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

[Yooginava182]

I'd prefer to be able to "buy" a house in ANY and ALL of the capitol cities, old (Dalaran Northrend ) and new ( Dalaran Legion ). Not really a place to go sit at the auction or whatever, but a place you can upgrade with side things like a "transmographer", but it would be cool to be able to put up trophies for Achievements you have. Like if you're a demon hunter and you have the "Let me hold onto those for you" you can place the warglaives up somewhere. Make it so we can change interior design ( Carpet, Furniture, ect ) Obviously this is something you'll put gold into / maybe even a "building profession" so you can go out and gather materials to make the items. It would be cool to have expansion specific rooms (Portals to these rooms - again have to purchase / gather material - be a MAGE? )

These rooms will pretty much be that characters collection of items that the character ( class ) can use from that expansion. Tier / PVP / Weapons sets ( as you collect them they will automatically get put on armor stands for that tier set ) So a priest wont have a bunch of two handed swords / Plate armor put up everywhere. Honestly this would be a cool way to be a completionist. Legion room for example if you have all 3 artifacts they will show up there. Then to show off you can have people "view" your house. You can set the options to just friends / invite only / anyone. So people can browse through other people's homes to see them without main owner having to be there if you choose.

This isn't something that should be an expansion themed thing to be trashed and forgotten in the next. This should be something that is fully apart of the game and able to move forward. As new expansions release they can release new Furniture's, painting, collectibles, additional rooms for the future expansions.

It doesn't have to be just like this but just some idea's of what they could do for player housing.

[Chapel]

It's due to a significant portion of the playerbase being miserable enough to loudly state how useless the feature would be just because they themselves aren't interested in the concept of player housing, despite it being a successful feature in multiple MMO's.

A significant portion of the vocal minority playerbase doesn't want a feature that promotes anything that looks like more solo-play in this game. This is the same crowd that didn't want a 'world pvp' flag but 'full-time active faction pvp' for every realm because they don't have enough people to grief and there may be less if they choose to be in their residence for any length of time, regardless of the fact that they will still have to go outside the housing to play the game to acquire anything for their house.

I would rather have housing to look at my accomplishments (trophies/plaques/banners/legendary items), than I would opening up the Achievement Tab. Bank storage could move to your residence. Same-faction alt storage could be at the bank.

Still, to this day, I have not seen a legitimate argument against player housing except for if the game engine couldn't handle it.

[Super Kami Dende]

Garrisons is a bad comparison since they were decidedly not player housing. They were player housing if you have no experience with player housing in other MMO.... or video games in general.

Once again, I didn't say they were. I was pointing out something that I thought was good that others called dead content. Like People would do with housing.

[Caerule]

They've actually talked about housing and guild halls at Blizzcon. It's something they want to do, but they also want it to make sense in the setting the expansion is dealing with. The main reason it's not coming in Shadowlands, is because we're not on Azeroth but in another realm, where it makes little sense for us to build a permanent home.

I'm guessing that admission means that odds of it coming are actually very good, in the expansion after Shadowlands. And as much as I want guild halls or player housing... I kinda get where they are coming from, this time.

[Will]

wtf OP? They never 'refused' to implement it. They haven't implemented it. Doesn't mean they've ruled it out.

PoH would kind of suck for WoW anyway. So what if it's a feature many other MMOs have? Many other MMOS suck compared to WoW, so that's hardly a good argument to make. "Hey, all these shitty competitors have it, so why not copy them!"

Say what you will about Blizz, but they might implement it when it makes sense and suits the game. Not for the sake of it like other MMOs do.

[Chapel]

They've actually talked about housing and guild halls at Blizzcon. It's something they want to do, but they also want it to make sense in the setting the expansion is dealing with. The main reason it's not coming in Shadowlands, is because we're not on Azeroth but in another realm, where it makes little sense for us to build a permanent home.

I'm guessing that admission means that odds of it coming are actually very good, in the expansion after Shadowlands. And as much as I want guild halls or player housing... I kinda get where they are coming from, this time.

The only way they will implement housing, in a way that fits an expansion, is if they figure it out from the start for WoW 2.0 and they learn how to increase its worth per expansion.

