Don’t like the idea because at this point they would just monetize the hell out of it
oh you want a new piece of furniture? that will be 2.99 thanks
It won’t. The only thing that can save WoW is if WoW rediscovers what kind of game it aims to be and provides an engaging experience for those players.
This requires looking to the past.
As for playing housing, it can be little more than a trophy room. Any attempt to give it functionality risks people draining out of the game world and into isolated instances, which is what happened in WoD.
It can’t have an auction house, it can’t have vendors, etc. If you give it only what a house can have IRL - that is stoves (for cooking), a forge, shelves, wall mounts, a bed, you get rested XP there, etc. - then you might get away with it.
But you can’t have players able to place a house whereever they want. If you do, they’ll place it in ridiculous places like in the starter zones or on top of the auction house or in the Goldshire crossroad or something else like that. So you need to program in tons of restrictions. What happens if they place it where all the wolves spawn for a quest?
And adding in all the possible locations for a house means creating 100k+ lots of land (there can be that many, perhaps even more, players on a server).
Or we all just get an instance and sit in our own separate sad instances again.
It’s super hard to make a housing system that’s great for an MMORPG, because it fundamentally requires you to implement a housing market that also handles people coming and going or you just created instances, which you should try to avoid in an MMO if you can help it.
I get why people want houses, but I really don’t think it’ll help this game. I genuinely don’t. WoW has to double down on adventure in a shared social world in order to survive, and frankly Blizzard haven’t been doing a great job with that, and I think that’s why it’s ailing.
Houses will be siiiiiiiiiick! I want to make one for mah Goblin pure junk and tinkers!
Also i understand that main cities will be empty but we all know atm main cities got only 1lvl booster spammers for trade chat.
Put 1 main city on each island and gimme mah house k?
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It’s blizzard.
After a month of introducing player housing.
“PayPal has approved payment for your Oggrimar second home council tax (band C)”.
€139.99 will be deducted each month until you die.
It’s all fun and games until the stormwind waste disposal don’t collect your paper recycling bin because there is a gnome In it.
Rehashing the same tired and rebutted criticisms over and over without having read what has already been said or looking to the evidence sighhh
I’ve said much the same as Ishayo, so I’m a bit curious what the rebuttal is beyond a difference of opinion? 
The OP offers no valid rebuttal to these concerns, and that’s because it is impossible to do so.
OP argues that Blizzard have neglected the open world and RPG elements and therefore become competitive and elitist. This is absolutely true, and it must be addressed.
But isolating everybody into apartments for much of their playtime, ignoring the design philosophies that originally made WoW such a compelling game for casual RPG lovers, and giving them more achievements to farm really doesn’t help. It makes it way worse and transforms WoW into something that’s not recognisable as WoW in any iteration. Most RPG’s don’t have player housing, and this should be a pretty solid hint.
Alright, let’s take this slow. You say the OP offers no valid rebuttal to your concerns, which appear to list: 1. nothing more than a trophy room, 2. no functionality, 3. houses wherever people want, 4. creating 100k lots of land, 5. sad instances 6. its hard to make housing for an MMORPG. Ok. Let’s clear these out.
First, lets get out of the way that anyone in any argument, discussion, or debate who says “my position is impossible to refute” has already conceded all of their credibility in that argument, discussion, or debate. It’s a really inconceivable and unfortunate thing to say that totally destroys the chances for productive dialogue. But, I’m here to debunk some other equally disheartening and fallacious claims. And lets repeat, for the zillionth time, that every other MMO on the market has player housing. What this means is its effects are both demonstrable and discussable, because one simply has to look towards the many examples listed in this thread alone for clarity on what player housing entails: see EsO, Gw2, Rift, Runescape, FF, SWTOR- to name the popular examples. What’s sad is that it’s clear you made your claims without looking at a single one of these examples based on your outlandish assumptions for what player housing entails by listing features and some concerns that don’t exist in any of these examples.
Secondly, lets revisit the fact that the OP and other commenters specifically use observable evidence from every other MMO on the market to bolster their positions for what player housing can do by citing the feature in these MMOs and noting their observed efficacy in uplifting MMOs in other features from professions, economies, sharing, and open world immersion, to name a few cited examples.
