It's honestly baffling to me that Blizz still refuses to implement Housing

[lolcats121]

They did with garrisons, and we all know how well that went.

[Ragedaug]

They did with garrisons, and we all know how well that went.

Garrisons were more like a private capital city then they were like player housing.

[MoanaLisa]

Blizzard thinks of WoW in two ways: Content requires action or content requires a relationship to the faction war.

Housing is neither which is why they have yet to do anything about it.

It's another reason why professions languish as well. They only support them because, in their view, it was a mistake to have them in the game in the first place given how it's worked out.

Garrisons as a concept were fine but Blizzard hates to allow too much customization and the extended idea of turning your garrison into a small town over time is anathema to how they view the game. They want fighters in the game, not mayors.

Putting a good building game into WoW would likely extend subscription life. I don't think they want to do a good building/farming game. At heart the game is about fighting. Anything not fighting gets little attention.

[Thetruth1400]

If it can be instanced like wod garrisons, I can see blizzard being ok with it but not a priority

That's literally the only way it could exist, but it's also the reason why they won't be happening. Blizzard discussed that garrisons were an overall flop because it isolated you off on your own.

Garrisons were more like a private capital city then they were like player housing.

While I get what you're going for, how do you think housing would be any different? You'd just have a single house in your instance that only you could see how you decorate it and you could invite your friends over to look at it every now and again too. Kind of a waste frankly.


I think the next logical step on the whole housing argument is guild housing with all these things people want to see in player housing. If the guild housing pans out as something that actually ends up being decent and not just Garrison 2.0, then could see moving some design and development towards player housing.

[MoanaLisa]

Sadly, I have to agree, as exaggerated it is, you are basically right about the shallowness of stuff like archaeology and Pet battles. As far as I am concerned, archaeology worked with being able to dig up mounts, pets, even a mighty weapon. Blows my mind why it got changed to this dull current state.

Archaeology, properly designed, would be a great way to tell side stories.

[WowIsDead64]

Like... I get that not everyone is going to be into Housing. But then, not everyone is into Raiding, or PvP. Housing has proven a pretty strong pillar of any MMORPG that still exists, so I have to wonder; why are they so hellbent on avoiding it?

There are several reasons, why Blizzard don't do it. The biggest one - houses require too much development resources with relatively small profit. Unfortunately game isn't in state, that allows Blizzard to do things just for fun - not because they're required to keep players subbed. There was such period back in TBC, WotLK, may be even Cata. But Blizzard justified lack of investment into Wow by developing Titan. Nobody knows, if it really existed or it was just a myth to justify lack of improvements in Wow. But money from Wow were taken away from it and nobody knows, where they're now.

[mickybrighteyes]

Garrisons were more like a private capital city then they were like player housing.

fact remains it was still WoW's attempt at personalized space and they really shit the bed trying it out.

[arboachg]

Garrisons were their test. Like half if not more of the feature got scrapped and the remaining half is looked back on as the worst piece of content to ever be added to the game. They're unlikely to ever do it again on a bigger scale.

Garrisons are looked back on as being the *worst* content to ever be added to the game? Jesus H. Christ, the hyperbole.

[Surfd]

Like... I get that not everyone is going to be into Housing. But then, not everyone is into Raiding, or PvP. Housing has proven a pretty strong pillar of any MMORPG that still exists, so I have to wonder; why are they so hellbent on avoiding it?

I can think of a very simple reason:

Because the game is not designed in such a way that "implementing" a housing system that doesn't suck balls would be practical.

WoW is not designed with the kind of "detailed customization of a house" system in mind to do what people would expect from housing. Garrisons are the closes thing we are likely to ever get for housing, and they were INSANELY limited in regards to what kind of "customization" options are available. The sheer amount of overhead a single house would require if you tried to truly let players "customize" the interior widgets would be phenomenal, and would require way more work than most people can imagine to allow you to customize your house to a degree that the average person would find acceptable.

Second problem is: Where the hell would you put them? Almost every game that had done "housing" has planned for it from the ground up. In WoW, the best case scenario would be instanced houses similar to Garrisons, as any other option would basically require them to COMPLETELY re build every world map in the game to add houses to them for players to inhabit, which would be monumentally disruptive.

[shade3891]

Why do we need a house? We are out on adventures or saving the world.
Rather see Guildhall's with unlockable portals to dungeons/raids, vendors, guildbank etc. Maybe some unlockable decorations.

[Jazzhands]

Garrisons are no where near what can be accomplished with player housing. EQ2 has great housing, it's one of the only decent things left in the game. There are thousands of items and probably a hundred different houses at this point. There's a profession centered around making furniture and the likes. Houses drop from raids and sell for big money, bosses drop trophies like their weapons or head that you can mount on the wall. Certain rare weapons can go on walls, so in wow it'd be things like legendaries and artifacts or maybe just any epic weapon. Pets can be placed anywhere. WoW could also let you place mounts. You can place crafting tools and tables, storage boxes and gain AH access.

It's a lot of fun, a few dying MMOs like Rift and EQ2 still have hard core house builders, it's a niche but a niche with dedicated followers. Wow has a ton of assets already in place they could use for it.

[Rafoel]

They likely believe the time required to create housing system should be rather spent on other features.

To which I agree. While housing in itself is not bad, and can have some interesting and/or fun elements, it requires a lot of work. It also seems that majority of players in other MMOs are totally uninterested in the concept. Amount of people that would decide whether subscribe or nto basing on such feature is probably nearly nonexistent.

[Kokolums]

Maybe if they had done IEs where instead of mindless queuing, you build a starter ship that allows you to sail to some of these islands. As you upgrade the ship, its able to venture out into deeper waters and unlock more islands. Unfortunately Blizzard thinks that would be too much RPG. Better to just have to click a button and queue up.

