I don't understand why Blizzard are dragging their heels regarding player housing...

[Dasani]

Player housing is stupid and pointless.

The only MMO I have ever played where player housing actually matterd was Ultima Online and there was one absolutely critical aspect that made them actually important. It was the fact the houses ACTUALLY EXISTED.

You could walk out of Vesper, one of the towns in UO and see my house right as you walked over that bridge leaving town. You, me, every single person on the server would all see it sitting there. It actually existed in the game world. I threw up a bunch of vendors in there, decorated it to lure people in and look fancy, and made a killing on earning gold there selling magical items, reagents, and other assorted goodies. I also had a room dedicated to Runes used for teleportation which also lured people in because they knew my place was a hub for going anywhere you wanted to go.

Now compare that to WOW... The game can't possibly allow "real" player housing that exist in the world because the world is absolutely tiny and there isnt enough space for all the scrubs and casuals to place their houses so instead, they do what all garbage MMOs that followed after UO did, they make it instanced (or in WOW's case, they'd do the next step up, make it phased just like garrisons and the farm). This makes them pointless because people can't just wander up on your house and see it or interact with it. Even your friends that might actually be interested in looking at your house can't do so without you holding their hand and pulling them into it manually.

Next, UO houses had a purpose and a function. First thing they did was offered storage capacity for all your shit. You could have entire rooms of chests full of objects and items. WOW doesn't jive on that. They want you to have no inventory space and limited bank space and are always reluctant to make bigger bags and almost never extend storage capacity in your bank. They just don't want it. Another function was the money making potential. You could setup vendors in there and sell your junk at whatever prices you wanted. It had a REAL in-game economy because it took so many factors into play. You had to know of a place that sold what you were looking for, you had to search through these places you knew for the best deals, and so on. WOW destroyed in-game economy by having it's omniscient/omnipresent auction house. Anyone, anywhere wants to sell something they just boop it on the auction house then everyone/everywhere knows what it is and how much it costs. Suddenly the location of your store doesn't matter, advertising and/or building a reputation for your store doesn't matter, always staying in-stock doesn't matter, because now the only thing that matters is "sort by lowest price".

So the only thing you had left that houses actually did was let you decorate them to suit your character/personality/whatever. UO's engine was made for this to work and it was an easy thing to do. WOW's is not. In WOW, it isn't even possible to put items on the ground. They simply don't exist in the world. Drop that sword? Boom, it ceases to exist. In UO, that sword would've been put on the ground next to you. You could've even laid it across another sword and some cloth to create a design to make your house fancier. WOW doesn't allow for any of that, all of it's little buildings are static objects. The furniture inside can't be moved, reoriented, or anything else. They'd have to make some pretty big changes to the game engine to even allow that. And for what purpose..?

Think about it. How often did people goto your garrison just to hang out or "look around"? Never. The only time you went to someone else's garrison was to get something out of it like using their disenchanting hut or picking up the next day's quest from harrison jones or to do a dumb invasion. You never went there recreationally. Blizzard had to create reasons for you to want to go there because you never would've done so otherwise.

So back to player housing... It would have no beneficial function and be just there to "look pretty" just for you, so you want them to design an entire new system with multiple house designs, dozens or hundreds of objects to put in the house that you can move around and place in it, and then the game stores all of that info. Then it only gets used by you. Each player has chunks of wasted data being stored on the server to suit their little house fantasy for no reason and it isn't even being used by anyone.

ANd how often would you even use it? Player housing in shit MMOs usually operate by walking into a generic "door" in town that instances you off in your own home. So when would you go there and why? If there was no tangible benefit for being inside of it, why would you go? You going to logoff there every day? Go through that extra load screen to get into your house? That isn't gonna last. You'll get over that shit in a week, if that, and stop going there. You might stop by to throw some random new shit on the walls if you get it from a raid or achievement or something, but then you aren't going to go back in there again until you get a new piece of shit to throw on the pile.

Player housing would almost instantly become as pointless and unused as 99% of the mounts and pets owned by everyone who just collect shit to collect shit then never use that mount or pet for anything ever for the remainder of their time playing the game.

Player housing is stupid. Player housing is pointless. You need a game that actually does it right, like Ultima Online. Anything else is a cheap mockery of it with no purpose.

[Deleted]

And int will STILL cost time and resources. They will still have to have people work in it and those people will not then be working on other things. And, well... you have all that. In FF. Play FF when you want that stuff.

Oh... so it's forbidden to wish for new features? You are not the only person that plays this game buddy.

Housing is an engrossing feature that will raise subs and increase retention. It's not worse than say pet battles or garrisons. Neither of those features cost raiding tiers, so get out with the negatitivity.