Now to your points. 1. “nothing more than a trophy room.” This is an astounding claim to make. Of all the MMO’s listed above, not one of them has reduced player housing to a “trophy room.” It is cited again and again the endless creative value of player housing as demonstrated in the above MMOs, as well as imagined when we consider the future possibilities in WoW. Entire worlds are built in player houses. I myself built a sky temple, a candy kingdom, a disco, carnival, titan-tomb-island, and a fae village in Rift alone, and I have observed some of the most creative and awe-inspiring builds I have ever seen from fellow players, most of whom are happy and eager to share the experience together. Thus prompting, wait for it, socialization. Furthermore, there is not a single post in this thread or the other that supports the claim that player housing is or can be nothing more than a trophy room.
Your point #2 functionality risks isolation. Yes, it does. That is why every commentator has suggested, and noted in other MMO’s, as well as used the example of WoD, that there can be zero quality of life features in player housing. The OP does not call for quality of life features. Participants in the thread do not call for quality of life features. So you are voicing a concern for a problem that is 1. not presented and 2. already overwhelmingly agreed upon.
Point #3 “houses wherever people want.” This is further proof that you have not read others’ comments or have observed player housing in any MMO. This simply does not happen. This is a non-issue. There is no assumption or epidemic of people planting houses in the middle of the open world to disrupt the game. It does not happen.
Point #4 “creating 100k lots of land.” Same explanation as above. It does not exist. You literally made up something to be upset about, replied to it yourself, and claimed it was an insurmountable problem.
Point #5 “sad instances.” The OP, the posters, and the consensus is clear on this. You’re basing your perception of sad instances on the WoD paradigm, which saw players forced and pigeon-holed into Garrison that had all of their quality of life features and main progression features in one, unchangeable, anti-social space. Yes, that was a Garrisons problem. That is not a player housing problem. I will include many of the posts from this thread alone below that additionally touch on that.
Point #6 “its hard to make housing for an MMORPG.” Every MMO on the market except for WoW has player housing. Every. Other. MMO. Has. Done. It. With varying degrees of success, mind you, but nonetheless, it has been done. And yet, you’re suggesting the most resourced MMO on the market cannot do player housing because its… “hard.” The posts below will further mete your point.
Finally, before we transition to others’ posts below, I apparently have to remind you that this is about more than player housing. This is about calling for a fundamental shift in design philosophy that realigns how Blizzard develops all modes of their game and to imagine a philosophy that produces holistic perspectives and reinvigorates every part of WoW irrespective of whether or not player housing is present. May I additionally remind you that the OP says right off the bat “I think player housing can begin to save World of Warcraft,” emphasis on the words can and begin. The OP does not claim to have the singular solution, as you do, because that would be extraordinary.
See the many posts below from fellow players who have been discussing many of your points already that you claim irrefutable.
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Absolutely not. Some concerns there are just no answer to. You can dismiss them and say they’re not important and go for it anyway, and that’s often reasonable depending on your design sensibilities, but you cannot pretend that those drawbacks don’t exist, and in this particular case they are a core part of the reason housing wasn’t done. We know this because Blizzard have told us in numerous interviews going all the way back to the alpha of World of Warcraft vanilla.
There are still traces of year 2003 player housing projects in the World of Warcraft game files and of course World of Warcraft already tried housing to disastrous results in Warlords of Draenor, though I understand that this wasn’t what housing advocates ask for.
Not all other MMORPG’s have player housing. That’s an outrageous statement.
Of course the subject is discussable, but what cannot be discussed is that these games have some very weird design compromises to get housing in and that all of them do a mediocre job. Most of them work on instancing, and as a matter of fact most of those MMORPG’s make liberal use of instancing and dynamic shards, and this is not appropriate for good MMORPG’s. These games are less popular than WoW at its worst for a reason.
Yes, they do. Again, most of these examples use instances - that is multiple people can own the same house and cannot see one another in that location.
This isolates players from the community depending on how much they can do in there. WoW’s answer was “basically everything” and that was a very big problem, but most of those games had the sense to make it “not much”.
More importantly though, what is the location of an instance? If I create 100,000 instances of the same house, then I have created 100,000 as much landmass, but it all looks the same, and there’s a weird teleporter. As you enter and leave your house people will mysteriously vanish when entering the front door. When you see this, does your home feel private? Does it feel like your home if tons of people have that exact home in that exact location as well?