[RobertMugabe]

Like... I get that not everyone is going to be into Housing. But then, not everyone is into Raiding, or PvP. Housing has proven a pretty strong pillar of any MMORPG that still exists, so I have to wonder; why are they so hellbent on avoiding it?

Why not just think of the obvious reasons first? Such as developing something like that properly requires a lot of development time and especially WoW would require a fuckton of underlying changes to be done so that they can even start with implementing the feature itself.

I think that most people still here don't realize that garrisons were extremely difficult and time consuming to implement with the current framework they have, they were even questioning themselves whether garrisons as they imagined them were even possible to implement. Heck, the final product then was also just barebones compared to what they announced at blizzcon and that was despite the expansion adding barely any content.

[opposing critter]

Because they will half arse it or spend too much time on something most people don't care about.

[erifwodahs]

Because it would be high maintenance stuff or would turn out to be dead content, besides making a shit ton of changes to the game, because of how WoW "building" works.
I mean I am certain, some people want houses, some. But in my last few guilds no one ever mentioned anything like that - idea of houses being in the game with sandbox style building, almost like minecraft - cool. Runescape style? boring AF. But not having that in wow? does not make a difference, like arch or pet battles, it's there, but a lot of us wouldn't even notice it's gone.

[Santti]

Meh.

If there ever would be any kind of housing in WoW, it would be much like the garrisons from WoD. An instanced version of a very specific Alliance/Horde building/plot, with pre-placed spots for you to put some Orc or Human themed stuff in you might get from achievements and shit. Your own (or guilds) collection for you to admire for 2 minutes, until you get bored and move on.

I'm not convinced we really need/want Blizzard to put resources into making that. Because that's pretty much exactly what we'd get.

[exochaft]

Garrisons are looked back on as being the *worst* content to ever be added to the game? Jesus H. Christ, the hyperbole.

Part of what made them great is also what made them terrible at the same time. If you liked being self-sufficient, garrisons were awesome as they let you mine/herb/fish/etc. without ever having to leave your garrison, especially if you constructed a bank and made the AH bot. However, that also allowed people to never leave their garrisons if they didn't want to (I know people that still conduct all their AH business from the garrison to this day because the convenience of the AH right next to a bank is great, and doesn't cost 5mil gold in Draenor ). As a tool for the expansion, it was awesome. As "player housing," it was pretty meh if you even want to call it that.

However, the overarching issues is that garrisons were made as an expansion feature... which lead to the problem I just mentioned. What garrisons truly did in terms of testing player housing was introducing actually in-game systems to allow terrain customization via placing buildings. Such systems were still pretty rigid, as the locations of buildings was fixed and limited to certain sizes. Other customizable things were the statue and the guards/banners of the race you chose, and my favorite to this day was being able to change the music to whatever you wanted. Beyond that... there wasn't much you could do to customize your garrison. Think of it this way: with garrisons, you couldn't even put down a simple chair in a random spot, choose its orientation, skin, etc. Something that "simple" found in other MMO player housing does not exist in WoW. Maaaaaaybe with the dev tools, but that functionality has never been extended to the player nor (as far as I know) been integrated directly/indirectly into the game's UI.

Part of the problem is that Blizz would have to make an in-game UI capable of making player housing feasible, and that might be one reason out of many that they haven't just flipped the switch on player housing (because that switch doesn't have any system to connect to that's already in the game). Some people mentioned Blizz should start with small systems and build upon them, and they do, but garrisons as released would've been a terrible system upon which to base player housing. I think the most likely scenario that would lead to player housing is if Blizz spends the time to integrate their world-building tools into the WoW client itself or able to be accessed by the client. If the tools are already a part of the game, they can reference all those functions/objects/etc. in a UI setting for players on a restricted basis that would allow customization of a certain space, such as player housing.

There's another problem though, and that problem is whether the game engine could handle player housing to the level that we and Blizz would want. Yes, they've updated and modernized the engine over the last 15 years, but at its core it's still basically the same engine. While Blizz can use external world-building tools to craft zones and buildings, that doesn't mean it even can be feasibly integrated into the game because of the game engine. I suspect that this is another aspect of the player housing issue that's probably a main driver in not adding the feature, as the solutions to this issue would basically make a new game engine for WoW... and making a new engine for a 15+ year old game generally doesn't register as a good time/money investment.

[Muajin76]

Like... I get that not everyone is going to be into Housing. But then, not everyone is into Raiding, or PvP. Housing has proven a pretty strong pillar of any MMORPG that still exists, so I have to wonder; why are they so hellbent on avoiding it?

It could also be like FF 14 housing, where they have areas that are ONLY for housing/apartments. Who knows, it might be implemented eventually, as a way of getting subs back/get new subs.

[rizyukaizen]

If blizzard could figure out a way to make housing like in FF14 I would be all over that. And now the limited spots like sadly FF14 does but like the personal plots of Wildstar that you were able to make into a community. Would def be cool to have a personal plot but have it linked to your guild mates and have a guild town or use the WoW communities they added in to make pretty much a town of player housing. Would also be a nice way to make professions make money again. Good portion of all stuff in 14 is gotten from player crafting with some from drops and others just vendor.
Blizzard always whines they need to add in a new gold sink well Blizz here is a good idea for a gold sink. Proper player housing where we can set up a house how we want. If I can have https://66.media.tumblr.com/4c453f48...720be13696.png and https://66.media.tumblr.com/41988525...97c2fcc62e.png in houseing screw buying game sub threw tokens my gold is going to a house. Im already an housing addict in FF14 if you give me something in WoW would be even better.