Do you want Player Housing in WoW?

[Rozz]

I'd very much love it. The Farm in Pandaria was lovely, it was the only time my character had a home. The Wod Garrison never really felt like mine, considering it was just Orcish/Human themed. The Orderhalls are cool, but are just country clubs--for fun/play but not a home.

I'd be fine if they made a fixed instance location in each zone and when you enter it, we could build/decorate with game assets that you could unlock or something for this purpose. Maybe get a few npcs to make it feel more alive and you can set their routing. And of course, just invite people into a group (you have to be leader or something) and they can enter your "home". Sounds like a dream.

[crakerjack]

I’m against it because I think it’s a waste of time and would take resources away from important content such as raids, story, dungeons, PvP and art. I’ve played various MMO’s with player housing and I’ve found it boring. I prefer challenging group content and player housing is almost the exact opposite of that.

[Infernoxas]

I think the reason why people want player housing is because it wont be irrelevant content each patch. They could carry it over every expansion to if they wanted.

[Kyphael]

I'd never vote against ADDING something to the game, even if it's not what I want in concept, my issue is when they don't want to add anything new (like a new class for an EXPANSION.) I'd love player housing if it was exciting. If it's like Garrisons, I'm torn on it. At first I found it boring and solitary, but when I gave it another try after re-subbing, I actually found having my own space that was self sustainable was pretty cool. I guess if they took the Garrisons concept, and made it more customizable, like a shire-sized, then I'd be all for it. Of course it's tricky to pull off where it would be universally praised because everyone has their own idea of what player housing should be. I don't blame them for not having tried it yet, it's difficult to please everyone with what would essentially be a vanity feature.

[fatgunn]

I think the reason why people want player housing is because it wont be irrelevant content each patch. They could carry it over every expansion to if they wanted.

Exactly! Much like transmog it would be a persistent system that would showcase your character's personality and accomplishments. I think a lot of people who don't see the appeal are the ones who don't transmog, wear the current tier, or have picked a given tier and wear it forever.

To those who feel it would steal dev time from other activities, I understand. Anybody who doesn't participate in all parts of the game understands. When I see the new arena coming in 9.2.5 I see a missing raid boss. But I also have enough awareness to know that people have been asking for more arenas and bgs for years now and can accept that not everything is designed for me. Will it housing take dev time? Most definitely. So do pet battles, and the toy box, and transmog.

Battle Pets are probably the closest comparison to what many of us want from player housing. Once it's in the game all Blizz has to do is keep adding basic stuff to it. Give me a statue or head of the boss when I beat a raid. Let leatherworkers make me some couches. Add an achievement gives me a cool fountain. AND the beauty of it is they don't have to make most of these assets unique to housing, anything made for housing can be put in a dungeon/raid/bg or city. Not to mention, there's already thousands of environmental items available in the world. I guarantee someone would love to have their own version of Black Temple's brothel or their own arcwine vineyard.

As for the "problem" of people just afking in their homes. In my experiences with housing in other MMOs, it is a nonissue. However, the simple and expedient solution is just to not add the things to housing that would keep people there. The biggest is just don't put an auction house there. If people want to sit on their Brutosaur in their home it's no different than them sitting on top of Mt Kunlai or or the bottom of Vash'jir and they can do those now. People sat in their garrison because there was no reason to leave. It had everything you needed and also the WoD cities were absolute garbage that were often plagued by horrible lag.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Decorating my apartment in FFXIV was a ton of fun and made me more invested in that game. WoW has the potential to implement and even better housing system, provided that it is not bogged down by the absurd difficulty of obtaining a house like in FFXIV and also has other QoL features like being able to log back into your house, rather than being kicked out on the curb in front.

EDIT: To everyone asking for a "Neutral" option on the poll, you should keep the following in mind: the addition of Player Housing would come at the cost of other areas of the game suffering as a large chunk of their time and resources would be invested into this feature.

Making more excuses for the multi-billion dollar game studio, I see.

There is absolutely no reason why we couldn't have been able to plop down a garrison in any WoD zone as was originally promised, or have had aesthetic options for all races at launch. The reason we didn't get that stuff boils down to pure greed and laziness on Blizzard's part. They learned long ago that they could slide by doing the bare minimum and their most ardent fanboys will continue to be milked.

[cuafpr]

caveat to my desire for housing... it has to be something they don't do for an expac then drop like they did garrisons. I enjoyed my garrison and hated leaving it behind vs continuing to expand on the idea/feature

[Toybox]

Making more excuses for the multi-billion dollar game studio, I see.

There is absolutely no reason why we couldn't have been able to plop down a garrison in any WoD zone as was originally promised, or have had aesthetic options for all races at launch. The reason we didn't get that stuff boils down to pure greed and laziness on Blizzard's part. They learned long ago that they could slide by doing the bare minimum and their most ardent fanboys will continue to be milked.

