I know, another housing thread. GD will most certainly have an influx of these for the next year.
But I digress. Most of the discussions floating around about housing have been centered around what people want and what should be included. However, I think we also need to talk about what it absolutely shouldn’t have in order to avoid them becoming Garrisons 2.0.
In no particular order:
1. Mission Tables
-Let’s face it, this was also the highlight and one of the downsides of the Garrison. A facebook mini game where you could make millions of gold just for logging in every day. Adding this will make housing feel obligatory, which is the last thing that is needed from this feature.
2. Tying it to professions.
-The Garrisons being mandatory for professions was just a horrible idea hands down. And professions at the moment are already in somewhat of a complicated state. Let’s not make it any worse by making housing a mandatory part of them.
Edit: People think I am saying that professions shouldn’t be able to craft items for houses. That is not what I am saying. I am stating that housing shouldn’t be mandatory for maxing out your professions like Garrisons were in WoD where you needed building and to wait on heavily timegated crafting orders.
3. Being mandatory for endgame progression.
In WoD, the Garrison was required for getting the Legendary and for unlocking Tanaan Jungle. Please don’t bake housing into max level progression.
4. Generating free profession materials
Another item on the list that made Garrisons obligatory. Why fly around the world and gather herbs or ore when it could easily be generated in your own personal phased area daily?
If you have anything to add, share it in this thread and let’s discuss!
I agree, though I do want mission tables back. Just leave them separate from housing.
With that, I disagree. I would love to see the majority of housing cosmetics coming from professions. I think it would breathe new life into them and make those cosmetics more meaningful than everything just being a dungeon drop or rep reward or something.
Yeah no, it should have nothing to do with power progression at all. Min/maxers should be able to completely ignore housing at the leisure.
Agreed. That was a stupid feature of garrisons.
Honestly most of your list seems to be just “don’t make garrisons again”. In their recent interview Ion stressed that garrisons were not housing nor were they a real attempt at it, so hopefully they know better than to use it as a basis.
Player housing also shouldn’t have a shortage of customization. I don’t want it to be like Garrisons and only have one style. If I want to play a gnome, I don’t want to live in a human house. Or a blood elf in an orc house.
I know, but Garrisons were their first “attempt” at player housing and I wanted to make it clear that PH should not have any of what I listed.
That’s not what I meant. I have no problem at all with housing materials being crafted by professions. I was just stating that it shouldn’t be mandatory for leveling professions like Garrisons were in WoD.
You can have neighborhoods that are still instanced.
The trick would be figuring out how to keep the same neighbors, while also letting people take breaks from the game without losing their houses, while also not reaching an inevitable point where all of your neighbors quit and your neighborhood is a ghost town.
I’m not sure how they’d accomplish it, so they might just wind up having each house be instanced alone.
When they gave the presentation for WoD, Tom Chilton had touted Garrisons as being “WoW’s version of housing”
https://youtu.be/nIz-oqwHgiY?t=2542
Nobody in this thread, (myself included) is trying to make the argument that Garrisons were player housing. I’m just stating the fact that Blizzard initially advertised them as being so.
First of all, while I wish I’ll never see a mission table again, it might just make a comeback. In fact I suspect it’s gonna happen for sure. So if they give us an item where to check that mission table crap that can be placed in the player’s home, I think it’s gonna make it more digestible, to me at least.
The profession thing, at best we’ll see the work tables as placeable items and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The housing system being mandatory for endgame stuff, yeah I agree with that. It shouldn’t be. Ever.
As for profession materials, what exactly do you mean by free? Are the herbs you pick up from the world free? The nodes? What do those cost you? Time. And if we are gonna look at the Pandaria farm, where you could plant ingredients and do all kinds of activities to grow these ingredients, I think that’s a great and entertaining way to earn some materials. They could also learn a few things from garrisons, in my opinion, like how it was with leather gathering. No, I don’t agree.
And no, I don’t believe the housing stuff will be obligatory. As in maybe they’ll make you go through the introduction quest, but after that you can abandon it and just play the game as you used to.
It could happen, but it’s probably far easier to just have a single instanced house that you can play around in and decorate, invite your friends, host parties, and set up trophies.
They spawned in buildings that were accessible only by you. And you didn’t have to compete with anyone for them.
Sure, but the entire expansion was not centered around the farm. And player housing (done right) needs to be purely optional and part of that means it not generating any crafting materials.
When WoD was first announced, Tom Chilton (the game director at the time) had touted Garrisons as being “WoW’s version of housing” when giving a presentation at Blizzcon 2013.
https://youtu.be/nIz-oqwHgiY?t=2542
Ion and any other dev can backtrack all they want and say that was never the case. But the fact is, this was how Garrisons were presented to us in the first place. If that wasn’t the case, we would hardly ever see the word “Garrison” being typed in any discussion about PH.
I’d also like to re-iterate that I am NOT trying to defend Garrisons and say they were PH. They most certainly were not. But it’s important to make sure we have the facts straight.
How are you competing with others since they don’t despawn after someone picks them up. I mean I know they do, eventually, but you can have 50 guys farming the same node simultaneously. Having to wait a period of time for your mats to respawn is a decent trade-off, I say.