Unpopular opinion: Player Housing is a WoD 2.0

It’s not shady. I’m not even against it existing, but it will never be a main feature or attractor. It will be a small indulgence for a small segment of the playerbase. Kinda like pet battles. If you enjoy it, great, but I’d rather dev time be taken up by developing lore, M+, raid, and PvP.

they were still introduced in MoP via “challenge mode” which is literally what M+ concept was back then minus the whole keys/affixes. literally the exact same concept.

Honestly people saying garrisons when anyone asks about player housing is so odd. We had zero customization in the garrisons besides picking relevant buildings to what you did. And placing a couple of trophies that only you and any person you invited into your garrison could see.

At this point I’m willing to bet that they haven’t touched housing because they can’t bother to create something they can’t heavily monetize.

The irony of it all is that they could heavily monetize it all. Instead of galvanizing the community when they release yet another high quality mount with a new wireframe and new graphics at the shop.

But all of this would take effort,time and more importantly money from the wow board and the devs.

Personally I don’t mind player housing, but I’m not in love with it. I’d be more interested to see user-generated content in MMOs though. E.g. player created quests for RP communities, playing around with some art assets like how people were able to create custom maps in WC3. Not too sure about the cost involved, but I find that those things have more possibilities.

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I agree with that tbh. One of the biggest mistakes blizzard made was banning people for cosmetic mods / transmog mods. Yeah, they mildly inconvenienced bots and farmers but they completely destroyed a thriving independent art community which was greatly enhancing the experience of thousands of players.

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Lol at least you prefaced it with saying it’s an unpopular opinion. I certainly think it goes against the grain.

I just have to ask you, have you played any MMOs where there is housing? I’m just curious. I’ve seen it done very well in WildStar and SWG, even SWTOR.

But yeah, Garrisons aren’t seen as ‘true’ player housing, and they aren’t really- you can’t customize anything but a few statues and where buildings were placed.

Everyone’s garrison looked the same.

I think most people are asking for a room to put their own cosmetics in, that’s the difference. Or a small plot of land.

It won’t be forced, just a side-thing, like pet-battles are currently. You might get a quest leading you to it, but nothing more.

Maybe there could be some rare-spawn that drops a really cool couch that everyone wants.

Having housing doesn’t mean the world would be dead. FF14 is the strongest example I can think of, the cities are more alive (populated) than WoW’s, even.

It doesn’t have to be how you describe it.

M+ and PvP and raids are always happening all the time, and those pull people out of Valdrakken. All content pulls you out of the main city.

Your house could give you a daily quest to go to the Valdrakken Grocery Store or something, making people leave their homes every day.

There were also little daily quests you could ‘steal’ from the world and put it on your plot, in WildStar.

One such example was a rock-climbing jumping puzzle, with a little currency/exp reward at the end. If you did it out in the world, you could get a blueprint for it, find some rocks out in the world to build it, and put it up on your own plot, rotate it around if you wanted to, make it yours.

Also, I think minerals could appear on it that you could then mine, it was neat.

WoW has a lot of potential, but unfortunately I think most of it is wasted.

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Some of us liked WoD though. WoD was miles ahead better then BFA. BFA was my least played expansion. At least WoD had great raids and good gold making.

First of all, you don’t seem to have a very clear understanding of just what player housing is.

It is not a garrison. In all the games I have played where PH has been involved, it has almost ZERO in common with garrisons. It is almost entirely cosmetic. Nobody goes to their PH and sits there for hours staring at the walls. As with transmog, the principle is creativity - what can I do with my house using what I gain from the game? You decorate it, you find things for it, you fiddle with the layout, maybe a take a screenshot to share with friends — and then you leave. There is no reason AT ALL to stay there.

Some games give it small benefits - ESO for example allows you to port to any house you may own. So if you have a house in another zone, you can port there as a means of fast travel. But ESO doesn’t have flight, so it provides a number of game options for faster travel, and PH just happens to be one of them.

The main potential benefit for everyone from PH is the professions. If Blizzard was sensible, they would have every profession provide stuff for player housing. That way, even those who weren’t interested in the PH system could potentially earn gold from making and selling things to people who were interested. Patterns could be found across the game in various ways, won from mobs, given as quest rewards, whatever other way the devs thought up.

It could be a huge boost to player activity in many ways that have zero to do with a character walking into a house.

You, OP, need to see the positive benefits that exist, and get past the negatives that don’t.

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The forums are just a small minority.

I don’t really think anyone is truly against PH though, I think everyone sees the pros and cons of it, but when it truly comes down to actually adding it into the game, then that’s where people are saying no. In my opinion, I don’t believe it should be in the game, it’d be fun to decorate a house and whatnot, but after 5-10 minutes, I’d be over it and move on to actual content. Overall, I think homes would be neglected because people would instead explore the world around them or do quests than sit in a house and not do anything. If PH is added, then I don’t want it to be a big thing; I want it to be a small thing; I don’t wish furniture dropping from raids, dungeons, etc., as loot. I don’t like the table to be a “scarce drop," either. If PH is added, I say add 5-10 customization options for your home and have the homes be located in their little area like what FFXIV has.

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WoW will not get player housing. Garrison is about as advanced as you can get for player housing in WoW’s engine. There are really serious technical limitations that make ESO style housing unreasonably difficult for WoW team. Not to mention, WoW isn’t exactly a passion project. You’re asking the lowest bidder entry level resume padding team to do monumental engineering tasks in ancient obsolete C++, it wouldn’t amount to anything worth your money anyway. If you want to play house decorator sim, download one of the dozens of games that specialize in that. It’s a comical farce to keep going on about it here.

Is turned off because it is a mess to look at. No thank you.

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I play SWTOR that gives you something like 15 different houses and the two capital cities are not empty, even though you can put an AH, bank, etc in your house.

Why? Because BioWare didn’t give these houses access to a global channel.

So instead of denying people what they have been begging for for 19 years, they should just not giving player housing a global channel like they did in WoD.

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I worked really hard on my wildstar house and made a video before the game shot down.

That game had pre fab buildings to use as houses. I didn’t use one. I made my own building with walls and wood and other materials.

That place wasn’t just a house it was a whole nother zone.

I can openly say that I spent hundreds of hours on that plot of land and it gave me tons of replayability. And I’d always come back to play because you wanted the stuff you could find in raid and dungeons.

I never did get the contained ai trophy. And I’ll never will heh.

We could experiment with a dirt-cheap way to have a housing system. A special heartstone, let’s call it an “homestone” for now, thou can be an ability instead of an object that can be set by the player ANYWHERE. In practice this will give some of the freedom the mages have with their teleportation but to a player chosen location. A second “guildstone” could work exactly the same way but it is the guildleader that set the location, thus giving the guild a base.

For extra flavour, npc’s at the home/guild home location could react to your presence with a special greeting, you are after all a neighbour, not a stranger to them.

If it wouldn’t be the same as garrisons, then player housing would be a RP element.

If it’s not a RP element, then it’s a WoD 2.0, as said in the theory.

It’s one or the other. There is no in-between.

Player housing can be done without it being even remotely close to garrisons. Yawn

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I think if they implemented “phased” housing in the major cities, you wouldn’t have this problem. I’m a player housing fan, and I’d be perfectly happy with a phased housing instance that uses an empty house in SW that players can upgrade for fun. Being in SW, and possibly without NPCs included with the feature, I’d be willing to guess people will still run around and go to the AH and whatnot.

Confused why you mentioned still enjoying WoD because of your love for M+ when M+ didn’t exist then

We don’t want garrisons, we want REAL player housing,.

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