Player housing isn't something that is expansion specific.

[Toppy]

They've actually talked about housing and guild halls at Blizzcon. It's something they want to do, but they also want it to make sense in the setting the expansion is dealing with. The main reason it's not coming in Shadowlands, is because we're not on Azeroth but in another realm, where it makes little sense for us to build a permanent home.

I'm guessing that admission means that odds of it coming are actually very good, in the expansion after Shadowlands. And as much as I want guild halls or player housing... I kinda get where they are coming from, this time.

Sounds like they just want an easy out, or arent willing to commit. They need to stop doing this, tie something to an expansion specifically horse shit and just implement features for the sake of them like they stopped doing come WoD. I think the last major feature they implemented like this was pet battles.

[Zyky]

They seem to want only stuff for the specific expansion... like garrisons, order halls etc. They don't want a "expansionless" system that you keep working on, for some reason.

Ya but with housing they could easily integrate it with each expansion, by letting you "move" your house to different locations like the initial idea of the garrison. Or just make housing purely cosmetic then it can carry over in the sense of cosmetics to place in/around your home.

[Sondrelk]

There arent that many risks actually. Even bad player housing systems in other MMO are incredibly loved.

Garrisons wasn't really player housing. At all. The key and absolutely required feature in regards to player housing is customization, which Garrisons didn't have.

Nor would it even be all that much work. They already have some basic ways to plant things in the world and to have instanced things tied to a player. Likewise they have thousands of housing doodads; they literally do not have to make any new models.

They just dont like listening to player feedback; and no thats not baseless complaining, they've made it abundantly clear their disdain for feedback from WoD on, "apologizing" in many cases for outright ignoring it for no reason.

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Garrisons is a bad comparison since they were decidedly not player housing. They were player housing if you have no experience with player housing in other MMO.... or video games in general.

The player housing is in itself s risk. Dev time is a finite resource given the strict schedule WoW operates on.

I find the garrison not being housing argument always boils down to people declaring it so because garrisons were bad and player housing is good, therefore garrisons are not housing. Yet still it has most of the hallmarks of it, showing you your mounts, tangible achievements in the statues and a degree of customisation.

Even if you have the perfect clinching argument against this I rarely hear people actually say they are willing to potentially sacrifice an entire expansion on the altar of player housing, despite the possibility it will end up like a worse version of garrisons.

[FlubberPuddy]

The player housing is in itself s risk. Dev time is a finite resource given the strict schedule WoW operates on.

I find the garrison not being housing argument always boils down to people declaring it so because garrisons were bad and player housing is good, therefore garrisons are not housing. Yet still it has most of the hallmarks of it, showing you your mounts, tangible achievements in the statues and a degree of customisation.

Even if you have the perfect clinching argument against this I rarely hear people actually say they are willing to potentially sacrifice an entire expansion on the altar of player housing, despite the possibility it will end up like a worse version of garrisons.

Ion himself even refers to Garrison's as "WoW's version of Player Housing" back when WoD was still unreleased.

The funny thing is the past year they've also still said Housing in on the table and there's simply a lot of logistics that need to be hammered out (aka they're trying to do it right).

So I think WoW devs do want to implement Player Housing now despite whatever their position might have been back all those years around WoD time.

Right now it's just more a matter of timing, and possibly figuring out how customizable do they want it and want activities will it or can it lead players to do. I think they're also realizing and probably not liking the fact that WoW is becoming more solo friendly and quite possibly see Housing as another step towards that for WoW and it might be something they want to handle carefully from that aspect as well.

TL'DR: Basically, there's a lot of shit to think about it when it comes to Player Housing specifically and its ramifications for the game vs the ideas the designers have for the game. While it may seem simple from an outside viewpoint, there could be a lot more going on internally than we know about which has led to (what I'd say) an "obvious MMO feature" not being implemented yet.

[Bosen]

I don't see the value in it. Why would it be worth the development time over cooler things Blizzard could do,like new dungeons,battlegrounds,new races?

[Cosmic Janitor]

I don't see the value in it. Why would it be worth the development time over cooler things Blizzard could do,like new dungeons,battlegrounds,new races?

