I'm just gonna say it; Blizzard is being stupid by NOT implementing a Housing system

[Louz]

The gratuitous bashing of the innocent FFIX, one of the best classic JRPG's on your post is revolting.

You mean FFXI maybe?

Either way, you just say that cause you never experienced it. Decorations are random mob drops, reputation rewards, dungeon and raid rewards, craftables. It enriches every aspect of the game with more rewards and more goals. You won't understand how addicting it can be until you start building your own creation. Once you have cool decorations and see the cool stuff you can make. How you can make your own private little town/mansion, and a really convenient space/base for your characters, you will see how addicting and useful it can be.

I used to think like you. Thought it was nonsense and why should i bother with that... until slowly unlocked and decorated my Tatooine homestead in SWTOR. It is my favorite place in the game now and it does feel like home. It's relaxing and has a badass view too.

The latest houses/strongholds added to the game were one in a moving train and another in a beach with a pirate sky deck where you can run private 4v4 pvp deathmatches or huttball. It also has raid testing dummies for dps, tanking and healing. Housing is awesome dude. You don't know what you're missing.

Wow, that A LOT of stuff to lose if you forget to pay for your subscription Yeah I meant the MMO that everyone on these forums seems to be obsessed with.

I've played Rift and Black Desert, both of which have detailed and yet different kind of housing. I've played Skyrim with 120GB worth of mods, many of them which revolved around housing, and I played Sims 2 and 3. Do games like Minecraft, Space Engineers, Medieval Engineers, Ark, Dark & Light and Conan Exiles count too?

None of them could keep me interested in this idea of "building a house where you sit and chill". Building is fun, yes, but then you move on. And it's only fun if you have very wide variety of options, like building from nothing, terrain alterations, fun interactive tools (not just static useless objects), most of which these games don't even have. I mean, not even building a sex dungeon in Skyrim could keep me interested that long.

Needless to say, what you claim is this super duper feature is pretty much a polar opposite of what I read so far.

I'd very much like to see more character customization instead of some useless dollhouse... or mandatory, depending on how convenient or not would it be.

Not sure whether to take you seriously or not with you throwing around the term 'weeb shit'. You are aware your avatar is derived from that self same 'weeb shit' you're throwing around, right?

Wtf does Alita has to do with the shit that's in this game?
Mind you, I'm not a FF hater, in fact I spend good years of my childhood playing FFVII and I still love it, I just dislike certain design choices in the MMO game. You know, the "cat girls", "bunny girls", "loli girls", all of which screams "weeb shit".

[MoanaLisa]

Garrisons were WOW's player housing system. I doubt Blizzard would want to go down that road again...

Base building isn't housing. Housing is really a customization and building kind of game. Those are very open-ended which garrisons were not. It was hand-waving on the part of Blizzard developers and did pretty well until garrisons were essentially "finished". A true housing mini-game would never be finished and would never limit itself to two aesthetics (Human/Orc).

For those reasons I think that Blizzard is well aware that garrisons weren't housing at all and we shouldn't think that it was ever meant to be that. Garrisons were a miss and one of the first major systems that Blizzard decided they would never iterate on. That was a mistake but an understandable one. Blizzard developers think of their game as a kind of action game...the important stuff is combat-related which is why systems like professions and housing get really short shrift. That's too bad because improving those systems and giving them more depth would likely make a great portion of their casual players very happy. Very happy players stay around an extra month or three.

Add masonry and woodworking as baked in professions, do housing and get it right and they'll profit.

[dragnipur]

The game DOES need player housing but it needs to be done correctly and with premium options. It's not so easy to simply put it in the game.

1. the crafting system needs to be over hauled AGAIN to implement crafting recipes from all expansions. Some will be from vendors and some will be from bosses.If furniture is being added it needs to be added in a way where people can materials from every expansion to make items. Blacksmiths will make metal based items, alchemy for liquid and chemical based, inscription for bookcases and desk etc.

2. the player housing needs to accessible from low level to high level. It will not be a feature only bound to 1 expansion such as garrisons. It will be a place where a level 10 to max can have a house they can go back to. There needs to be options to increase house size and do upgrades.

3. Player permissions and possible community based housing could be an option. For example FF14 has community housing districts where you live in a neighborhood with other players. This would be much better than a solo que housing but it has its own problems. There needs to be options to move to other communities when your community is dead or dying to go to a more active and available housing instance. The game might even add community challenges to the area to beatify the zone based on contributions from everyone.

