I promise you, people like myself will play for months on end if you introduced a proper housing system. Decorating, teleports, crafting, and placing items, and unlocking new things through outdoor rewards, and feats will seriously encourage us.
I’m a massive creator/designer. I love drawing, art, music. There’s so many creative people who play WoW who would dedicate an unhealthy amount of time into such a system. Please make it happen! Garrisons were a drop in an ocean. It wasn’t what we were asking for!
Please Blizzard. I promise the development time will be worth the longevity in which you keep a certain amount of people subscribed.
This is something that comes up from time to time.
Blizz have said that it is something they would like to do. But it would be such a large job it would be something that happens over the course of several expansions.
Personally it’s not something I’m interested in. But if they’re going to do it, I’d rather them take their time and produce something worth doing, than rushing it and we getting another Garrison, but with New UI style Snap grid.
I have lost countless hours decorating my house in FFXIV and I don’t regret a single minute of it. I love decorating so much I have fc rooms (guild house private chambers) and apartments on all my alts.
WoW has an incredible amount of beautiful assets in the game and it would be a dream come true to have a proper housing system.
And anyone who says garrisons are player housing have never interacted with an actual player housing system. You don’t even have your own bed in a garrison!
There was interview with one of the devs (might have been Ion) prior to Dragonflight in which they talked about playerhousing.
They said (paraphrasing) that people often joke that implementing player housing would cost a raid tier, but that it was actually much worse than that. Because the expectation of what player housing should be and include has gotten so high in recent years that it would take them several expansions to implement, or risk severly disappointing people. Like Garrisons did. Which, yes, was Blizzards attempt at player housing.
Garrisons were originally going to be a lot bigger. Not in physical size but in features. And should have had a ton more customization. Like being able to choose which zone you wanted your Garrison in. Or race themed buildings. But all of that had to be scrapped (along with a ton of other stuff, like 3 whole zones) when AKB decided that expansions needed to come out yearly, rather than the usual 2 year cycle. That ended up backfiring greatly, but it was too late to change course. So WoD was instead abandoned to give Legion more dev time.
Lets say that Blizzard themselves would make a base for human houses, with 2-3 chairs and tables and beds etc etc., this alone would not take that long, making the asset is quite easy when you have already base to work of and WoW has amazing plethora of base items to use as, of course they need to be brought to modern day standards but its not years worth of work, even a novice can whip up something in a week as long as they know how to use programs, and Blizzard has really good artists so one would think that making a chair is not overwhelmingly hard task.
Hardest part is how it would work. I am sure people who want housing want to move things pixel perfectly and have 100% freedom to add even the slightest little pollen bits to its correct place but I guarantee you, that would be impossible. WoW engine could do that, but it would need some serious overhauls to make stuff like that happen so that players could do it themselves.
One way would be to steal from Old Republic (the star wars MMO) and have it be grid based with very basic movement from items. Chair could be placed certain places and have it be rotated to 9 different directions. Very limited but sufficient enough to let your creative juices flow and make your own little house.
Same would work for rooms, you have base room to start and once you sink in some in game money to it you could add maybe more rooms and even floors, make yourself little inn and once you have truly maxed out, you have yourself a keep.
And once the ball is rolling they could hold community contests on how to make stuff.
Lets say you are tired of the 2-3 base chairs there is to use, well along comes a fan of WoW with skills in art and 3D modeling and they decide to make chairs, all following strict Warcraft art guide lines, so no Unreal5 engine styled plastic crap, but low poly 3D model, hand painted textures with slight wonk to them and boom, you have now 4-5 chairs to choose from instead of 3. And then another artist sees this and then another and then another. You suddenly have hundreds of chairs to choose from and all Blizzard has to do it just have curation on these items to there wont be a dongs flying around.
Is it as easy as I wrote? Helllllllllllll no! Making stuff like this wont happen by just snapping fingers and having fairy come and make it so. It takes time and skill and I am 100% sure Blizzard has that and there are people working there who already are tossing far better ideas than what I could come up while I am sitting at pooper.
I understand the appel and think that housing would be a great addition to the game.
I’m not sure if most people would be willing to pay the price for it though. The scale of a feature like that would obviously mean that they would have to take ressources from another part of the game development to make it happen.
Would I wish for player housing ? Yes
Would I be willing to give up on several tiers of content for it ? Not sure