This is the same kind of arguments i saw before the transmogrifier was in. "This is not a fashion game", "this feature is pointless it doesn't add me more content". And yet it's a gigantic sucess. It is obvious there is demand for it. Stop thinking these things come at the cost of raiding tiers. The raid team is a completely separate team. Theres alot of assets already in game for this kind of content aswell.

[Deleted]

...cut...

As an ex UO player I could not have said it better.

[Ryzael]

MMORPGs aren't just about raiding

Moderately Multiplayer Online Raiding Progression Game.
It's right there in the acronym.

[Deleted]

Asking for things to be removed is different than adding new things.
Removing content that already exists is selfish, yes. Adding something new means it's going to keep getting attention, like the pet battle event, attention that was taken away from raiding, the main point of the game. There were no pet battles before they added them, there shouldn't have been people playing pre-petbattles WoW for the sake of pet battles because it didn't exist at all. Now there are people who play for that, and they want the occasional attention which takes away from the attention that should be given to what the game was really about, dungeons/raids and equipment progression.

It's not selfish to want the game of your genre to focus on updates for that genre instead of a different genre.

I was talking about pet battles, at one point this wasn't in the game either and people were opposed to the IDEA just as you are opposed to housing now, probably the same people want pet battles to be removed from the game, this is what i talked about.

Also it's not a different genre, Ghostcrawler called garrisons the "Warcraft version of housing" at blizzcon, but the game is evolving, new things are added all the time, pretty sure i can find some posts about who were opposed to Artifact Weapons, obviously before playing with them.

[Ryzael]

I was talking about pet battles, at one point this wasn't in the game either and people were opposed to the IDEA just as you are opposed to housing now, probably the same people want pet battles to be removed from the game, this is what i talked about.

Also it's not a different genre, Ghostcrawler called garrisons the "Warcraft version of housing" at blizzcon, but the game is evolving, new things are added all the time, pretty sure i can find some posts about who were opposed to Artifact Weapons, obviously before playing with them.

Yes, it's not selfish at all to be opposed to the idea because the idea doesn't exist yet in form, nothing's happened with it. Now that pet battles are here we have to accept that and live with it. The development time was spent on it and it's too late to get rid of it, wanting it removed at this point is selfish.

Traditional housing hasn't been done yet, and it shouldn't be done because it's a waste of development time. Battle pets were a waste of development time before they were added to the game. I'll be adamantly against housing until the day it's added to the game, then it's too late, the waste has already occurred.

And it's true that garrisons were a progression game (ie WoW) version of housing, you used them to progress your charcter, not to play the sims with.

[Deleted]

And it's true that garrisons were a progression game (ie WoW) version of housing, you used them to progress your charcter, not to play the sims with.

And that's why they failed. I find it funny that you, and other people here, are concerned about Blizzard's production cost.
Also if you took a walk through Suramar city now, not chasing some quest, but admiring the work put into it, go from house to house and look at what's inside, one could see a lot of assets there and wonder why isn't there a housing feature in this game.

[angrys13]

As title says I don't understand why Blizzard are dragging their heels regarding player housing... Wildstar despite its many flaws possibly had the best player housing in any MMORPG, hell even WoWs biggest competitors FFXIV and SWTOR has player housing and that's almost universally praised by the players. Instead Blizzard gave us two poor-man's housing in the form of garrisons and class halls that didn't give much if any customization and get abandoned. Player housing could actually be an expansion feature designed to last unlike the garrison, class hall and artifacts that are obsolete a year later.

I find the argument "we don't want people not in the world" argument BS. I would rather a personal hub I can invite friends to, not some class hall surrounded by strangers not even talking! I also don't believe the "WoW doesn't have the technology" argument. Obviously some people aren't interested in player housing like some people aren't interested in PvP or Raiding but it would give us a new form of content to do at endgame be it crafting decor, running dungeons for decor, buying decor, etc!

I can break it down pretty simple from my subjective point of view, from two very favorite games I've played (one with, one without).
Keep in mind, I am all for player housing, as long as the game and the type of game allow/permit it.

World of Warcraft is a game that does not lean on a requirement, a necessity, or a desire for player housing.
Ultima Online had player housing, and it worked beautifully well, because it was a game that had a very strong necessity and desire for it.

I will hit a few pointers to elaborate.

In WOW:
We do not have things that inhibit our bag space to a point where we need "storage" for items.
If we run into a storage issue, we simply go to any of the 200 towns available and access our bank.
Or access our bank from in the middle of nowhere via a do-dad engineer item.
Or we access a mobile vendor to sell crap to to create storage.
There is nothing a house would do, based on current game design, in terms of bringing anyone besides the player there. AKA, a garrison.

