Pyromor.
No offense, you’re a hard one to please by the few forum posts I’ve seen thus far.
The above post is what in my mind Blizzard should do, not just for you, for everyone.
Player Housing and its drops, mats, parts, etc., are only as invested into as Blizzard makes said items available.
And, in my mind? They should try to rival or beat FFXIV in that regard.
The game certainly won’t hurt for it.
Let’s avoid this at all costs.
The WoW gold token being used to buy both gear and carries is enough to buoy the game’s financial performance such that WoW’s records profits of late to me are due to said gold token.
I would dissuade Blizzard from offering ANYthing PH wise on the Store.
I’m not a selfish one and truly you didn’t need to post that 
Sorry, just making sure Blizzard knows that it should not cater to any one person, let alone any group of players.
I didn’t mean it personally. It’s just that Blizzard isn’t that great at reading who to direct WoW at, if that’s even anyone at all.
We have to start with pretty basic things for housing, because honestly there’s a lot of ways to do it poorly. It doesn’t matter how good the house is if it’s only around for one expansion.
It needs to have elements that tie into the pillars of the game, you can play WoW so, so many different ways. Whatever way you play should be represented in your house, even if you don’t raid, or pvp, or do dungeons. Your house needs to define you, it needs to be yours. I’m not talking about 1 of 10 different houses and you get to pick. I’m talking a completely customizable experience, everything should be able to contribute to it, but nothing should be required for it. Every different avenue of gameplay should allow for new possibilities.
I don’t think you should have access to the bank or the auction house from it though. You should however have an anvil, a campfire, a forge, anything you need for a profession should simply exist there. I also think you should have access to limited mats, but not have it as efficient as world collecting, never remove the value of the world, just give us a nice place to afk with minor conveniences, that’s all it takes.
Thing is though, I’m saying I HOPE it wouldn’t come to that.
Did you know there is a ‘furniture store’ in Boralus? It’s called Dock 1 Imports (making fun of Pier One Imports) and it’s a furniture store that has like cute little mugs on display, chairs, etc. And I’m sitting here raging like “WHY CAN’T I BUY ANY OF THIS STUFF!”
There are so many different things in WoW that can be implemented for housing; Pandaria, IMHO, is one of the most beautiful places in WoW and I was like “I would sell my soul to live here, this place is gorgeous.”
Blizzard needs to do this, even with the controversy and their notoriety of ‘not listening to players’. Doing housing would simply be the next step in the right direction.
And for those who argue that the Garrison is housing. While yes it is ‘housing’, it’s bare minimum. Saying the Garrison is housing is like saying putting extra shredded cheese on a Hot Pocket is ‘cooking.’
I agree! Also love the name, good to see fellow SMT/Persona fans here.
I agree to all of that, Mediarahan!
The problem is that, done right, player housing as Blizzard might envision it is not something they’ve chosen to share with their players yet.
So as I do agree, the issue is getting out of player housing what is meaningfully put into it.
And, as you type, having PH suddenly vanish or lose importance after a single expansion is a major issue if that were allowed.
Player Housing would, according to game content history, currently be outside the scope of Blizzard’s content work thus far. They have never once to my knowledge allowed any single piece of content from any one expansion retain any measurable relevance into the next one.
And with PH, that’s the opposite of what would need to happen.
The nice part is that PH would not be a way to directly affect endgame.
However, PH would be a possibly nice way to allow the player to supplement and support current endgame content in any expansion, as each rotates live.
We call that ‘Evergreen Content’, which is content you can do that isn’t endgame, but stays in the game. Transmog and pet battles I would consider ‘evergreen content’.
This would cure droughts for most people. Imagine if someone with no interest in housing was bored enough to try it whilst waiting for a new patch/expansion. They might like it and end up enjoying it immensely, getting hooked on it, going on Furniture Runs on PVP/Raids/Dungeons.
This game needs something to keep the drought feeling less like a drought, like a bottle of water during a long run, it’d be refreshing to just relax and just goof about with the housing, maybe even perfect it with the right NPCs or shelves or even have your motorcycle outside of the house!
I’d love that!
It would likely get me playing again, for that matter.
The issue is that, to me, Blizzard does not seem to grasp how it truly views WoW, even when attempting to account for their sacred vision.
The sacred vision changes with each content patch. And, I think, personally, that long term that’s doing more harm to the game than it is doing good.
Case in point, Sylvanas and Danuser’s constant simping of the story for his walking corpse bride pillow of a Protagonist for WoW.
However, to me, the quickest fix is to give WoW a single metastory from start to current end, as that constantly changes, along with making sure that story drives gameplay, and then said gameplay redrives said story. It would help with both new and current, or in our present game state, returning lost, customers, nearly all benefit from the story being both relatable and followable with no loss of context nor player along the way.
After that’s done, I would think PH would either be good first, to retain those few left, or, after, to try to add old and new players alike. What would possibly be even better would be the first, a quick PH push, and then, after things are a bit better, an expansion to really open things up and give even more options and customizations to PH.
And, for the record, massively increasing individual character customization options is not something I’d pass up on if I were Blizzard. WoW is notoriously light on single player options, even now.
Probably almost no one here played/s EQ, but I love the housing system in that game. I’d LOVE a housing system like that.
