Because it hasnt happened yet, so there can be no hard evidence. In the case of ESO, it was already free to play when they started housing and put houses (other than a couple of single rooms in taverns which were free) into the shop. So its a bit different for ESO, because WoW isnt free to play.
There is a bit of a different between a mount in the store (when players have access of multiple hundreds of mounts from in the game itself) to houses that can only be purchased from a shop.
Except it wont work that way. WoW isnt Earth 2. I donât believe they would ever create housing in the way that Ultima and FF14 does. Players wont be able to sell their houses. Any more than we could sell our garrisons back in WoD, or can sell bound mounts that we get in the game. You would get a house somewhere and it would be yours.
Naturally its impossible to guarantee anything but I think thats about as close to certain as I can be. I cannot see Blizzard creating a game option where players control the owning and/or transfer of properties. House building and/or content sales I could accept easier than I could accept that.
If they decide to repeat what they did in WoD and make the homes only visible to you, then they wouldnât have any more value then what they did in WoD. I donât think people want them to do what they did in WoD again.
If they decide that homes are going to be an actual piece of real estate, then they will have enormous value. By an actual piece of real estate, I mean a place that other people will see and recognize that belongs to you.
Any way the point is, all someone would have to do is get a large number of different accounts, establish a home, and then sell the account to someone.
That is where the money is. That is why WoD garrisons were a big FAIL. People want homes to be collectibles to show off to other people. Much like the high school kid who brags about their highly fashionable shoes. They donât wont some virtual home that only exists to them. Itâs like a mount that only you can see. You see a super rare dragon mount, and everyone else sees some crummy horse mount you can buy with a couple gold in Stormwind. No one wants that.
except there would be no gold to be made as every man and his dog would have the housing to get/craft their own stuff . It would flood teh market into nothing . Just like garrisons did .
Now for teh re4ason I DO NOT want to see player housing ever put into teh game.
Development and ongoing $ resources it would cost. Blizzard has a finite amount of $ to spend on WoW. This undertaking , to do it right , would consume a reasonable proportin of that capital.
We already have to do without things because of the lack of capital , we dont want to lose more. There should be thousands of quests ( the heart and soul of RPGS ) to do after we reach level cap and many many more added each patch , but because of how much it would cost they would never do that.
Also they could never please enough people . What some people think is a great housing system others would hate.
Also anything that gets players out of the world and into their own little space is very bad for teh game. Cities are bad enough .
Plots all over the world would be horrible; you never think about how many players there are. It ends up looking like âShanty Townâsâ sprung up over the landscape. That would âruinâ Wow.
The way to do it is just to have it instanced, without being obnoxious or obvious. It would be invisible to anyone not interested in Housing.
A good example is the way it is done in ESO. The thing already exists, then you go into your instanced apartment/whatever.
I really liked it, in ESO, since you could place trophies and things how you wanted.
I donât really want it to be anything like Garrisons, we already HAVE those. When you start talking about a âlittle farmâ added, you get too much into what we already have in MOP. Anything like a âlittle farmâ would trigger the devs tendency to add something grindy.
People have really just wanted âhousing.â Blizzardâs mistake was thinking they had to have it tie into the game in a big way, involve RNG and grindiness, etc.
People want various choices of what it might look like, ways to alter the interior/decorations, a hearthsone just to there, maybe placing some minipets somewhere, some mounts outside, etc. Just simple stuff, without crazy RNG farming for any of it or having to do X dungeon with strangers on Heroic/Mythic to get some parts of it.
Honestly, to DO IT RIGHT would involve little to no overhead or money; doing it WRONG, again, is what would involve that. You can TELL they did a LOT of work on Garrisons, to make something âhousingâ fans disliked and nearly everyone else REALLY hated. It ended up really in no way being âoptionalâ content.
The best way to do it would be to let a few of the art team people, and such, do it in their spare time for the heck of it. Then for them to show the dev team, âhey, we basically made âhousingâ for the heck of it in the way people have been asking for it during the last 16 years.â
I also would say it should totally be separate from âGuild Housingâ, with that possibly coming later; just basic housing should come first. You KNOW âGuild Housingâ WOULD be lots of dev time.
If done right, it DOESNâT TAKE PEOPLE OUT OF THE GAME. It does the opposite, because there would be NOTHING TO DO at your housing (except alter the housing, in some small way.) The only thing to do would be to enjoy your housing; actually the less other stuff to do there the better. So then it would not detract from Wow, taking people out of the World. All it would do would be give them a âhomeâ, that seems more like a home than Garrisons did, IN that world.
I donât think Player Housing fits into the narrative of WoW in anyway whatsoever. So with that in mind:
It must be instanced so it doesnât take over the landscape like Second Life.
Itâs not required in any way for anything. It should never be a forced metric that unlocks anything else like Garrisons were. You had to unlock your garrison in WoD to unlock 95% of the quests.
