player housing?

[dokilar]

sorry if this has bee discussed before but ive always wondered, what is the big deal with people always requesting player housing? its been requested a bunch on the WoW forums and it seems Rift is adding player housing in their new expansion.

if i remember right WAR had a small form of player housing didnt it? it was like a guild hall or something? ive just never understood the purpose of it, other than it was a place where only guild members could enter and "hang" out. i believe there were some vendors in there as well. i guess i just dont understand the whole "hanging out" thing.

[Ighox]

Not sure what answer you are looking for.

Player housing is fun?

[dokilar]

Not sure what answer you are looking for.

Player housing is fun?

i guess thats what i ment to ask, whats fun about it?

edit : im not saying things like this shouldnt be implemented, im just geninuely interested in why its such a requested feature

[Affixiation]

I like player housing as its a way to show off creativity with what you're given to work with. Also being able to go to other player's homes and checking out how they built up their own house.

[unholytestament]

The appeal to me comes from all the the years I spent playing D&D. When you got to a high enough level things stop becoming a challenge so you either A) go dimension hopping and take on the lords of the nether realms or B) take all that treasure you have gathered and build yourself your own castle/fortress/tower/retreat/whatever for you to rule.

[Talorh]

I remember some of the older games having this, which is why it was strange to see the newer games not having it. Well and it's fun, I guess, same kind of fun as gearing up only with more freedom.

[dokilar]

ok, so its basically just a side feature to have something to do when youre not doing anything else, fair enough. i generally dont get too involved with side features but to each their own, thanks for the answers!

[Deleted]

It's fun in the sense that it lets people create something of their own, customize it, give a personal touch and generally have a place that they can call their own in the gameworld.

Same applies for guilds. When you're among the top guilds of the server, having an grand, imposing guild fortress that was collaboratively built by the guild is actually mega-cool.

Plus it conveys that warm, fuzzy feeling that I can't explain.

It also promotes the 'virtual world' side of MMOs, which in more recent games has been greatly neglected.

[slime]

I hate this feature in RIFT, because to me this is filler content - like the pet battles in wow. I'm sure a lot of people want this and like it, but I'm a bread and butter content in MMOs kinda guy - like dungeons, raids, quests, things to do to improve your character(s) - and this is fluff. Now, Trion has only impressed me since I started RIFT - so I will of course give this a chance, and who knows I might be blown away by it and go full 180 on my opinion, but for now I see this as a waste of developer time.

[Fencers]

It's fun.

Housing provides an outlet to personalize something in a game you [presumably] enjoy.

From a developer POV it provides a huge gold and time sink w/o being burdensome.

For example, most MMOs need to artificially create drawn out scenarios or reasons to log in. Such as dailies, weekly lockouts, long respawn timers for mobs or materials, achievements, rankings, etc. Some of these have to be made compulsory too or the system breaks down.

This often creates a fatigue; "ugh, more dailies..."/"have to do my weekly still..."/"need to come back in 2 hours for this spawn..."

Housing gives the devs an out in creating long term hooks & time/gold sinks without that content being expressly compulsory. Housing is pretty expensive to develop, however.The caveat of housing is if it is underdeveloped housing doesn't have an effective hook realtive to the cost of development.

It's way cheaper and easier to create: 'kill 10 monkeys, get tokens, turn in tokens for gear' daily quests as content than create robust housing.

There is a benefit to both players and developers if housing is done successfully in an MMO. Even more so for MMOs with a cash shop or microtransactions.

[wariofan1]

I don't really get it either. It's nice for people on RP realms and all, but I honestly don't want to play Sims, I want to go out and slaugther my enemies. I ain't saying that it shouldn't ever be implemented in WoW, I could simply ignore it. However, I would personally rather have that the developers would focus on other things

[bbr]

Not sure what answer you are looking for.

Player housing is fun?

player housing is insanely fun.

try playing UO,. it's a great way to keep players in the game, and give them a place to store their stuff - other than the bank.

[Nelfie]

sorry if this has bee discussed before

This has been asked hundreds if not thousands of times on all sorts of forums and blizzards forums aswell. A simple google search would net you the answer really fast.

And the answer to the question stated by blizzard numerous times are the following: "No."

[enchanted]

Well player housing was back in WoW during alpha stages but wasnt implemented due to technical limitations I guess back then. As for the answer your looking for, probably as everyone said its something fun to do besides dailies etc... And to show off your creativity and personalize something for you like make your own personal storage for items or something. Would love to see it in though other than after doing those 1000 dailies besides afking in stormwind.