4. Armor and weapon displays will most likely be a big option to this and needs to be implemented correctly.

5. The housing should maybe only be done after another revamp to the overworld. They should implement housing in a way that makes lore sense. Characters acquiring a new house in a zone that needs to be populated and developed.

It's not easy and rushing into player housing without clever planning can lead to a disastrous feature.

I like your ideas a lot

[Mikazukinoyaiba]

Yeah, blizz needs more customization and sandbox content. They also need more content that isn't just combat-oriented. Fucking warframe has housing in your ship, WoW is desperately behind the times and this would be a bigger and more popular system than transmog.

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As opposed to what...yet another raid? I would sacrifice raids for an entire expansion if it meant adding systems like housing and making other systems like Warfronts / Islands good. WoW **desperately** needs meaningful content outside of dungeons/raids. And no, just because that is what has always been the core content does not mean it should remain that way.

Yeah ofc you would ask for another Warfront, its not like BFA is dead enough because of it.

[zox2]

Personally, I don't see the point of a housing system.

[Soikona]

So you think transmog and mounts are useless too? Because they're pretty much the same thing as a potential cosmetic-based housing system would be.

Housing would be great.

It could have a ton of really unique cosmetic rewards, new professions tied to the system, new crafts for old professions, etc. Not only that, it could also make other rewards more meaningful. For example, imagine you get your own base and you can put a stable in it - then you can select a couple of your mounts and have them parked there, so that whenever someone comes visit your base, they see what cool mounts you have collected.

You could have flags and banners from raids and dungeons that you could put on the walls to show everyone that you cleared that content. More ways to show off your achievements for top players. For RP crowd, housing could potentially become a massive source of actual RP gameplay. If Blizzard wanted to, they could add some mini-games for players, so that they could just visit each other and have a nice, social experience together. Heck, if a single house could accomodate a lot of players, streamers would definetely love to invite their viewers to hang out and do some mount/transmog competitions and other fun stuff.

Obviously, some people like you will not care about it, but I can bet that the vast majority of the playerbase would absolutely love a proper housing system. The potential is definetely there, the only question is - is it worth it the amount of work it would require to flesh out the system?

You can’t compare mounts and transmog though. They are simple and easy systems, housing will need a lot of work to the scale that it would be a main feature of an expansion, and don’t even get me started on the new models needed. If housing was implemented, we would lose more than a full raid tier, it would come at such a high cost that none of us could predict what it would be.

Do you honestly think housing can be implemented mid expansion, like transmog?
Do you honestly think that housing will need the same man power for making mounts or implementing transmog?

[Poe]

Yeah, more raids are better since it's engaging content. Housing have never interested me. I don't get the appeal to decorate my own space in games.

Not sure how housing would be "meaningful" content. It's fluff and cosmetics. If you enjoy it, great.

Right

I barely want to decorate my bedroom. Why would I want to decorate a house in a video game?

[blackbird1205]

I would come back to wow with a housing system ( like something on the scale of ff14's housing). Just my opinion.

[Sunderella]

yes, housing please so they can add everything they come up with on the cash shop!

[Kolvarg]

WildStar had an incredible housing system. It was just all instanced. Blizzard could easily do it. They just don't want to yet. I'm sure they will in an expansion or two. Gotta pad for subs.

I liked LOTRO's housing system as well. It's instanced, but they are instanced neighbourhoods. Meaning there's specific areas where you can buy a house, and you buy it in a specific neighbourhood - an instance where other people also have houses.

It solves the problem of space by still being instanced, while not feeling super unimmersive and still having a social aspect to it.


With that said - immersion is not really a thing for me anymore in current WoW. And housing, immersive or not, wouldn't really do that well of a job at keeping me subbed for longer than I do. Personally WoW is already too focused on the collection/completionism aspects. I'd rather the core gameplay and classes are improved so that it's actually fun/interesting playing.

[Canderous1]

blizzard is in to doing stupid things. they are so detached from the playerbase its just silly at this point.

[Jawless Jones]

Guild halls would be a better idea than player housing imo

[LilSaihah]

Playerbase asked for housing before WoD.

We got Garrisons.

Please don't ask for housing.

[huth]

"It will cost a raid tier!" No it won't. And if it does, fire your environment artists for incompetence and hire people who can get work done on a decent timetable.

You're adding stuff to the timetable. Nobody can get that done without neglecting something else unless they were underworked, and artists are one of Blizzard's biggest bottlenecks.

So yes, it will "cost a raid tier", because they have to take the time from somewhere. This doesn't have anything to do with competence, it's to do with time being a finite resource.

