Player housing, will Blizzard ever get the message?

[tiporispit]

This is an interesting thread.

[Iseeyou]

Housing?

Dont worry, Wildstar is gonna bring smething trully amazing.

Just check their videos, im affraid i ll spend all my time in my hobbit house

[tiporispit]

It's interesting how people want features that failed MMO's have, and have them integrated into WoW.

They all had their time on top. Warcraft is no different. We already see their declining numbers. Will it ever die? No, but Ultima Online never died, either. There's still people paying $10 a month to play it. Just about everything about that game was superior to WoW, except its graphics. Its growth was stopped dead in its tracks by an expansion that changed the core mechanics and ran 90% of the player base off.

- - - Updated - - -

Exactly, it really doesn't add anything meaningful to the game.

I know some people play MMOs to RP as much as possible so they like housing, but apart from personal customization, it adds nothing to gameplay.

What have they did to add to game play? You move out of fire and press 4 or 5 buttons. We've been doing that since Vanilla. Does a badge or point system add to game play? What does it change about standing in the green circle and casting Prayer of Healing? Nothing.

[Flutterguy]

This isn't Second Life. The housing wouldn't come with the kinds of customization people are dreaming of in this thread. The closest you will ever get to it is the farm.

[smokii]

for roleplay purposes i kinda get why you'd want it

but for anything else, i don't see it as necessary. they've not ruled it out though, they just want to make it awesome when it does happen.

[Selah]

Player housing is an incredible waste of time, energy, and resources for something so minor and useless. There are little to no reasons for player housing except for "RP" purposes. However this would make players hide in their tiny space that they can decorate while they queue away for instances and removing them from the world even more.

Besides, can't you just buy the farm in VoFW?

[Recom]

No thank you. Blizz is already slow enough, they don't need to be slowed down by secondary stuff that a minority demands.

[Collected]

This isn't Second Life. The housing wouldn't come with the kinds of customization people are dreaming of in this thread. The closest you will ever get to it is the farm.

Have you seen the housing in wildstar? Everything is customisable. Even down to the wallpaper on the walls and the ambient lighting. You can add items, scale them however big or small you wish, and place them anywhere. It's as if you're a game developer building your own personal inn. You have that much power. And outside the house you can place items anywhere and even change the sky. They've gone crazy with customisable housing in that game.. it could set the bench mark.

[Paximus]

Probably not.

Which sucks.

I'd love a plot of land I could customize without anyone else ever seeing it. Not sarcasm.

[Deleted]

personally i dont see a point in player housing sounds boring... i dont play world of warcraft to build and customize houses....

[Coldhearth]

Player housing doesn't belong in this game. The devs have ignored this topic for years because it's fucking retarded.

[Collected]

The traditional player housing in MMOs isn't very interesting, maybe with the exception of Ultima Online. This was because you owned part of the world, making the area have real value.

Housing worked for a little while in Ultima Online when not many folks could afford the deeds but soon became a big problem. Because there was always going to be a limited amount of land available to place a house, pretty soon all the available land was grabbed and houses placed, which resulted in two problems. One, if you wanted a house, you couldn't have one because you couldn't physically place it anywhere. Very frustrating. And two, the world became filled with houses. So any clear open spaces that existed when the game was launched suddenly became full of houses. So you were having to navigate between them all the time and generally it was pretty annoying. Imagine the barrens full of houses. You get the idea.

The problem was compounded because if a player quit the game, their house would remain standing.. so you had lots of ghost houses in the world that were never used. Origin tried to fix this problem by forcing them to decay which would lead to people camping abandoned houses for literally days waiting for the house to finally collapse, which would immediately free up the plot (and place all the items held within the house on the ground.. phat loot). That was fun times. But eventually all those plots would be taken up too and they were back to square one.

I quit the game shortly after that point. So I don't believe physical world housing works.

The only way I can perhaps see a half way point is if they were able to instance "neighbourhoods" where you could perhaps have a house that sits along side houses of other guildies or friends. But I think it would be too messy for them to implement. I'm sure Blizz will be sat watching how well the housing works out in W* and will copy it in some form if it's a success.