Because that is not how game development works. Not to mention that most of the assets are already there and the people involved wouldn't be hindered in making dungeons anyway. Essentially they'd need to make the system once, format the database to accomodate housing data with the player profile, the rest is just making new recipes for each new furniture piece that gets added when Blizzard implements the next blood elf bordello dungeon like BT.

[qwerty123456]

I haven't played other MMOs, but I see no purpose to housing at all.
Unless they are going to change the game into minecraft where you can build anywhere you want and use resources from anywhere in the world to do so, its only going to make the game worse.
Otherwise, it would just be another predetermined place where everyone hangs out, or at worst, a fully instanced object taking more and more people out of the open world.

I really am inexperienced with the topic, but from what I have seen discussed the ONLY way I would be excited about it was if you could build literally wherever you want, allowing you to set your hearth in crazy locations.

Other than that, what gameplay does it actually add?
It seems like an RP thing, or a garrison.

I just don't understand what either bring to a game this size.

It keeps players in game and paying.

Also some games have bosses drop housing items. Normally when you do a dungeon you stop running it once you get the items you want but when you add housing items there will be people who want to use a ton of fancy dressers that Kael'thas drops to build a mecha and if they aren't running the dungeon to get a ton of copies then they are buying them off the AH. Think of it like battle pets except instead of someone only being able to use 3 they can use dozen's if not thousands of an item in their house.

The reason is simple: Such a system would haunt them until the end of time if it goes bad. At least expansion-centric systems eventually just end.

And as much as every pro-Housing player is going to say "Garrisons were not Housing", it still showed one of the primary bad side-effects of such a system - you depopulate the world, as many people will idle in their house, instead of a city.

There is only two possible options for how one could implement housing:

(1) Make it meaningless fluff, so that you have nothing but cosmetics in your house, so it doesn't take away any reasons from being in a city, but also doesn't really offer you any reason to be in your house all that often.
(2) Have the house offer certain commodities and services, taking away from the importance of cities and other hubs, but make the house feel more useful.

Either one of those options would really not be very good. (1) would be boring for anyone but the wannabe interior designers, and (2) would result in the "empty cities" problem, not only for one expansion, but for ever.

As such, there is little course where they can truely win. Such a concept would cost serious effort in artwork, and to justify that they need to get a lot of people hyped for that - and a (1) option might just not cut that. And (2) is dangerous.

Except there are thousands of people who don't give a shit about battle pets and yet run old raids to make money off the pet drops. If you implement housing, sure you have people spending time in their house decorating but you also have people running content to get the items they want for their housing or to sell. There are also the people who don't need to do a bg/dungeon what ever but see the queue time and instead of waiting around the 30+ minutes just log out. If you have content like housing that can distract from the queue time those people will likely stay instead of logging.

[Gurluas]

Honestly, houses add a lot to the game.
Look at MMOs with housing and how big housing has become for those games...
Wow's attempts at housing so far were very lackluster because they in essence didn't include the customization aspect which is the biggest attraction.

In games housing have fluffs and customization.

Forexample in FF14, you can get a Free company (guild) house, and get an airship workshop, a chocobo stable and other fluff like this, but the main draw is to completely decorate and design a house. Garrisons were only the fluff, you couldn't decorate the garrison, only change the layout to a degree.

[durenas]

I've wondered this. A player house would be loads of fun for a lot of people. Personally it'd just be something I'd do whenever I got bored of everything else, but I'd still enjoy it. It could be a great way to show off achievements and add extra reasons to revisit old content to get items and rewards for your house.

One thing that always bugs me is how disconnected expansions can feel. Each expansions sends you to a new zone and very rarely connect back to Azeroth other than occasionally "go talk to this npc in Org or SW". Housing would give something that connects all expansions, seeing everything you've done on your adventures in one place, that'd be awesome.

There's so many other good reasons for housing, it bugs me that Blizzard haven't done it. Although after the shit show that was Garrisons, I'd be very wary of them getting it right.

The thing is - you can't just say to Blizzard 'implement player housing' without being more specific. Because by blizzard's standards, Garrisons WERE player housing. IMHO unless we have the ability to place objects dynamically and customize to a far far greater extent, they might as well just not bother.

