I don’t mean as crude as that. I mean like how LOTRO or SWTOR does it… and not like how Rift or EQ 2 does it.
I mean, I pretty much say that in point 3… 
If the player housing facility would ever at all be added, it wouldn’t be making cities obsolete if it doesn’t have the things mentioned.
Wildstar had a really great housing system. FFXIV is pretty good too.
I don’t believe Blizzard makes anything deliberately terrible.
They’re just bad at what they do.
Sometimes they get weird guidelines such as “Players have to spend at least 2 weeks to complete this task” and then they put timegates on them, but timegates are annoying, not terrible.
I don’t believe for a second that anybody at Blizzard is malevolent or intentionally making WoW worse than it is.
I just believe they’re incompetent or overwhelmed.
I also believe that many Blizzard devs, who don’t or rarely play the game, believe they know better than people who do and thus refuse to listen to any kind of feedback.
It’s not them being deliberately bad at what they do, it’s just them being stubborn, most likely too few employees as well as most people simply being completly disconnected from the actual community and the game, thus they simply don’t know what may become good or bad.
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The game has been doing great for 16 years. Imo housing is just not really something they think the game needs urgently. Probably in the expansion after SL.
Oh, most people liked the garrisons themselves well enough. The complaints about the garrisons themselves were largely around insufficient customisation. For example, early in the WoD hype cycle, Blizzard said that we could place our Garrisons anywhere, or at least in any one of many selected locations. That didn’t happen. Garrisons were built either in Orc style, or Human. Many people wanted a Garrison of their own racial style. (And later, there was an option to unlock racial decorations, but it was pretty minimal, just some flags and guards.) There was no ability to decorate rooms, or build your own furnishings.
And so on.
These are the things that would be needed for player housing, but Blizzard struggled to produce even the Garrisons we got.
The REAL problem was not with the Garrison itself, but the fact that there was nothing to do outside it. Garrisons were not only self-sufficient, but provided a free slot of loot each week, and massive amounts of gold, while world content was a disaster, and M+ hadn’t yet made an appearance.
But you are right in your idea that, because Garrisons failed, player housing was discredited both among the players and among the devs.
I therefore suggest that Garrisons themselves failed in two ways:
- Over-rewarding. That could easily be fixed.
- Blizzard simply could not develop Garrisons that could be made into adequate player housing. How much of this was structural limitations, how much was volume of additions needed, and how much was unwillingness to invest in a gameplay element to be discarded after one expansion is not clear to me.
Real Player Housing would also have to be a permanent feature, not a throwaway. Nobody wants to invest all that time into a project that will be abandoned next expansion, and Blizzard seem to hate the idea of carrying anything forward between expansions.
So when someone brings up Player Housing, these are the kinds of things that people respond with. While it’s not true that nobody liked Garrisons, that is just a kind of shorthand for all of the factors I just described, and a lot more.
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I loved my Garrison and I miss it dearly. Same with the farm. Class hall was so not the same… 
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Not everyone hates the Garrison. I still use it and i love it. I wish Blizzard had given us more plots and more options.
They did not.
The thing about Blizzard, is that they wanted to go above and beyond with player housing and give a much broader and larger experience than just the regular house, with decorative furniture.
They wanted it to be a garrison, that you would build and upgrade, customize building, guards, music, outfit, patrols, professions, defensive battles etc etc etc.
The problem is, that they were basically centering all the content around garrisons and when they realized that players probably want to leave the garrison every now and again, they had fallen drastically behind on the actual content of the expansion.
So much, that a raid, several quest chains and mid to end content had to be scrapped.
Then they realized that if they keep working on Garrisons, they wont have enough time to do everything they want to do in Legion. So their priorities changed and shifted over to making the next expansion, pretty early on. Garrison development was abandoned. Abysmal time planning.
The irony, is that all players really wanted was actually simple housing with decorative furniture.
Hope this metaphor makes sense to you:
Imagine ordering a steak at a restaurant… then the chef comes out and says:
- “Aw, I’m not only going to get you a ribeye, but deluxe cuts from all over, with exotic vegetables and I’ll get you golden silverware with diamond engravings and the Queen of England will present the dish for you while a orchestra plays epic music”
Sounds pretty neat, right?
- Then the dishwasher shows up, dumbs a plate with half a ribeye that’s barely cooked and some frozen broccoli on the side
Dear Blizzard, keep it simple s****d
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I have mixed feelings about the Garrisons. At the time, I liked having my own space and making buildings that suited my needs and seeing NPCs that I acquired and built up walking around…it felt like a small community without any of the hassle. Then WoD dragged on and on and on with very little non-Garrison content and it started to become a prison (maybe that was the reason Sylvanas finally snapped?).