In UO:
We have limitations of our bank and personal storage space.
We have limitations of our personal carrying capacity based on dexterity/stamina.
We have limitations of bank locations.
We have limitations of types of characters that can even enter town to access a bank (PKs).
We have a desire to amass multiple storage containers to contain crafting materials, reagents, armor, weapons, all kinds of items worth a significant payroll, because upon dying, there is a high chance you're going to lose everything on your persons and have to reobtain/restock it.
Having a recall/portal rune directly to your house stolen led to some of the most desirable encounters that game ever produced.

If we shared a guild home or guild castle or whatever in UO, it was epic, and it was truly a home.
If I shared a home in WOW with a guild or someone else in this game, it'd just be another log out/hang out point with not shit going on with zero general purpose.

It's just the type of game it is. There's no need for it.

[Daffan]

The only game where player housing made real sense was Ultima Online, because banks couldn't store many items and resource/item storage/safe area/guild meeting areas actually mattered + there was item loss on death so having a base of operations was worth it.

In games like WoW, it's nothing more then fluff that looks cool for a small period of time, I think it would be worth it only if the devs had nothing else to work on and they had a really good spin for it. I'd also imagine since WoW is in full 3d, it would be much harder to have the level of customization as UO did (Without a ton, ton, ton, ton of work)

They could just rename your garrison to "player's house" and you could imagine it as a really big castle lol.

e: Oh cool the poster above me was talking about UO too. UO rulezzzz

[Pane34]

Because players don't want player housing, its a waste of time. It adds zero gameplay value.

[Traveler Voltin]

Because players don't want player housing, its a waste of time. It adds zero gameplay value.

So do alot of things already in wow

[Deleted]

Because players don't want player housing, its a waste of time. It adds zero gameplay value.

Source on that statistic?

[Traveler Voltin]

Show me on the doll where player housing hurt you

[Deleted]

Oh shut up with that kind of BS.

Its because of people like you that then they stop communicating.

Watcher is great and i am very happy both him and ghostcrawler bothered to talk to the community. Silence is the worst thing we can have. If you don't like it, go play the game and don't come post trash in the forums.

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So, thats because you don't understand how it can work.

For example in FFXIV you have districts. Its not one instance just for you. You have a whole neighbourhood with other players and you can customise your little corner of the world. FFXIV also makes some pretty amazing looking places to relax on.
Just let us have some vendors like AH, bank and transmogrifier and it will be useful while not inrupting on the usefulness of cities. Actually, this is why i still use my good old garrison. And dummies actually. There can be common fishing spots aswell for fisherman... or you can have your own little "puddle", or your own pet kindergarden. Theres lots of cool social stuff you can have.
The other aspect of this is what SWTOR has done. Have pieces for this housing to drop off all types of old content revitalizing their use and making you go out in the world. Also more useful market value stuff if professions can craft different things.

In terms of world building it is very engrossing and good to have. Should it be in if it costs a raid tier? No. But it doesnt have to.

As much as i enjoy the player housing in FFXIV, the game was build form the ground up with that in mind. Wow's game engine is insanely outdated. We are still playing on a modfied warcraft 3 engine. Adding something as huge as player housing like in FFXIV would require a massive amount of work if it is possible at all. Remember then things like the backpack are so far in the code they cannot remove them anymore. The closest we will ever get to it is Garissons which were sadly not costumizeable at all.

[Benomatic]

i'd love a custom home, like the farm in MoP but in any zone i wanted, also a guild all like a garrison and order hall would be awesome

[Deleted]

Player housing only would work if it was in the actual open world. Instancing would just lead to the same shit as Garrisons. Same is BTW true for Wildstar. Some people were really good at designing, but for most it was just another place to log out (incentivized with higher rested exp).

The best player housing experience I personally had was in Ultima Online, where Houses actually are a physical part of the world. And you can and will pass other player's houses when running around in the world. Vendors incentivized visiting those houses, etc. I just don't see this happening in WoW, because it's a completely different style of game.

[Deleted]

Player housing only would work if it was in the actual open world. Instancing would just lead to the same shit as Garrisons. Same is BTW true for Wildstar. Some people were really good at designing, but for most it was just another place to log out (incentivized with higher rested exp).

The best player housing experience I personally had was in Ultima Online, where Houses actually are a physical part of the world. And you can and will pass other player's houses when running around in the world. Vendors incentivized visiting those houses, etc. I just don't see this happening in WoW, because it's a completely different style of game.

See ArchAge had that and it just looked a mess, abandoned houses littered everywhere! FFXIV system may be better an instanceed neighbourhood with 20 houses.