I just don’t get it. Why does Blizzard HATE player housing so damn much? They tease us with a little farm, or the garissons, or our class halls, but then completely avoid a true player housing system that virtually EVERY SINGLE MMORPG ON THE PLANET OFFERS!
Why?
The only conclusion I can think of is that Ghostcrawler told Blizzard (after they hired him from Everquest 1) is that: “Player housing sucks, don’t waste time with it.”
Yet hundreds of thousands (if not MILLIONS) of MMORPG players <3LOVE<3 player housing and wish World of Warcraft freaking had it!
They hired a whole team to add pet battles to WoW and almost NO ONE does it anymore. Talk about a total waste of money and pretty much NO ONE asked for a Pokemon clone to be added to WoW. Then you have hundreds of thousands asking for player housing and… cause Ghostcrawler said “it’s a waste of time”, even after he QUIT BLIZZARD ACTIVISION, you still refuse to add a true player housing system to WoW.
I’m mind blown… the amount of money and popularity and fame and love from your fans you would get for adding a player housing system to WoW and you neglect it because of 1 dude…
Well, according to Taliesin (they talked about it at the content creator thing they did last year) they’ve been working on player housing and want to do it, but want to do it right so maybe we will get it eventually. Housing was something they actually talked about including in the game before it launched but it never made it in.
And tons of players do battle pets to varying degrees.
And where are you getting this Ghostcrawler stuff from anyway? One person would not be able to unilaterally decide something isn’t going into the game. Based on what various devs have said they vote on things as a group.
If you want to play with houses so much, go play Sims.
Then why aren’t you playing those other MMORPGs?
Oh, that’s right… because they lack in the ways that Wow doesn’t.
As has been mentioned in other threads many times before and as Verheinen says below, more resources spent on keeping players less engages means less interactivity with each other, and that goes against what Blizzard wants.
Got a source for that? Because it’s incorrect. I love pet battling, and many people pet battle, going by the number of WQs that are easy to do daily.
Uh, Greg Street was hired from Ensemble Studios. He was working on Age of Empires before coming to Blizzard.
You’re probably thinking of people like Furor or Tigole who were EQ players hired to become devs for WoW. And Furor (Alex Afrasiabi) is still working on WoW. Tigole (Jeffrey Kaplan) is now working on Overwatch.
Many people did ask for pet battles to be added after seeing things like the Grunty/Zergling interaction. So it didn’t just come out of nowhere and it’s not something that nobody does. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean everyone else thinks the same way as you.
Also, as far as anyone knows, it’s only a couple people working on pet battles in addition to other duties. I think Jeremy Feasel is the head person for pet battles, but that’s not the only thing he works on.
The farm was a test for the Garrison feature, honestly a lot of people did enjoy the farm.
Garrisons were a big flop. Blizzard promised the Moon and gave us a bowling ball. Maybe they did it on purpose to say “We tried and nobody liked it.”
That kind of shot the idea of future player housing in the foot, because the player base response to Blizzard’s first attempt at “individual instanced content” was overwhelmingly negative.
I personally don’t care if we get player housing, because I am out gathering Naga Boogers and chasing rares around, I don’t have time to build a chair or trim my hedges. I can do those things in real life.
There are whole websites,forums and discords dedicated to pet battles, plenty of people do them. Just because you don’t doesn’t make them useless. And yes, people did ask for them.
I’d rather have:
-Guild halls.
-A farm just like Sunsong where I can grow mats from any expansion. Somewhere neutral and/or easy to get to, like outside your racial capital. Not available to Night Elves and Worgen, obviously.
2 entirely different things. Sims is much more detailed building wise than what people want from player housing. And we want to be able to make things using crafting professions which don’t exist in Sims.
Housing adds to the rpg element of the game for many people and is just something fun to do on the side like pet battles and collecting various things. It would also be optional so people who are not interested don’t have to bother with it.
People spent all their time in garrisons because that’s where everything important was. You had profession buildings, a herb/mining/fishing plots, mission table, daily apexis npc, and all the other stuff that the buildings provided like the mount quests from the stables and the pet battle npc/vendor.
Nobody ever left their garrison because there was very little need to do so, player housing existing as a collectable hoard and customizable personal space would (or should) exist purely for the fun of making it. Rpers might get more mileage from the feature, but it doesn’t need to do all the stuff that garrisons did to be fun content. Housing is popular in every mmo it’s included in for a reason.
If I might speculate. Because it’s not instance based group content, and can’t be converted into an eSport. Blizzard views the open world as only existing for two purposes. First to level up your character, and second, to provide “busy” work to fill in gaps between raid lockouts. As such the development focus is on instanced content. And housing would draw resources away from that.
Wow, Ghostcrawler is still getting blamed for stuff in WoW years after he’s left lol. Just because you apparently hate him, doesn’t mean he’s the reason why they don’t have player housing. They tried it with the garrisons and didn’t like how players spent so much time in them.
Also, they were going to add player housing originally with Vanilla WoW, that’s why there was this like portal like instance place in Stormwind but it didn’t do anything, because that’s where it was going to be for Alliance but they decided not to do it and released the game.