Why can older games that had less money, less tech and less teams give player housing but WoW cant?

Community General Discussion
146

It just means (to me) that the problem is harder to fix than people wanted to imagine.

What makes you think over the last 8 years the Horde has been a priority, instead?

It isnt the story. It isnt the gameplay. It isnt the lore. These are all Alliance based.

If nearly all actions have been to help the Alliance fix the problem, the continued existence of the problem doesnt mean that those actions didnt take place.

It basically just means Blizzard doesnt want to completely break the game or force people to change factions.

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Oh I’m with the rest of your list. I fully agree with you there has been a pretty significant alliance-bias in modern WoW. And just to be clear, I’m not trying to make any assertion as to why that is. I could make my guesses, but I’d venture to guess that most people who are getting HoF and title aren’t that concerned which faction the story is leaning (or at least, are more concerned about which faction fits their in-game goals the best than which way the story leans).

I just don’t think the racial ability bias fit into that discussion. The racials were rebalanced before Legion in some ways to encourage players to go alliance. The decision not to rebalance them to be more equitable across the factions seems more likely a constraint they walked into the expansions unwilling to change rather than looking to lean even more alliance with the game. Even if the story was completely horde-centric in that time period, I don’t think Blizzard would have touched the racial distribution since the faction imbalance still existed, and for all we know might be even worse if alliance had worse racials.

148

You dont think making racials a priority, and making the Alliance racials better than Horde racials was a priority?

I guess I am lost.

Even if we want to say that they just made them equal with the Horde…which they objectively did not…There is no way you can look at the benefit of the Dwarven and NE racials and see anything equal on the Horde side. Sheesh, thats the entire reason I believe we are getting Earthen Dwarves. So Horde can have that OP racial as well. Thats how strong that racial was. That I believe it is effecting expansions.

How is that (the creating of racials) still not part of making the Alliance the priority?

149

Ion said, quite seriously in an interview that it would cost an extraordinary amount of dev resources to create player housing. And seeing how Garrisons siloed people away into their own little instanced areas, I think it’s pretty fair to assume the same will be true of housing.

150

It’s because warlords has shown what happens with a half-baked solution. To get garrisons, they had to cut a lot from 6.0, and we lost a full content patch, and there was a 14 month content drought from MoP.

Doing the full version of housing would take even more time/resources away from creating new content, which seems to be what actually keeps players around, and they’ve likely judged that going down the route of housing with no content for ~3 years would do more harm than good to the game.

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151

Not to mention you’d have to maintain the player housing system forever. You’d have to constantly add new things for “housing-focused” players to chase after.

And considering how successful that’s been when trying to build content for “open-world” players, honestly why waste the time?

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Ion says a lot of stupid crap. Doesnt mean you should believe him.

153

I choose to believe the game lead over some random’s on the forums.

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They could but after all this time ,it’s plain to see they don’t want to.

If they did we would have something more than garrisons by now…

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You shouldnt believe what anyone randomly tells you. Instead pull your head out of the ground and go research how many other games have did players housing and did it well. Ion saying and I will quote you, it would require “an extraordinary amount of dev resources” is a load of horse crap. Other games have did it and had way less resources or budget. IMHO Blizz refuses to do it, and this is my opinion is simply cuz they want to keep milking the the cash cow until it dies and will ONLY put money and “resources” into the game if it keeps from the game dying off.

EDIT:
Just wanted to add that ION has ZERO programming experience. He was a LAWYER at his last job. Playing a game doesn’t make you a game designer and sure as heck not a programmer.

156

Yeah I’m looking around, and nearly every single one of these games has had massive issues with their housing. Ask any FFXIV player how they feel about housing. I’d say ask your local Wildstar player but that game’s been gone for nearly 6 years. What about Archage? Oh right, dead. Ultima online? The best version of player housing we’ve ever gotten, and it came out in 1997.

And they all gave something up to have that.

Wildstar had no meaningful content outside of raiding and housing, if you didn’t like those things you had nothing to do.

FFXIV has nearly no content outside the MSQ, housing just serves as a way to keep people busy, and it still stinks. Also it’s a huge game with a massive budget.

Archage had no endgame to speak of and was a bug-riddled, translated mess.

Ultima’s housing is the best we’ve ever gotten, but considering that game is older than some people who post on these boards I don’t really think it’s a meaningful comparison.

Great, let explain to you from someone who is a developer what this means. You have a finite amount of resources on your team, and you have a finite amount of hours each person can work. As a director, your goal is to allocate those resources in such a way that they are distributed both efficiently, and profitably.

You always have to make trade-offs, and unless you staff up massively, you have to make cuts. Player housing was tried in WoD and it didn’t work, it also took an enormous amount of effort for the team to implement and we got a half baked expansion out of it. The only things that kept people playing the game were pre-existing systems such as Raiding, CMs, and Transmog.

If I’m Ion, I’m never touching the housing idea again, it was a massive waste of time, and it lead to a expac that damaged consumer faith in the brand.

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At the same time, all the team leads report to him. So him saying "an extraordinary amount of dev resources” is likely him going off what the engineering leads who reports to him is saying.

And the engineering lead is going to be an expert on this.

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I never said they didn’t make alliance racials a priority, they clearly did. That was just before Legion, and as faction balance was still not achieved by then, they shifted their focus onto other things keeping racials status quo. I’m saying I find it more likely they didn’t give any priority to racials and thus they merely stayed the same whereas other aspects of the game (like the story) they clearly put an emphasis to the alliance.

But how many of those games added player housing after the fact having not planned to have it in the first place? This makes a huge difference in the amount of time it will take you to develop something. Most of my team’s architecture discussions are on trying to determine what kinds of features we might want to add in the future to design the structure to be able to easily accommodate such features because it can take literally 10 times the effort to retrofit it after the fact if not.

You may be right that Ion simply made up the argument that it would take an extraordinary amount of dev resources, I have no way to confirm it. But you have no way to disprove it either, and what he said is plausible, regardless how many other examples you can find of games that were able to include player housing.

And just to be clear, I was a programmer, now managing programming efforts. I was not a lawyer completely out of my depth here.

159

I would love player housing, but I think the big argument against it that I’ve seen is that like garrisons, it takes people out of the world or the major cities.

You see less people milling around and the world feels more empty.

160

You already have your player housing op, garrisons were their attempt at it and look how massively they failed, do you really think the are capable if better?

161

Its not that they cant, its they wont, and if they do it, it will be munkeypaw’d into oblivion becoming Garrison v2.0 which will just be “lets pretend its player housing” territory.

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Now thats a bunch of horse crap, smaller creators are capable of it perfectly fine

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With WoW being an old game, it doesn’t really attract new players and the youth now. It only is retaining hardcore players that started when it was release and maybe returning players who can be considerably new, especially if they haven’t been playing for a few years.

In my opinion, player housing will not bring new players into the game but only to please the current players who will continue to bash about it being bad anyways. The garrison is already acting like player housing and players are probably not using it because it is not relevant to the current expansion.

Adding player housing would mean you’re following the trend. As a business, you don’t want to be following a trend, you want to set the trend.

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Thats what I was trying to point out…

165

Hmm no, thats not a good business model. Thats how you loose money unless you get really REALLY lucky.