[Abysal]

WoW has never been heavy on the RP side if MMORPGs. It's always been gameplay first and everything else second. Focusing on things like player housing would be moving away from that design.

Maybe gameplay first isn't popular anymore and that's part of why WoW is losing subs, though I doubt that. Personally I couldn't care less about player housing. More class balance, better story and raids, these are things that would make the game better for me. Player housing? Eh. If I want my own special plot of land I'll play minecraft.

[Elite Peon]

Yeah, no player housing is a stupid idea, it's not interesting and adds no interesting gameplay whatsoever. I absolutely can not see why anyone would want player housing at the expense of something meaningful like, let's say, interesting end game content?

Um , sir A LOT of people like player housing in other games ...Blizz is a very very lazy company they always have been ... that is why you have new character models at 25% when any other game company would have them done ...and working on matching up animations . Player housing is a complex issue and that is why it is not in the game ...it actually takes effort to do ...it's not something easy like rehashing old dungeons or raids ...or making scenarios out of pre existing locations and art and it's not retexturing a drake model the 10 billionth time to add " a new cool mount " ...Blizz is lazy ...player housing is very cool and just to prove to you how cool it is I will show you from the game that finally put the death blow into WOW.

[Paximus]

Um , sir A LOT of people like player housing in other games ...Blizz is a very very lazy company they always have been ... that is why you have new character models at 25% when any other game company would have them done ...and working on matching up animations . Player housing is a complex issue and that is why it is not in the game ...it actually takes effort to do ...it's not something easy like rehashing old dungeons or raids ...or making scenarios out of pre existing locations and art and it's not retexturing a drake model the 10 billionth time to add " a new cool mount " ...Blizz is lazy ...player housing is very cool and just to prove to you how cool it is I will show you from the game that finally put the death blow into WOW.

Oh, come on. Blizz does more for it's playerbase than anyone else out there. I'd be furious if I logged into my warrior and it felt differently. I'm glad they are taking the time to try to make the new models feel familiar.

[Dontrike]

Um , sir A LOT of people like player housing in other games ...Blizz is a very very lazy company they always have been ... that is why you have new character models at 25% when any other game company would have them done ...and working on matching up animations . Player housing is a complex issue and that is why it is not in the game ...it actually takes effort to do ...it's not something easy like rehashing old dungeons or raids ...or making scenarios out of pre existing locations and art and it's not retexturing a drake model the 10 billionth time to add " a new cool mount " ...Blizz is lazy ...player housing is very cool and just to prove to you how cool it is I will show you from the game that finally put the death blow into WOW.

[video=youtube_share;5qyzcwRHcRQ]http://youtu.be/5qyzcwRHcRQ[/vide]

They can be lazy all they want with player housing, it isn't exactly an exciting feature.

[Collected]

personally i dont see a point in player housing sounds boring... i dont play world of warcraft to build and customize houses....

I'm sure many people don't play WoW to play pet battles either.. but there is a demand for mini games and a lot of people enjoy that aspect of the game. The housing is optional. You don't NEED to take part in it. But if you do it has certain advantages. Think of it as a single player component. Something you can do instead of just being sat in a capital city doing nothing in between raids and instance runs.

[Deleted]

Their world is too small and flooded for openworld Housing.

[dokilar]

housing is something thats never interested me in the slightest. just seems like a boring, pointless piece of content, but then again this is just my opinion.

im not the type of person who logs into a game to sit around in a house or guild hall and chat or ask people to look at my trophies. i log on to kill things. again this is just my opinion/stance on the idea

[Elite Peon]

They can be lazy all they want with player housing, it isn't exactly an exciting feature.

To you ...to you ..it's not interesting to you but it is to a lot of people . Im not the biggest fan of pvp but I respect a lot of people like it but I don't go around saying " bahhhh dont work on new arenas and bg's who cares about that crap " ...and btw it's true only a small % of people play pvp in wow and a tiny % do arena ..