I still enjoy my player housing in SWG and my shop. Boy they got that mostly right, then again places weren’t continents they were planets so there was more space to fill with non instanced housing.
Not a system that would translate well into wow…
But I can’t see why they couldn’t have it in instanced zone or zones. Either accessible by portals or cities. Everyone can enter that zone but houses or guild mansions can set rights to who can and can’t come in. Every zone having their own team going on.
I have been sugeesting it here many times, pretty much same ideas that you have. I support them fully. However, i don’t think player housing should be gold sink but it should be activity. Give lot of things to do in forms of farming, gathering, crafting and trading housing goods. And there should be room for creativity with free item placing and building possiblities. Rifts player housing is closest to what i have in mind.
I can remember close to the end where Dantooine was just one large urban sprawl save for a few no build areas close to POI’s.
I’d love the SWG system here in WoW but it would have to be managed a lot differently with regard to placement of houses and how long after sub expired the house existed.
Yup, the tax system was a bit too lenient. Taking too long for buildings to get shutdown and removed.
SWG Emu has less of that problem though. But it does indeed require a bit more thought to it.
Garrisons weren’t terrible in my opinion.
I liked the offline progression, the follower system and the building system. It was quite complex and engaging. On the other hand BFA mission table was (is) terrible and I don’t know why it’s even there in the first place.
The garrison was TOO good in some fields. Especially bringing raid loot for you, without actually raiding. Receiving items from last bosses on mythic difficulty was nice, until I actually killed that boss and realized that there’s nothing I want from him except the mount. They fixed this in Legion by requiring you to go and kill the boss in order to get a bonus item.
But overall? I loved being able to simply log and raid / pvp, not occupied by stupid daily quests that have no end in sight (like Legion and BFA). Questing after hitting level cap is just bad and boring. Good quests are few and far between, such as the race on Great China Wall in MOP. Most of them are boring, arduous menial grinds. Especially those damn assault craps. Fill-a-bar where a mob is worth 1%, give me a break with those.
I wonder if there could be ways to add in player housing but also avoid the issue of making capitals obsolete… I have some suggestions I thought up.
The house would overall be just that - a house. You could perma-place your toys around, maybe allow a profession like Blacksmithing to craft furniture/Tailoring to craft rugs and cloths, maybe even let a pet or two wander about, around to welcome you whenever you visit.
It could go either way of being a gold sink or being something everyone is given (like Garrisons or the Acre in MoP). It could make more sense if it was something all players got with a quest/gold investment - how can a “champion” just wander about the place, homeless?
But unlike garrisons… it doesn’t have to give solid facilities. Why would a house have an Auction House or even a vendor at all? It could just have a mailbox and maybe something akin to Void Storage, an extra closet to keep things in.
Like garrisons, to avoid congestion of the world, it could be a separate instance that your friends can visit if they are in a group with you.
Edit to mention that my ideas draw from Pokemon of all places, where in Generation III you could make tree houses with purely cosmetic features.
From this perspective I think Blizzard is all wrong. They don’t want to add player housing in fear of making capitals obsolete and yet same time their are no longer designing the game from world perspective like they used. The feeling seeing capital full of players came from recognizing that these were the players you were sharing persistent world. Once the layering/sharding was implemented this feeling was no longer there, because you were no longer sharing persistent world but an instance. Basically Blizz has filled world with bots and say it is as good as it was and now trying to preserve the garbage.
I thought Garrisons were pretty good. About housing though… I think everyone has given up hope that they’ll ever add it. It’s such a missed opportunity. Would be an excellent side activity and trophys from bosses and stuff would have been great. I’d be happy with, even prefer, a simple hook housing system. Don’t need all that move anything whereever you want nonsense. Just want to find or craft some cool things and put them on display.
In Star wars the old republic you have Strongholds that are their form of player housing.
There is one specific one that’s a pvp version.
If you open it up for public listings you can have a pvp fight in your home.
On top of that you can place all sorts of stuff in the pvp area. Making your own unique arena
I’d love to see this in WoW, you could create some nice pvp events in a cool and strategically build arena.
This would be my nightmare. It would take away all the fun for creativity and planning and placing things different ways or combining different items together. But actually this is my biggest worry, that if Blizzard would do player housing they would just give you ready made house with similar transparent preplacess hooks you have for archeology stuff in garrison that you would have to “fill” then when getting right object.
Those are otherwise great, they got sort of hook system but not for premade objects but just for different sized objects.