the food chain only to âteach them a lessonâ when they tried to be his equal.
The MC of that first book was so horrendously awful, not just in what he did, but how he was written. âI have done horrendous things and must face justice and pay penance, but heck you if I will ever admit to being in the wrong, ever acknowledge anyone elseâs opinion, ever acknowledge my view-points were monstrous or that everything I built on those bones and ashes was undeniably worse than what I was fighting against.â
And thatâs not including the awful writing where the plot bends to support the MC no matter what, he gains powers faster than an Anime Protag in a cheap Isekai series only intended to last one season, despite the fact even one of these powers should be enough to send the whole planet into a frantic scramble to either kill him or worship him as a Saint, and despite all the nonsense, the literal God of this universe seems to be 1010% behind this mass murdering, mass-(redacted) nightmare fusion of the worst possible takes on Stalin and your local Incel who just learned no amount of gas-station miracle growth pills will compensate for natureâs cruelest handicap.
The only reason I will ever bring up Shadow of the Conqueror is that if this misogynistic author-appealing psuedo-socialistic-mormonism garbage can get published, nothing you write should have any reason not to as well.
If I canât have a block party or just stand on my lawn screaming at people walking by, why even bother?
ETA: Reality and WoWâs version of Player Housing.
There are two universes at play - what I want and what weâll get.
If Iâm being realistic (and I have to force myself to be, to stave off disappointment), I will not get what I want.
What I want - Brick and Mortar player housing. I want individual logs. I want individual bricks. Beams, etc. I want to make my own chairs, tables, accessories, etc. All of it. I would settle for prefab walls / floors / roofs.
Frankly, I doubt weâll get any of that. Iâm okay with that, but I want more than just Garrison 2.0. I suspect they will give us the house itself. You can choose from House A, House B and House C. (much like Garrison building.) and then change the colors? Change the roof style? Maybe? Will I get a garden plot? Will I get a yard or a piece of property? Will it be open and uninstanced so that my neighbor can walk over without a portal?
Will we get a variety of landscapes? What if I want my house to be on a snow-covered hill? Is it just housing that allows you to put things youâve acquired on the walls? or place trophies? Is it actual playing housingâŚthat lets you build, design and decorate?
I really canât stomach the thought of finally getting player housing only to have it be the ultimate âyou think you know what you want, but you donâtâ moment.
Someone once wrote, people buy lottery tickets, not because they think they will win but rather it removes them from reality for a few days until the numbers are drawn. They can spend time living in a fantasy of âwhat ifâ as opposed to âWhat isâ.
Thatâs how Iâm viewing player housing in this game. It really is the ultimate WANT for so many of us. Now that weâre about to get itâŚ
âŚshould it have been left to fantasy and never realized?
Youâre probably right but at the very least I hope it is more like the mog cash shop in WoW than ESOâs store.
In ESO it seems like every aspect of housing is monetized, any house can be bought with cash. If we have to use the cash shop I hope it is more like how WoW sells mogsâinfrequent, unique, sort of eccentric items wind up in the cash shop but most mogs are obtained in-game only.
Like yes if the housing equivalent of wendigo pajamas is a cash shop exclusive I wonât be too upset, but if the whole system is designed around real money transactions then I donât think it will be any fun.
Maybe this argument doesnât hold water in an era of $90 mounts but we pay a sub for WoW, unlike ESO which is purely funded through its cash shop. Raise the sub if you have to, but donât ruin the game design by monetizing everything.
Player Housing in this game is about 18 years too late. Weâve got zones in this game that have aged like fine milk, and the development team is spending their time on cosmetics as opposed to improving the gaming experience.
Iâm aware this will never happen but imagine if player housing could be thrown down anywhere, and has all the crafting tables you can buy off the Trading Post and theyâll have an annoying year long achievement that unlocks banking and void storage.
Honestly I feel like given WoWâs track record, taking stuff you can achieve by playing the game out of the game wonât be a thing. 90$ store mounts exist, yes, but there are plenty of mounts you can still earn just by playing the game and only by playing the game.
I can see them putting some monetized items on the store at a consistent pace, but I canât see them making everything monetized. They also want you to play the game, and if you can buy everything with real money, whatâs the point?
We saw the head of Onyxia on the wall, so theyâre obviously planning trophies for raiders. And yes, while you can buy carries, there still need to be carry groups for there to be carries. So thatâs still padding playtime statistics as groups get good enough to carry people.
I definitely see them adding stuff to all sorts of gameplay facets, as rewards for doing things like Loremaster, KSM, Gladiator Rank, Profession grinding, delves, etc. To put something I actually want them to do in the most cynical terms, it gives incentive to play and essentially becomes a version of Artifact Power that rewards cosmetics instead of player power. (And most games do this to some extent; reward for doing thing is a common carrot for games period.)
powers faster than an Anime Protag in a cheap Isekai series only intended to last one season, despite the fact even one of these powers should be enough to send the whole planet into a frantic scramble to either kill him or worship him as a Saint, and despite all the nonsense, the literal God of this universe seems to be 1010% behind this mass murdering, mass-(redacted) nightmare fusion of the worst possible takes on Stalin and your local Incel who just learned no amount of gas-station miracle growth pills will compensate for natureâs cruelest handicap.