Originally Posted by
Claymore
I'll take a stab at it.
After the end of this expansion, a few Kul Tiran or Zandalari sailors (depending on your faction, obviously) return from a long voyage at sea, having come across a series of islands. While they seem to lack any useful resources, they are said to be a paradise unto themselves. As a champion of the Horde or the Alliance, you are given one such island. However, it is stressed that it is YOUR island, and your faction cannot divert funds into helping you build it up; instead, it is a reward for your loyalty and service to your faction (obviously, this might take some twists or turns if you're on the Horde, depending how things play out).
For your first journey, you must take a boat there. However, a powerful Mage accompanies you setting up a beacon in which you can use a hearthstone to return to your island from then on.
Lore-wise, this is an extremely long and arduous journey, too far in the middle of nowhere to realistically be used as a "staging ground".
It would start out a blank island. In a perfect world, it might start out with some randomly-generated terrain, but no biggie. The island is completely barren (barring possibly a short intro quest, where you clear out some monsters living there and then tear everything down). Basically, though, it becomes a blank canvas. Just a big, mostly un-noteworthy island. You can then begin acquiring housing items, even *buildings*, to place upon your island.
Furthermore, by requesting the assistance of a powerful Shaman or Druid (thinking Thrall for Horde, Malfurion for Alliance), you can also do a couple of things:
- Change the environment. Instead of a flat landmass, you could add mountains, subtle inclines, maybe rivers -- even if they "snap-in" like LEGO pieces, it could spice things up a bit.
- Pull more land from up from the ocean. Either as part of the "main island", or even pulling up small "isles" that you could connect with via bridges of some sort (ie maybe you add a series of rocks to jump between them, or a rope bridge, or a massive stone-bridge; cool opportunity to add some personality to the place)
- Change the ground itself or type of native foliage. Maybe you want a tropical sort of beach island, or maybe you want it to look like a harsh stone pillar jutting out from the ocean. Maybe you want somethings "exotic" like Crystalsong Forest, or maybe you want something that will have autumn-colors year-round,
- Change Weather effects. Maybe you want your place in a constant state of winter, where "sand" looks more akin to snow, maybe there are suddenly blocks of ice out in the water. Or just set it to "random", where it changes daily or weekly.
- Maybe even allow you to build "caves" or "underground caverns" into your island.
In addition, you could request the assistance of a powerful Mage (maybe Jaina for Alliance, or whoever the Nightborne chick was) to let you change the "skybox", which not only gives you some cool options for the sky itself, but might also greatly affect the general lighting and atmosphere of your place.
To REALLY begin decorating, though, you might have to consider varying degrees of gold-sinks for different sort so of "Keeps" you could build. These wouldn't be mandatory, mind you, but would be the easiest way to incorporate very large, detailed buildings into your property. Maybe you could even drop gold on entire "themes", such as "I want a new Forsaken fortress, complete with small cemetary, and constant eerie moonlight that makes the water appear almost green.
I would probably add a new tradeskill (like Archaeology, where it doesn't preclude any "REAL tradeskills") that focuses on building house-items. I would actually use this in conjunction with EXISTING tradeskills. So for a simple chair, you can build it entirely with tradeskills. Something more extravagant, like a wrought-iron chair, mind require a Blacksmithing component. If you want a Nightborne-inspired chair, maybe it requires a bit of enchanting dust, and/or some ingredient found around Suramar. Truly EXTRAVAGANT items -- like entire BUILDINGS -- might require items from numerous tradeskills (ie. a bunch of stuff from Jewelcrafting, Blacksmithing, and Enchanting might let you build a magical vault, full of gold and gems).
Other ideas might include building a dock, and being able to acquire different types of ships to dock at your port (you CANNOT use them to travel; purely cosmetic, otherwise players would be OBLIGATED to have them).
PERSONALLY, I would make your island Faction-wide. I'm not opposed to having Character-specific housing by any means, but I can just see where that would eat up a *LOT* more server space. I think two houses per actively-subscribed account is still totally worth it.
All House-items should be Account-wide, however (even if some are Faction-specific to actually place).
In addition, I would say that ALL Followers and Companions you've unlocked (NPC's from both Draenor and Legion) could randomly appear on your island. No "actives and inactives" (or at least, no limitations; maybe you can simply "uninvite" NPC's you don't like). Certain house-items would cause NPC's to appear near them (ie. certain tables might spawn 3-4 NPC's randomly near them, certain buildings might randomly spawn NPC's within, etc). This has the dual effect of encouraging players to have multiple classes, to access those different Class Hall NPC's.
Or -- like many other MMO's already do -- you could simply treat NPC's as "house items" themselves, letting you place them as well. I just thought "spawning them near 'social' items" might feel a bit more organic.
If you are unsubbed for X number of days (I feel like 90 is a good number), then all of your house-items are returned to you. That way, you can ease the amount of space being used on housing by inactive players. As long as they don't LOSE anything, they would just have to "re-decorate" their island after returning.
Now, as far as "staying relevant"...
Well, it should only be as "relevant" as you are interested in it. If you honestly don't care, then just do the quest to get your island, and you never have to touch it again. I suspect a lot of players would REALLY dig it, though.