[mrcodez]

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?

My guess is their decision is profit-related.

How many extra subs or revenue do we expect to generate with housing?

What is the cost to develop and maintain housing?

Employing more people to develop housing means we are decreasing profit. will the exta subs and revenue be a large enough and compelling enough amount of money to go through the hiring, planning, and development cycle for housing?

If we do not hire extra devs, what must be cut from the game to provide housing? Will cutting those features impact current subs?



I believe that's the spot they are in. If I had to guess, I would say that Activision/Blizzard is looking to make the most amount of money with the least amount spent (effort). More of a "don't rock the boat and just make more money with what you have" mindset.

So to make the most from the WoW product you simply add in more items to the retail shop and continue the game as-is. It generates subs, the subs buy services/items from the shop, and you continue to make profit for many more years, until you don't. Housing is not needed at all in that business plan.

In fact, there aren't really any new features that need to be added. Interesting systems, sure it keeps subs coming back. Pets, mounts, and cosmetics, sure, those keep money coming in from the cash shop.

What does housing bring to this? A large up-front expense with the promise of a pay-off in the future, possibly. And how long in the future is the extra money?

You quickly see how trying to sell that to the people that control the budget just isn't going to fly. You can compare the revenue (estimates) from other games but at the end of the day you're trying to convince management to take a big risk. Pay lots of money now for the promise of more in the future. For management, they know if they just continue on they don't have to take *any risk at all* and they keep getting profit. Easy decision for them.

[Lord Pebbleton]

I agree with archeolgy, but the pet battle thing no.
the pet battle dungeons and tournoments they have been adding, aswell as making pet battles a huge peice of content in the new zones (giving you a massive boost of rep) they are still doing great, maybe not as amazing as when they were first added and there was TONS of stuff, but it still gets quite a large amount of content. Legendary pets, pet battle dungeons, new pet battles every patch, etc etc.

meanwhile archeolgy.... ugh... I was server second max on my realm back when it got added.
I have almost every single rare.
but legion and BFA sorta ditched it... Legion had the bi-weekly, but that was more of "do a weekly quest that has some archeology in it" there was no rares to discover.

I used to be big on pet battles, still have over 200 level 25 and I have cleared all major content related to them (grandmasters, Celestial Tournament, dungeons).

My problem is with the overachieving side of things. You have fun events like Algalon and Timeless Isle, and then the horrible slog that is beating every trainer with pets of a specific type. You do not need a strategy because 99% of them do not work, you just go fetch the pets that make it a roflstompfest and you are done.

Pet battles are kinda ok exactly because they do provide fun and you can level pets while you level characters (did 85-90 back in MoP with a priest I didn't feel like leveling by battling pets and getting ready for tournament). I am just afraid of the direction they are heading.

[Toppy]

The thing is - you can't just say to Blizzard 'implement player housing' without being more specific. Because by blizzard's standards, Garrisons WERE player housing. IMHO unless we have the ability to place objects dynamically and customize to a far far greater extent, they might as well just not bother.

People have been fairly direct when it comes to what they expect from player housing. Garrisons were called out as a poor example from the get go. Its not complicated, but blizzard tried to complicate it. This has been done more or less the same way in so many other MMO at this point that there's no excuse, theres no saying "Well what do you mean". Its an MMO standard, like changing your gears appearance.

An instanced area for the player where they can place various types of furnishings.

That is litterally it. You can add bells and whistles, but that is the most baseline, and what anyone would expect. And blizzard fucked that up.

[Arakakao]

Given how crazy many many people are over something as simple as transmog, I don't get it either. People would go nuts over well implemented housing.

I'm still baffled that someone can find anything wrong with transmog.

[Spotnick]

They seem to want only stuff for the specific expansion... like garrisons, order halls etc. They don't want a "expansionless" system that you keep working on, for some reason.

"for some reason".. you realize the more stuff they add that works over more than one xpac, the more they need to maintain it and it means adding stuff every xpac to it, hence xpac takes more and more time to do because you have to add pet battles and archeology and more achievements all over the place because they decided to implement those at one point.

That's why they went the "xpac feature way".. and we should be happy warfronts and island expeditions will be gone.