Thoughts on Player Housing

Community General Discussion
1

Why housing?

Many other MMOs have player housing available to their players. Housing provides a place for players to spend gold to boost the economy, provide incentive for players to engage with areas of the game (PvP, Mythic+ dungeons, Heroic raiding) they may not have previously interacted with for the opportunity to decorate their house, as well giving long term players something to work on in between major content patches.

Also games like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing are strong examples that sometimes people just like decorating and playing house. Besides, don’t you think your Champion has more than earned the deed to a home??

How could housing plots work?

Player housing could be instanced similar to Class Halls where there are a limited number of land plot styles available to have a home in. EG: Elwynn Forest, Durotar, Valley of the Four Winds, Northrend.

This would allow players to have some sort of customization over the aesthetic of their housing while still limiting the actual amount of land that would need to be designed and implemented for development purposes. In addition this would also resolve some of the WoD Garrison critiques of limiting players to a ‘faction exclusive’ look that they may not vibe with.

Traveling to player housing would be through a personal ‘housing’ hearthstone or ‘housing’ portal from the main cities. Viewing other people’s housing could be similar like Garrisons where you could toggle to “view party leader’s house” and then travel through the housing portal/hearth.

Acquiring the plots of land could be something each character could unlock upon completion of a quest chain. Payment of gold, earned ‘housing currency’, or other form of current content currency could be used to pay for upgrades to the house.

Upgrade suggestions could be things like - making your house larger, adding a second story or a basement, add a stable to display favorited mounts (similar to garrison), or to add a farm outside the house for displaying of cosmetic plants/flowers.

How would decoration of player housing work?

Decorations for the housing could be managed via a new tab added to the collections menu where placing the items in the house would function similar to toys/campfires. A limitation can be put onto the housing so that there would be a limit to the number of objects in any given house. EG: a small house could be limited to 15 decorations, whereas an upgraded larger house could be limited to 30 decorations

Creation of decorations could be additional mats for professions, lootable rare drops, earned achievements, or purchasable with either gold or with ‘housing currency’. Some examples of professions and the decorations they could make are:

Leatherworking - fur rugs, sofas/chairs, mounted skulls/taxidermy
Tailoring - woven rugs, floor pillows, faction pride banners, curtains
Blacksmith - tables, chairs, statues, iron chains
Jewelcrafting - Mirrors, chandeliers, decorative housewares
Inscription - bookshelves, dye for purchase as mats for other crafters, paintings
Engineering - electric lighting/lamps (goblin/gnome), radios/record players

Allowing players to craft and sell decorations for housing would increase the longevity of the usefulness of crafting and depending on execution could encourage players to max level multiple professions across their characters. Themed patterns could be available as drops from older raids/dungeons. EG: Sunwell - Blood Elf style decorations, SoO - Orcish style decorations, Stockades - Human style decorations, Dark Heart Thicket - Night elf style decorations

Creation of all of these assets may take some time…

There are large numbers of existing ‘housing’ assets in the game already for NPC buildings and homes. Existing buildings could be emptied and re-used for a player home and a large number of the initial decorations could be re-used from existing NPC housing locations (Orgrimmar, Stormwind, Suramar, etc).

Also, I do not think that Shadowlands would be the best time to implement something like housing from a ‘lore’ perspective, but it would be something nice for the near(ish) future.

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Please, I beg you, don’t give them the housing idea again. You saw how that was handled in WOD.

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You have a Garrison, that’s your house.

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I don’t think that’s necessarily fair. The housing of the Garrison itself was nice. I enjoyed the building designs and the customization of it.

The part that didn’t play out well was the utility portion. EG: mining/herb gathering/crafting without needing professions. Also WoD was never a fully realized expansion, so judging parts of it to be ‘non optimal’ isn’t really fair.

What I’m suggesting is a completely optional housing for decoration purposes. Other than collecting/decorating it would have no impact on gameplay.

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they are afraid ppl will be antisocial like in the garrison days.

i think theres more chance to get guild housing than personal housing - at least you could say its a bit social that way.

the really anti social ones can start a one man guild :wink:

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And I am building up my garrison again because I think its fun to customize, but I think there is more that WoW could build on in terms of “housing” the way that FF14 and ESO have done it.

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I really wished they made garrisons a guild feature and not a player feature. Imagine a guild building up a guild fort in every expansion. It would give players something else to do beside raid and pvp.

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If Garrisons was truly my house, why are there so many annoying little craps loitering around in my home? Why can’t I kick them out? Why do I have to send some on missions?

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If I wanted that kind of housing gameplay I’d go play Sims.

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Not having player housing is a huge missed opportunity.

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The nice thing about World of Warcraft is that it includes a wide variety of content to do, many of which took inspiration from other games. EG: Pet battles & Pokemon, Transmog & Barbie fashion dress up.

World of Warcraft is capable of having housing design as an aspect of its gameplay without lessening its more mainline raiding & pvp gameplay.

3 Likes
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It’s completely fair.

They had a chance to do housing, and they came up with Garrisons.

If you look back on a game like Star Wars: Galaxies, that was a much better way to do housing. The difference is, that game was a huge sandbox, and WoW isn’t anything close to that.

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I agree Warcraft isn’t a Sandbox, but what I am suggesting is like Tillers + Garrison located in a personal/guild class hall instance where you can drop toys on the ground to make it look pretty. All of which Warcraft has shown it is capable of doing.

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I feel like Blizz needs to come to terms with the fact different types of people play their game. Though this kind of content might not appeal to the hardiest of raiders, the fact is those raiders are largely done with the patch content the moment they meet their goals, which is fair because the game no longer holds much appeal for them. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a large population of people who enjoy farming old content, RPing, and gathering cosmetics and other achievements. The latter group is their most solid and loyal fanbase. It only makes sense to give something to them, to be enjoyed all year, not just for the two or so months a raid is fresh content.

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Easy solution to the players separating argument.

Just put the entrance to the houses in places with AH, Mailboxs, and training dummies outside.

So your house is in an area players will have incentive to hang around outside.

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Player housing would give us more ways to invest ourselves into the game world, and therefore way less likely to ever want to leave.

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17

but that house sucks, doesn’t get updated, and the customization is beyond lacking.

It was a poor implementation.

That’s like giving a a kid who wanted a basketball an orange ballon with lines drawn on in black marker, then telling him you have a ball, now go play

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18

It’s overdue but i have zero faith in blizzard to actual make it any good…i have a lot of others friends that would drop other mmos if wow implemented housing just somewhat right…

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19

Oh that would be nice!

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I personally never cared about it, as in I just , whatever not something I like or dislike, but if so many people do perhaps housin is something they should try to a point.

I think the problem with guild projects like that is that. Very few people comparatively actually have a guild with friends and stuff.
Many guilds would end up at the officer’s whims while lower members are forced to contribute in a way or feel left out of this feature.
Other times people would find harder to leave guilds due the work they put in this stuff.

Honestly it’s just like the cata guild system that ultimately hurt WoW a lot (killing small guilds, turning some guilds into gold fabrics were officers abused power, destroying server puging, etc…)and was since then diminished.

2 Likes