Swator is a great game , teh housing system is horrible and really takes away from teh whole game experience . Just my opinion of it , others love it like you . But its a good example of what I said above in another post that no system would please everyone , I would even say that no system would pleae the majority
I want a cozy, private place I can bed down for the night after a hard day of whatever. A servant bringing me a beverage would be a bonus. How would that be bad for the game?
Once upon a time during wod my moonguard main got out of Ashran at dawn and portaled to moonglade, bedding down in the inn in Nighthaven. The next day she woke up and found herself very unexpectedly in a threesome.
No, the money is in subs. Sales of things varies, adjusted by many factors but someone buying a monthâs sub means that person is potentially playing for a month and interacting with the game in a positive way.
Look, this is all hypothetical anyway since we have no idea if it will ever happen, or how it will happen. We can discuss it in ever-decreasing circles and end up where we started. I am going on a gut feeling, as well as a bit of logic. The logic is that smaller games with smaller player numbers can afford to have open world real estate, but at its peak WoW is too huge for that. Can you imagine a normal busy server at the height of expansion release fighting over limited real estate plots? It would be absolute mayhem. When they could solve that problem by simply making the houses instanced. I cant imagine they would do anything that labour intensive in the way of casual content when they dont need to. And if they are instanced there would be no buying and selling at all.
As far as selling houses themselves on the shop, of course its possible. And Iâd be very surprised if they arenât considering it. But they have to walk a fine line between exciting the customer base with a new set of game content against alienating the very people who love the idea by putting the stuff in the shop. I think theyâd be more thinking along the lines of âpeople will buy tokens to purchase stuff for their houses off the AH so we donât need to sell them the housesâ. Buy hey, as I say, its all conjecture. It may never happen at all.
That depends on where the house is. If it is in a city, then it should be a one or two-story townhouse. From there, the architecture and layout depend on the city. Silvermoon seems like a place for open balconies. If it is rural, the architecture is up to the race of the character and its location. A pond would be nice. Each house should have a room or a building to do crafting.
I really think it would be a good move to have houses on the shop , i can see Riot do this for their MMO . Itâs not like you canât turn golds into money/shop .
A Night Elf themed house for my Elf. Or a dark mansion for my Void Elf.
I know a game where the houses are not instanced, they are in the world. You can see them in cities and when you hover the cursor over their door it will say âHouse of Xâ.
That said, I doubt Blizz would even do it like this because it limits the houses for so many players. So, I think theyâd do it instanced.
Fully customizable would be cool. Or at the very least, diverse. Not âAlliance house = Stormwind house and Horde house = Orgrimmarâ like the Garrisons were.
Back when I played The Old Republic, they did it well. Only change Iâd like is maybe not have specific plots for furniture/decor and make placement fully dynamic like in Path of Exile.
I disagree. I am an older guy and I originally was an Ultima guy. So I can speak from some experience when it comes to housing. I was much younger and far more superficial when it came to stature in a virtual setting. I did purchase a home for Ultima for about $80. I was far from alone. I also did manage to get a rather nice home placed for myself through the game. Soon after I placed my home I had a visitor. Someone came to complain that I should have never been able to place a home where I did and they wanted to speak to a game admin. Which was nonsense. I was a little lucky with the placement, but that is beside the point.
Homes back then are just like mounts are in Wow. Status symbols or collectibles. I didnât have one home, I had to have three. People could care less who was in the homes or what was in there unless they could steal it.
When homes would crumble, that was when a home wasnât accessed for a long time, people would gather like vultures waiting to snatch up the lot for themselves.
If Blizzard does do it, I am sure it will be based on a "show me the moneyâ platform. FF14 is also another game Blizz would look at closely when considering housing I am sure. Competing with them is something I am sure they see as essential in many ways. Itâs no accident that FF14 went the way they did when it comes to housing. I am sure they believe their approach to housing is the most lucrative as well.
Iâd like to be able to display all the weapons Iâve collected over the years. A place for my pets to call home. If they did a farm, Iâd hope you could grow any herbs from any expansion there.
A place to invite friends, a place to fish in peach in quiet.
Decorating could bring a new profession or flesh out the current professions.
i donât find it interesting. iâd rather they spend the enormous amount of development time/resources it would take to do good player housing, and instead spend it building new dungeons and raids. if i want to build and customize a house iâll go play an existing game that has that as a feature.
Not sure how FFXIVâs approach to housing is âmost lucrativeâ. Housing plots in FFXIV arenât sold for real money by SE, and âplot flippingâ is expressly banned. FFXIVâs housing system is also one of the things that gets the most criticism from players.
Housing needs to be individually instanced so that everyone has access to it. The ability to own a housing plot doesnât need to be a status symbol. Housing is a creative outlet that everyone should be able to engage with.