Having only experience with FFXIV as another MMORPG with player housing (edit: I lied, remembering all the fun I had with housing in Ultima Online a thousand years ago), I agree that the existence of housing isn’t the only thing keeping roleplay hubs and large campaigns from emerging in the open world in that particular game. There are many elements that discourage them:
- Lack of official roleplay servers
- Lack of chat bubbles + autoscrolling chat = difficult to keep up in busy roleplay environments
- AddOns being treated akin to black market wares that you need to be hush-hush about, compared to WoW where it’s perfectly fine to advertise them on the forums and RP Discord servers. AddOns like TRP, Listener, etc. add so much convenience to our everyday roleplay experiences in the open world.
- Impossible to create large scale events without characters disappearing a few feet away from you. This diminishes the aspiration to create such events, along with the aforementioned difficulty of keeping up with the chat.
- Far fewer ways to add flavor to open world roleplay, compared to WoW toys that you’re able to place outdoors, all the consumables and items, not to mention pickpocketing appearances and prisms.
- Housing has been there since the game’s early days, compared to AD where we’ve had two decades of roleplaying primarily in the open world; I don’t think people will stop adventuring outdoors or creating public community events any time soon, it’s something a big chunk of us would sorely miss, and an important part of so many guild concepts.
Now, it’s inevitable that housing is coming to WoW. No amount of “no housing” comments is going to change that, though I understand people want to air their concerns. I think it’s more constructive though to provide feedback on how to make the housing as good as it can be with the roleplay community in mind, especially if the devs want to tie social elements to the feature.
Now, my own hopes for player housing:
- Enough customization options to turn it into a leisure creative activity, the ability to create unique-looking spaces. I’d love to waste hours upon hours to plan room layouts and decorate spaces around different themes. Some might think this would be time away from roleplaying, but for me, it’d be playtime added on top of roleplaying. It’d also draw more eyes to the game when people generate a buzz sharing their designs online.
- Size options from small to big; from cottages to large interiors suitable for community events, and the ability to invite a lot of people to visit the place. Perhaps then we wouldn’t always have to use the Greymane Manor OOC for all the Gilneas balls… just as an example.
- While a plot of land around the house would be nice, I’d also be happy just with an indoor instance if there were ways to avoid a claustrophobic feel through fake window views etc. This is perhaps driven by concern that the fixtures would be locked to few house models per race, limiting the customization options.
- Visit system: different toggles, from private with permission exceptions to public, letting anyone find and visit your house from some kind of an in-game housing catalog. This would enable creating venues players might build for the roleplay community readily available 24/7.
- No neighbourhoods unless you were able to choose who you’d like to share a plot / district with. If randomized neighbours were to be a thing, at least lock the style of housing exteriors to a specific theme, to avoid the immersion stuttering when your elven house that is IC meant to be in Ashenvale, sits between Gnome and Forsaken homes.
- A co-working system; the ability to let other players modify your home with a variety of permission levels, from being able to only move furnishings, to changing the layout, to withdrawing items from the furnishing storage. This would be an example of a social feature tied to housing, being able to work on it together with your friends / partner etc. From RP POV, it’d let different players move furnishings during an event which could be useful. On FF14 many people even commission housing enthusiasts to build and decorate the interior of their homes, though it’s always a risk as much it would be to give a stranger access to your guild bank.
- The ability to change music in your house. There’s no shortage of soundtracks in the game. Again this would be a nice feature for roleplaying in the space and for events hosted in houses.
- The ability to float furnishings in the air… I suspect this probably won’t be allowed, but damned it’s part of the reason why the housing is so creative on FF14, as people sink and float furnishings, utilizing all sides of a furnishing piece in ways you’d never thought of in order to create something cool. Nevermind that it was never a planned feature on FF14 either, but the devs never fixed the glitches letting people circumvent the base limitations.
- Please don’t make it overly expensive to obtain a house/different house sizes/furnishings, I don’t want to sell my kidney every time I want to redesign my home(s)