Visually, I preferred my farm but it lacked the customisation element. Having somewhere for my champion / hero / savior of Azeroth to go and relax was a nice element.
Class Halls were a good idea to move away from the isolation that farms and garrisons created but it didn’t have that place where I could just go and AFK or read up on tactics or play about with my UI, macros, etc. without having people jump around me and cast train toys and generally just being WoW players.
Player housing would be a massive gold-sink for Blizzard. If they got it right, they’d get quite a nice bit of income from it because people would invest in making it their little corner of the world. It would have to be ever-evolving and non expansion-related but I also think they’d have to make sure that it did not become a permanent, isolated prison where people go to and ultimately make the cities look deserted.
Perhaps Blizzard have weighed up the pros and cons and thought the world immersion is more important than risk making everyone retract further into the solo-game mentality?
I couldn’t agree more. By insisting of adding their own “magic touch” to it they destroyed everything that makes housing a fun activity to do. That’s why i keep (to the annoyance) repeating on housing related threads, that garrisons are not housing.
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My 2 coppers worth. I’m certainly intrigued by the idea of player housing but also concerned that it will be garrisons 2.0
One way would be to have the ability to collect raw materials for crafting therefore giving some professions some sort of meaning again. However to craft weapons and armour you have to go to SW or Org to do it, splitting time between the housing and the faction capitals.
Reminds me to look in on my garrison later and possibly run some old WoD content
Housing is not about ability to gain materials or in game benefits. It is activity for those whos gaming motivations are on collecting, creativity and immersion (just to mention some not to exclude other motivations).
My concept for housing would be something like this:
- Works instanced in the way that farm/garrison do. Is visible in open world but walking in gives everyone their own instance and own view.
- Available in apartments (capital) and off the city locations. For example, apartments in different part of Stormwind on existing buildings that are not currently on use. Those would have premade lay out but you could furnish them the way you wish. Off the city locations would offer either a empty lot (where people can build kind of house they want) or pre existing building (think of something similar to Saldeans Farm for example). On these you could build buildings and furnish both interior and outside as you wish (with furniture, decorations, plants, trees, stones, pavings, paths etc.)
- Professions would be connected to housing system. There would be lot of recipes for different furniture and decorations. For example tailors could make curtains, leatherworkers fur rugs, herbalists could collect seeds and grow in pots to make different decorative flowerpots, trees and such. Lot of furniture would need components from different professions: to make chair you would need base frame from woodworker (yes, add new profession too) and then puffings/fabric from leatherworker/tailor depending what kind of chair you make. There would be own recipes (lot of recipes!) for all professions (including gathering ones) for both independent objects but also for these “multiprofession objects”.
- You could also loot items for your housing in open world. Type of mob you kill would determine what kind of object mob drops. Belf mobs would drop belf style items, dwarf mobs dwarf style items etc. All drops would be on open world, making it accessible to all and in general open world busier.
- Everything would be BoE. This would build up big trade around the housing and also make housing pleasant extra gold thing for those who don’t want to focus on it (they could sell housing item they find/make in AH).
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WoD is when Blizz stopped showing subscription numbers because everyone unsubbed. They also put in sharding to avoid having to merge servers because all servers were dead.
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post edited.
I guess that was what I was trying to say, but you just worded it a lot better.
Would be fun to use Saldeans farm in Westfall for such a purpose, especially with the psycho scarecrows, and with the mine in close proximity
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rp is one of the biggest points imo, it’s high time they gave something to the rp community and this would be huge, for them and a lot of non rp’ers, though technically we all are, just some won’t admit it…
i can’t see a comparism between garrison and player housing really, it’s a base with too many dirty boots on your carpet and just too impersonal, farm was much closer…
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WoD losing subs has nothing to do with the concept of player housing. That is what the whole OP is about. Garrisons were not player housing.
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My point about “were garrisons deliberately bad” is that garrisons being bad led to EVERYONE UNSUBBING. Why would Blizz build an entire expansion around one feature and make that feature deliberately bad just to shut up a few dozen people on the forums? I get it if they put housing as a side thing and made it garbage on purpose just to shut them up. But garrisons being bad led to a giant exodus of players. So no, they weren’t bad on purpose.
I agree, but I see why people make the comparison to the garrison as this is was the one and only time Blizzard offered something like ‘a personal space’ for players. The fact that the garrisons were so profitable and gave so many materials, is for me the reason why they failed as there was literally no need to leave them.
I tend to like Radium’s concept for housing as she has posted in this thread 
Housing as a vanity item, something fun for a player to work on, with item drops from open world (ensuring that nobody spent endless time in their house) but also giving a boost to various professions.
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