Don't they have the biggest team they've ever had working on content, or was that BfA? I doubt they're employing more & more people in recent years so they can slack off at work, & so I think calling it laziness is unfair. The lack of content to show for it boils down to incompetence moreso than anything else.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Making more excuses for the multi-billion dollar game studio, I see.

Exactly. It's also not like it would take massive amounts of work to keep the feature running in the first place. Making the changes to the framework to allow placement of objects and reserving some space in the database for it would essentially be a one time investment. After that it's just using parts of already existing assets and associating them with item names and icons, if they do it properly throwing some crafting recipes in the mix as well. This is not some massive development effort like balancing another class or anything even remotely close.. It certainly shouldn't be daunting for a AAA studio.

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Don't they have the biggest team they've ever had working on content, or was that BfA? I doubt they're employing more & more people in recent years so they can slack off at work, & so I think calling it laziness is unfair. The lack of content to show for it boils down to incompetence moreso than anything else.

I have a hard time believing that their current team is anywhere close to something warranting the use of words like "biggest". At least that is the only way to explain the output of shadowlands.

[TheRevenantHero]

Don't they have the biggest team they've ever had working on content, or was that BfA? I doubt they're employing more & more people in recent years so they can slack off at work, & so I think calling it laziness is unfair. The lack of content to show for it boils down to incompetence moreso than anything else.

Blizzard has been getting lazier with each expansion and patch. Just look at BfA and SL.

[Asaliah]

I am all for it but please time gate the construction to one brick a week

[MoanaLisa]

I’m against it because I think it’s a waste of time and would take resources away from important content such as raids, story, dungeons, PvP and art.

PVP has its own team. Raids and dungeons have their own teams. Story has its own team. None of these would necessarily be involved at all with creation of a housing system.

Art is something to talk about but if you think about it the art assets used to populate housing in WoW mostly already exist in the form of racial architecture and the tens of thousands of art assets created over the years for the game.

Housing would primarily be a systems thing so yeah, you might be giving up a grindy progression system for housing. That's a trade I would make. On top of all that, whether they iterated on garrisons or not, a lot of the systems needed to do it are already embedded in the game.

I'm not saying it would be a trivial thing because they might have to create a couple of new professions for it (shocking and terrible I know). It's unlikely that the impact on the areas mentioned would be substantial.

[Lolites]

Much more social to AFK in a city or standing next to a mailbox?

It doesn't matter where people go to AFK. It doesn't affect the game either way.

true, but unlike housing AFKing in city doesnt need developers to sacrifice time and resources that could be put to better use...

[Vakna]

Yes. It's one of the most free wins possible for the devs.

Transmog, mounts and pet collecting with the Wardrobe feature single handedly added thousands of hours of gameplay and spawned some amazing secondary progression system addons like ATT (All The Things). Imagine what Player Housing could do if implemented correctly. Furniture and decoratives collected from legacy and new content alike, themed after the raids/dungeons/locations they are obtained from. Displays for other collectibles. Gold dumps for rich players (I have nothing to spend my 30 million gold on, the game needs more gold dumps). More furniture and decoratives attached to professions to boost the no-power oriented economy. Player Housing could add more content to the game than the Wardrobe already did, which was incredibly substantial.

[Lolites]

I think the reason why people want player housing is because it wont be irrelevant content each patch. They could carry it over every expansion to if they wanted.

they could carry literaly ANYTHING to next expansion if they wanted, for some reasons they dont seem to want that, so why would housing end up being different?

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I think a lot of people who don't see the appeal are the ones who don't transmog, wear the current tier, or have picked a given tier and wear it forever.

i love transmog/mounts/toys collecting, bcs i can see them while playing the game, housing on the other hand is not...
if i run a dungeon i see my mog and mount, but i dont see my house... its completely separated from most of the game...

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i love how people on MMO-C try to claim 99% wow players are power oriented min-maxers, and then in other thread try to claim housing with no impact on power would be extremely popular and would "save" the game...
so which is it, both cant be true...

im sure there would be people who love housing, and if it doesnt cost us other content good for them, but most likely scenario is that if blizz ever add it, theyll see not everybody engages with it, and abandon it after expansion... they do it with pretty much every system, why do people think housing would end up differently?
maybe if it was universaly loved, but lets face it, thats not possible

[Pakheth]

Because AFKing in your Warcraft-themed Sims isn't something this game needs.

People already do that in cities. But you are ofc ignoring the aspect of house keeping where you are out in the world finding stuff for your house from activities like exploration(chests), dungeons, raids, world quests, quest chains, crafting, heck even PvP. You could argue that all queue based content in WoW just makes people sit around and wait in cities. That's not better.

[Faerillis]

Every time a new expansion announcement looms on the horizon, the subject of Player Housing is brought up. Every single time, without fail.

