If the roleplay community would fracture as gravely as people think it would just because of guild halls becoming a thing, then I think that the roleplay community has far, far more pressing matters to tend to than worrying about a feature like that.
I personally don’t really care about guild halls / personal homes myself, but, seriously, if something as inane as that would be a threat, I think it’s time for a lot of us to take a step back and articulate what the hell’s going on and how to fix that beyond looking at each other and saying ‘don’t roleplay that or there or with them’, ‘I hope they don’t add this because it would hinder roleplay somehow’, ‘I bet they’ll mess up the lore of this book / next patch / next expansion, etc.’ and waiting for the roleplay we want to see to just sprout from the ground.
I mean, yea sure, in FF there would be people randomly dropping in…
But thats FF. In WoW? I doubt it, ngl. People have problems attracting customers anywhere else but Stormwind and/or Dalaran(even at prime times). Orgrimmar died on all levels of RP.
My Friend… Star Wars Galaxies Guilds were on another level. Hell, Star Wars Galaxies was on another level as an MMO in general!
I should check out the SWG emulator(<- That was it the word) project
Stormwind has an entire market event and Stromgarde has a tournament + market event that happens about every month or two and it’s genuinely some of the most activity related to shop roleplay I’ve seen besides… →
→ Dalaran during their market nights, unless a campaign which most Dalaran-going roleplay characters would be is happening.
Orgrimmar ‘died’ for several reasons, having an unfriendly layout for roleplay being one of the main reasons, and bad experiences with momentary people that left as fast as they arrived being another.
People just preferred to complain about Orgrimmar and Horde RP more than they liked to roleplay in it, and now people talk about Orgrimmar as this quasi-Schrödinger’s Cat case where they get more enjoyment out of pointing at it from far away and going ‘haha rp dead’ than the hypothetical scenario of them (may god forgive me for saying this) actually logging in and roleplaying there if they’re that concerned about it.
Roleplaying isn’t waning because of some hypothetical what if scenario where the Alternate Universe Warcraft where housing is a thing invaded our own and suddenly there’s less roleplay; it’s waning because people love to make a mock funeral out of a death they’re announcing themselves. Out of the last 500 posts in a forum of a roleplay realm, at least 440 of them are in a thread about complaining about stuff.
I do personally have a great fear of the impact of player housing, especially if it grants a level of complexity not present in the open-world of Azeroth. I know a lot of people desire it for making event locations, dungeons etc. and, hypocritically, I would greatly enjoy that as well. However its undeniable that in the history of every MMO-RP community, once housing is added and becomes increasingly complex, open-world roleplay and non-bubbled roleplay in general takes a nosedive off a cliff and having seen that happen to SWTOR and ESO (by the time I tried FFXIV housing already reigned supreme for RP), I wouldn’t like to see it happen to WoW because I just very thoroughly do not enjoy the style of RP it brings about.
Edit: I should clarify that there are obviously other reasons as to why these other games RP communities rapidly just collapse but from my personal experience its always been around the times when housing gets added and becomes complex.
Whilst it is true the RP community has greatly diminished post-Legion, to a very significant degree, I don’t really think its a good idea to just continue actively killing it. More damage is still damage to an already very-thinned RP community.
One of the things that turned me off SWTOR and FFXIV in the long run was the absence of chat bubbles. Well that and the RP playerbase in SWTOR dried up like a raisin, but the chat bubble absence did not help things.
About player housing, I spent most of the Warlords of Draenor and Legion era playing another MMORPG called Neverwinter.
At the time, it had a feature called the Foundry (a feature that has since been removed from the game for reasons that infuriate me) that allowed players to create their own custom instances.
You could create your own maps with a very in-depth map builder, you could create your own NPCs, you could create your own dialogue… The only area in which customisation was limited was when it came to monsters, in order to prevent players from cheesing the system and creating Foundry maps that made farming stupidly easy.
The Foundry system gave players the ability to create their own worlds and of course roleplayers used this system in order to create houses for their characters, bases of operation and other such things. They could even invite up to four other players to join them in these Foundry maps.
Despite this, the most popular form of roleplaying was in the primary hub, the Moonstone Mask tavern. At the height of the roleplaying scene in Neverwinter, the tavern could bustling with as many as forty people at one time. Despite being given the ideal world-building tool, most people preferred generic tavern hub RP that allowed them to meet new people and roleplay with the wider community.
In fact, when the Foundry system was taken offline and removed from the game, that didn’t cause a flood of roleplayers who were hiding in the Foundry to suddenly join everyone else at the Mask. No, that was the deathblow that caused the majority of the roleplaying community (most of which was hub roleplayers) who enjoyed that feature to never come back to Neverwinter again.
So no, I don’t think player housing or guild housing would cause RP to shrivel up and die. Hub roleplayers would continue roleplaying in hubs. The only people who would limit themselves to player housing or guild housing are the communities that don’t really interact with the rest of the server these days and provide their own RP for themselves, without any need or desire to interact with hubs.
And oddly enough, some of the people complaining the most in this thread about the impact that player/guild housing would have on hub roleplaying already belong to these communities.
City of Heroes also had the Architect system. While it also ended up being used for fast exp grinding, even after a nerf hammering, it was still predominantly used for RP instances.
That said, the main RP hubs also didn’t dry up. So Im with you on that one.
