Originally Posted by
Belloc
Personally, I think it's bananas that people are still wanting a housing system. What would you even want to do with it? Show off the worthless transmogs that you're not currently wearing? Decorate it with items that no one else is ever going to see because your house is going to be instanced? What's the appeal, exactly?
I ask this as a former player of Asheron's Call, which had player housing (Cottages, Villas, Mansions) that were present in the actual game world and, therefore, limited in number. Once all the houses were gone, no one was able to get them until someone else stopped paying rent and lost their house. Housing in Asheron's Call was for you to show off your quest items, buff items, and a number of mostly uninteresting decorations. Asheron's Call had a lot of fun little knick-knacks that were essentially useless, but also cute (think pets in WoW, but they didn't follow you around). Housing in AC was a great addition because it was limited, so not everyone could have one, and because the loot system in the game didn't follow the expansion cycle that games like WoW have -- pretty much every good item had a time and a place and wasn't rendered useless just because a new expansion was released. Players tended to keep equipment drops long after they were no longer useful to them because they could give them to their alts or to their guildies... and such drops often had sentimental value.
WoW, by contrast, has loot that becomes worthless to you the instant you replace it, which happens with new seasonal tiers or sometimes even during the same tier. Those items are trashed pretty much as soon as they're replaced because they have no sentimental value. Toys in WoW tend to not have in-game art assets, aside from their icon (not exactly something that you can display on the walls of your house). The only thing in-game that I could really see as being useful decoration for a house would be mounts (which would be visible in a stable, obviously) and pets. Most of these, however, are common and uninteresting.
I don't see the point of housing in WoW. Blizzard would have to implement hundreds of housing items that would otherwise never exist just to ensure that players would have something to decorate with and then, who is going to see it? Blizzard obviously isn't going to plunk down a few thousand houses into the game world and make players race to be the first to grab them -- they'd have to have them instanced... and why on Earth would anyone bother checking out your house? WoW is not a game that is very conducive to housing.