It’s instanced, but the instances are neighborhoods, full of houses and streets, etc. For the most part, everything is customizable, down to the exact spot, size, and angle you want to place a chair, or literally anything.
There are quests you can do to get furniture and stuff. Or just drops from creatures, etc. Certain tradeskills/professions can craft different types of items. You can hang up weapons and other equipment you’ve acquired from the past, maybe just for posterity, or for sentimental value.
Like I would hang up my thunderfury or shadowmourne on a weapon rack–I remember what it took for my guild and me just to get those items. I remember when i finally got all the items needed for the TF, and we headed out to Silithus to start the encounter, word got out, and it seemed like half the server all went there to see it and experience it. I actualy crashed right as we killed the guy because there were too many people in the zone. I was so scared that something would be messed up. But when i logged back in, a saw the sparkles on the corpse (a corpse i wasnt online to kill lol). The experience getting both of those was, what’s the word… legendary. I still remember that. These days, I don’t even know the name of, or care about, any single item I’m using. It’s all just throwaway.
I’m getting off topic so…
Yes. Player housing. Like EQ.
Please never do this, as you need your soul to function.
So an instanced city zone, basically?
If Blizzard played their cards right, they could, and indeed, should, take their favorite aspects of each player housing style out there and then picking it into the version that they like, and pushing it onto the PTR for players to interact with for feedback, changes, etc.
I honestly hope they one day do just that, the above.
As to EQ housing, as for WoW, I would think that an option to consider would be scalable allowances to each instance site, or, if scattered across the world, some kind of delineation of demarcation points such that players and guilds know exactly what and where they are working with in game.
Basically, if there’s a single farm, village, town, city, berg, burg, or larger area of land to build upon, more customization that simply repeats over the entire terrain piece would likely be best.
As would a large influx of both character, housing, and options customizations for all of the above and previously mentioned areas of the game.
Gear racks, statues, decorating options from mats and other items… If they, Blizzard, put in a good amount of effort into giving LOTS of options, I don’t see Blizzard losing out monetarily. And that’s what drives most developers.
I just hope Blizzard can see this as the untapped gold mine it looks like to me.
Instead of housing I would like to resurrect the old Talent Tree…
Oh, if we’re going that far back…?
I’d attempt to return all of the Talent Trees, at once, just balanced and stacking options so that players can actually customize their own choices and not be immediately playing derp WoW as a result.
“Oh, you want to be a DPS Shaman? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH Heal you nerd”
No thanks, as much as people love the old Talent Trees, if you didn’t ‘pick the right tree’ you were basically shooting a nailgun into your foot.
Dark Age of Camelot does this, and sometimes you could see other houses in the distance in Wildstar. A small neighborhood would be nice, and I wouldn’t limit housing like they do in FF14.
Agreed.
As for DPS Shaman, what Blizzard truly needs to do is mathematically balance all races, classes, spec’s, item levels and gear ratings, such that the game is actually both fairly and evenly balanced for once.
And then never break that balance, and only build upon it.
Let people play their way.
It will net them more subscribers in the long run.
Having player housing cities sounds like fun.
doing it right however is the rub. I for one wish them luck, and personally hope that such an endeavor would work out. Maybe around each major city in game allow PH plots around the NPC filled city, such that the farms, wider suburbs and what not are all PH sites?
It would also truly increase the in world lived-in feeling if done right.
I used to say in WoD that if Ashran dropped items to customize your Garrison, it would never be empty.
The point about player housing a lot of people seem to miss (on purpose?) is that the material for would come from playing the game. From quests, from world drops, from dungeons, from raids, from pvp, from chests. Not just current game, either. Want a mini Maiden of Virtue for your home? You’ll be in Karazhan a lot. Go back to Pandaria for the mats to make Imperial Silk, needed for tapestires. You want a house that looks like the one Alliance base in Howling Fjord? You’ll be running around Northrend a lot.
And the secret items and pets WoW has been adding since Legion could also be part of housing. Secret mats to make rare items, rare items themselves, etc.
I mentioned this in another thread. Housing is a bad idea… It adds nothing nothing to the game at all. It is a “luxury item” that will only go to the very wealthy and top 3 to 5%.
Think about it. If Blizz does it they will cash in. 20 million gold a house… Perhaps 75-100 million for a larger house. Maybe 400 million for a castle. Think of all those Token sales… People will be spending insane money for homes upwards of 5,000 to 10,000 real dollars for a Wow home…
How does this help gameplay? People are complaining about too much Time Gating and Grinding. They are fed up with bloated progression systems. This adds nothing to the game that satisfies the want of the community to have better content. It’s like asking for more items for the in store shop. If they spend time and energy on this, the game doesn’t improve at all. It becomes more of an online mall.
Honestly, I don’t care about player housing. It’s not something that that I would enjoy.
But a guild hall would be great!
Honestly I feel they really missed the boat (pun intended) in BFA with giving us a very unique and useful type of player housing that would have mitigated all of the issues brought up when people argue against it.
If they’d allowed us, the players, to actually become the captains of our own ships with our own customizations and a system of arming them similar to what Allods Online did, it would have satisfied the demand for player housing while making them useful in the open world for both PvE(the Island Expeditions) and PvP(imagine high seas battles between players).
Was really a missed opportunity, but that ship has now sailed.