[Deleted]

I don't really get it either. It's nice for people on RP realms and all, but I honestly don't want to play Sims, I want to go out and slaugther my enemies. I ain't saying that it shouldn't ever be implemented in WoW, I could simply ignore it. However, I would personally rather have that the developers would focus on other things

Player housing comes under the rpg part of mmorpg, which sadly many players seem to neglect. Personally when I want to go out and slaughter my enemies, I log into an FPS and wreak havoc. Whereas when I want to immerse myself in a fantasy world along with my friends I will log into an mmorpg.

It seems to me as if a huge number of players simply want to treat mmorpg's as instant gratification dungeon/raid crawlers, to the extent of ignoring almost all of the social aspects of an mmorpg. Maybe there is a market for a game that limits you to just doing raid content with you guild in your own instanced world.

[Azuri]

But I don't really know how housing could be implemented in modern 3D MMO's without either of those technologies.

Here's how a modern MMO developer does it, if anything they should have the tools to do it good and right these days more then years gone by:





I'm not sure if housing is something I would put a ton of time into since my play style is different but others love them and it gives them plenty to do and adds value for the developer to have it's players want to spend time playing their game. As far as a waste of resources goes for some developers I can see this being an issue but not for the likes of Trion who develop Rift. Even with their extensive feature packed upcoming housing they are still delivering raids, dungeon and PvP content, and tripling the world size which seems unmatched by other developers

[Amyllia]

I remember reading a blue post a long, long time ago where someone had said Blizzard would only do player housing if they could do it on the same level of detail as a game like Animal Crossing.

With recent additions to the game being inspired by Pokemon and Harvest Moon, I don't see it too ridiculous that they might be looking heavily into games like Animal Crossing to figure out how to apply it to WoW.

[wariofan1]

Player housing comes under the rpg part of mmorpg, which sadly many players seem to neglect. Personally when I want to go out and slaughter my enemies, I log into an FPS and wreak havoc. Whereas when I want to immerse myself in a fantasy world along with my friends I will log into an mmorpg.

It seems to me as if a huge number of players simply want to treat mmorpg's as instant gratification dungeon/raid crawlers, to the extent of ignoring almost all of the social aspects of an mmorpg. Maybe there is a market for a game that limits you to just doing raid content with you guild in your own instanced world.

Admittedly I'm not very much into the RPG aspect of an MMORPG. I usually just call it an MMO anyways. That doesn't mean that I neglect the social aspect of the game, I like socializing myself, that is however close to impossible in MMOs today, which can nearly single handedly be blamed on WoW's Dungeon Finder. I like the gameplay of a MMO, it's where I have fun finding a strategy to get a boss down and smashing the face of my opponents. That's why I play MMOs, strategy and unique gameplay. The FPS genre doesn't offer that, too many FPS games have the same gameplay, and most of the time it's just mindless shooting and shit.

Anyways, I'm sidetracking. Point is, it's easy to enjoy a MMORPG without the RPG element. RPG does stand for Roleplay Game, and might I remind you that roleplaying is something completely different than simply socializing yourself.

[Remilia]

Ah yes. It's one of the biggest thing I played around in EQ2. You can 'rent' player housing and you'd just generally make and customize your own place. You can place mirrors (secondary AA tree). It also allowed you to place trophies and allowed you to place certain things around that you can use, such as the Djinn Lamp (Genie).

Guild housing allowed more things. It allowed you to gain your own personal crafting benches, NPCs that gathered stuff for you, different portals, test dummies, what not. Guild tier 3 housing was HUGE. It was nearly the same size as a city. (It might as well be one).

I spent hours messing with my house, and can have my friends wander around in it, or whatever. Also bugged it so I had 'extra' floors, >.> .......

We made a 'zoo' (statues of monsters) in our guild house for giggles. Had these random things. There is no actual use, other than for fun.

Basically the above is why I like / want it in games.

[Rukh]

Player housing is fun for the same reason people like The Sims or Sim City or whatever else. its fun to work to build something of your own that you have to overcome certain hurdles to design.


I honestly didn't like rift that much. Its an ok game, but every feature I feel like I've done for 5 years already in WoW, so it didn't interest me. However with Rift introducing player housing, this one thing really makes me want to give it another shot.