[KronoFett]

For one thing, housing would need some form of woodworking (and woodcutting) so you'd need a revamp of trees on every zone so there are trees you can cut everywhere (Draenor has it due to Garrisons).

Very silly and not needed. All already in game professions should be able to make furniture. There is zero reason to implement a new profession. Having furniture come from all professions is a better and organic way to bring use of a new feature that everyone has access to. It is a HORRIBLE idea for people to drop a profession just to make items in a new feature. It should be organic and a part of the game everyone has access to.

On the statement of wood...you do understand it doesn't matter in the end what materials you use right? Wood can also simply come from a vendor, no reason to implement tree cutting however they added this to battlefronts which won't be a problem to implement. And for that matter it doesn't matter if there is no wood materials to make an item. Items using gathering materials normally used by the profession is good enough.

Example

Inscription lets you make a book shelf
It will require herbs from the relevant expansion
Maybe some dust from enchanting for magical books
And then maybe a few glyph from the expansion.
And maybe a rare drop from a boss if the bookcase is really cool.

No need to make a new profession.

[LedZeppelin]

go play animal crossing

[pacotaco]

Useless? Nah, it's content. Meaningful, depends. Most of it are tied to achievements that require gameplay to get and are simply rewards to content and challenges you do. It's not a challenging content in of itself.

So the meaningful content tied to housing would be whatever the reward for said cosmetics is tied to, which will most likely be professions/dungeons/quests/raids. Just like transmogs are a reward of dungeons/quests/raids. Housing is more complex than transmogs, which is why I think it's lots of wasted resources since it doesn't bring any meaningful gameplay. It will just be a reward of gameplay content.

If they make it so you can benefit from it in a meaningful way it will become a gameplay system. Most housing ideas have simply been just decorate your own room and invite others to see your room type of thing.

You can't make it meaningful, because then it'll become mandatory, and then people will minmax it to get the best profit. Just like WoD garrisons, and then everyone would stay in their house.
It MUST to be purely cosmetical (like transmogs), barely useful (like special mounts, like the bug -walk on water- or the goblin machine -collect plants without dismount-) or a system on itself (like battle pets) to not fuck up like they did before.

[Sarethion]

Do you honestly think housing can be implemented mid expansion, like transmog?
Do you honestly think that housing will need the same man power for making mounts or implementing transmog?

I'm totally aware that it would require a lot of work, but... There's already a metric ton of doodads and decorations used in the in-game structures. A lot of them could be used in a housing system. Some actual building models and assets used to create them could be used as well. Of course they'd have to add quite a bit of new stuff to make it interesting, but I don't think it's as bad as you make it sound, at least not on the art side of things.

And while I think art-wise creating a decent starter pack for a housing system should be possible, the main concern I have is developing an actual system that would allow a player to not only have his own house, but also have the creative freedom to place these decorations as he sees fit. I'm not a tech guy, so I can't really say, but I imagine WoW's engine wasn't build for anything even close to this, so adding it would likely require a ton of work.

Still, the main advantage of the system is that once the initial work was done, it would be fairly easy to add more content for it with each patch. They're already developing a ton of art assets for each zone - some of them could get added to the pool of decorations available for player housing. That's one thing. The other is - creating mostly static doodads (e.g. furniture, banners, paintings, etc.) is much easier than making armor and weapons that have to work with a lot of other models or creating fully animated mounts. So in that sense, adding to a housing system could actually be considerably easier than adding to mounts or transmog.

---

So... yes, it would have to be an expansion feature as it's definetely too much work to add something like this mid-expansion, but I don't agree that it's such a titanic endeavor that it couldn't be done or that it would cost us a raid tier. I'd say adding player housing would require a similar amount of work as garrisons or warfronts, so... yeah, I think it's totally doable - the only question is whether it's actually worth the effort to make a purely cosmetic system an expansion's main feature?

Here I have some doubts. As much I think housing has a ton of potential and I'd like to see something like that added into the game, I think that actual gameplay features currently need more help than player customization and thus I'd rather have the engineers and designers (with support from the art team) work on that rather than develop a big new cosmetic system.

Especially considering the biggest issue with any player housing - i.e. how to make your house visible enough to other players so that the player expression and customization you get through it actually matters?

[lagiacrux]

i like garrisons. from what i heard, the main problem people had with them was:

- its instanced
- you didnt have to leave it
- capitals were empty
- they were quite boring and customization was lacking

the first 3 could not be improved by any new implementation of housing, so i dont see why blizz should go for.

[outflow]

If I wanted to build a house I'd play the Sims.