I've personally never seen the appeal of Player Housing, but I may be a bit of an outlier as I detest building even in games that have a large focus on building. I remember when I played Sims 4, I always picked a pre-made house to get into the gameplay quicker. Valheim I actually quit when I realized I had to build a house, and in Minecraft I've always built something really fast (usually in the side of a mountain or underground so I don't have to place as many blocks).

But I'm curious, how many here actually want Player Housing in WoW? And I'd also like to know why, because to me it seems like a strangely anti-social feature to have in an MMO.

EDIT: To everyone asking for a "Neutral" option on the poll, you should keep the following in mind: the addition of Player Housing would come at the cost of other areas of the game suffering as a large chunk of their time and resources would be invested into this feature. So when you say your opinion is "Neutral" on the matter, you might as well reword it to "I don't care about losing out on cool shit in the game if it means we get housing", which means your answer on the poll might as well be "Yes" since you don't care about the massive content trade-off that Player Housing comes with.

Wow. I know this isn't a forum where we strive for objectivity and avoiding bias but this is loaded even for here.

"I won't put neutral cause it means losing out on 'actual cool features'". No no you can't say "I'm neutral because I would have no issue with having this as a major but don't strive for it.

Also strangely anti-social? Inviting people to see your player home is quite social. And if you've ever seen ESO? Player Housing can easily be made into Guild Halls where people socialize.

Oh and they'd be great if tied to professions; creating both Gold Sinks and ways to circulate gold

[Relapses]

I'm not saying it would be a trivial thing because they might have to create a couple of new professions for it (shocking and terrible I know). It's unlikely that the impact on the areas mentioned would be substantial.

I wish I could believe this but part of the reason for 5.4's extremely lengthy content drought was because of Blizzard iterating on the Garrison feature. And even then, they still didn't work properly on launch causing one of the few times Blizzard has given its entire playerbase free game time based off of the unplayability of the game. I just... I don't have as rosy an outlook on Blizzard's ability to develop a feature like this without it either directly or indirectly impinging on some other feature greatly. I'd rather they simply didn't bother; also, given the radio silence from Blizzard on the subject of player housing I'd say they're probably of a similar opinion.

[Utrrabbit]

Every time a new expansion announcement looms on the horizon, the subject of Player Housing is brought up. Every single time, without fail.

I've personally never seen the appeal of Player Housing, but I may be a bit of an outlier as I detest building even in games that have a large focus on building. I remember when I played Sims 4, I always picked a pre-made house to get into the gameplay quicker. Valheim I actually quit when I realized I had to build a house, and in Minecraft I've always built something really fast (usually in the side of a mountain or underground so I don't have to place as many blocks).

But I'm curious, how many here actually want Player Housing in WoW? And I'd also like to know why, because to me it seems like a strangely anti-social feature to have in an MMO.

EDIT: To everyone asking for a "Neutral" option on the poll, you should keep the following in mind: the addition of Player Housing would come at the cost of other areas of the game suffering as a large chunk of their time and resources would be invested into this feature. So when you say your opinion is "Neutral" on the matter, you might as well reword it to "I don't care about losing out on cool shit in the game if it means we get housing", which means your answer on the poll might as well be "Yes" since you don't care about the massive content trade-off that Player Housing comes with.

No. Please god no. I would hate if the brought that crap into wow.

[Fitsu]

Really? Haven't touched it since I unlocked the last campaign thingy through the naval base back in WoD.

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Mythic is a bad metric. Show me normal and heroic statistics. That is where the majority of raiders are. Well LFR, but this forum is schizophrenic when it comes to LFR. Some days LFR is not considered raiding when it comes to talking about difficulty and gatekeeping gear. The next day it counts as raiding when arguing that a large chunk of players raid.

Mythic is and always will be small beans.

I used Mythic because I was speaking of my own niche. While both are "raiding" I wouldn't consider a Mythic raider and a Norm/HC raider to be of the same niche and to use LFR as an example is a bit silly, that's like saying everyone who has made a character on an RP server is a RPer or someone plays Arena because they queued up for a Skirmish once.

Now I guess this tier is a little unfair as it's just started but looking at last tier 5107 guilds were 4/10 Mythic by the time the tier ended. I would argue that any guild that doesn't atleast kill the first few mythic bosses during the entire tier isn't a raiding guild. There just a bunch of people doing random content, as the first few bosses on mythic are puggable by the end of a tier. So yeah your probably looking at a bigger number. Perhaps around 8% of the playerbase are raiders.

I don't mean to sound elitist, but I dunno what niche I would consider you if your literally raiding every week and progressing heroic for an entire tier I doubt this is the case for anyone but I may be wrong. There's probably guilds that don't raid but once every now and then decide to get people together and just give it a look, there more just casual/social players though not raiders.