There are two things to say about this. Firstly, you shouldn’t be creating entire worlds. We’re playing World of Warcraft, not World of Texasdktoast. If you want to create custom adventures for players, Warcraft has a very good avenue for this, and it’s called Warcraft 3.
If you do not want this open-ended create-anything experience, and you want it to instead cost resources or come as a result of in-game achievements, then you do have a trophy room, even if you make a complex one.
Secondly, it means that much of your time spent in the game is not in the game world. The notion that you get a more social experience by spending a hundred hours in an instance and then inviting people in for a few hours as opposed to spending a hundred hours running around the game world and major instances is ridiculous and obviously fallacious.
Good. I brought it up to make sure that everybody’s clear that housing has no gameplay value at all. It only offers social and world building value, and I go on to demonstrate that this value is net negative, which removes the justification for player housing entirely.
It’s not a non-issue because the only alternative is instances or huge areas of laid out housing.
Dynamic instancing has a lot of problems. The social aspect of MMORPG’s is hugely important, and in order for it to work we need a town effect - that is a sense of community that is large enough that we can’t know everyone, but small enough that we can meet the same person many times. Since we want the world populated that puts a limiter on map size.
Now here comes along you, and you’re going to say “Let’s make the map size scale linearly with the number of players.”
Do you have any idea how stupid that is? You destroy everything. You point to all these other MMO’s as if to provide an example for WoW to follow, but I’d like to remind you that WoW, when following the design principles I have just laid out, gained a playerbase many times the size of these games, and that’s despite the fact that one of them was created by a celebrated RPG maker and uses one of the largest and most famous IP’s ever made: Star Wars.
ESO actually applies the poor logic of scaling the world linearly with player count to literally every single map using its megaserver concept. Now, I’ve got 2500 hours in TES games, easily. I love that series, and yet I consider ESO an absolutely godawful MMO. It’s a stain on the franchise, exceeded only by Redguard. Its world is so fake, its combat so floaty. It is the Elder Scrolls world and it’s delivered really well, but by God is the gameplay awful, especially as an MMO, and this isn’t the only reason but certainly contributes.
There are a few MMO’s that have pulled off player owned assets really well. The most famous example is probably EVE Online, but EVE Online only gets away with it because it has a realistically scaled world where the default assumption is a degree of isolation. It’s not like Warcraft at all and it was built with these features in mind from the ground up - WoW is not.
It’s given in contrast to point #3 and point #5. You have to choose one of those 3. You simply have to. This is the least destructive one but it’s also boring and outrageously hard to fit into the Warcraft world map at this point. There are testing maps in the WoW client where Blizzard were experimenting with this.
It seems to me that the primary argument you’re coming up with for player housing is that it’s okay as long as people don’t use it too much.
So, what you’re essentially saying is: You’re going to suggest a design compromise where two different goals are at odds to each other and walk away from the design where the two design goals complement one another.
You’re going to have to be super careful not to make housing a big deal, and yet at the same time not make it worthless, and you’re still going to have people magically disappearing regardless and you’re still going to thin out the world. Player houses are going to have instance portals, but instead of those portals being placed far away before long-form content so hopefully you don’t see too many enter and leave, in this case you’re likely to have thousands of people outside all talking about how wonderful their exact same house, but totally their own house of course, is.
Not. True. All you have to do is Google it and you’ll find, for example, Neverwinter does not. However Google will actually try to correct you because it’ll assume you meant “with” because that’s the question people more often ask.
Why do people ask for player housing? They just want a place to stretch their creativity and a trophy room, and they have absolutely no bloody clue what they’re really suggesting, and neither do you. You are not a game designer, and neither are they. You spend so much time thinking about it, but you fundamentally don’t understand basic game design elements like map size and community size and you’re bringing up all these MMORPG’s that took tremendous damage from developers not understanding it and presenting their ideas as gospel.
“Everyone else does it” is an argument from authority, and arguments of authority only works if the authority is something more successful, but you and I both know that they are not, and therefore you and I both know that the argument from authority is bunk, so why are you using it?
MMORPG design is devilishly tricky, expensive, and disastrous should you get it wrong. There is a reason Blizzard succeeded where almost everyone else failed, or were at least less successful. I suggest you buy some books and watch some videos from the developers of early WoW. They’ll give you an earful about why they rejected this idea. They wanted people in inns and in major city hubs when not questing.
I understand that, and I reject it. I don’t want WoW re-aligned further into the disaster that has struck it. I want the damage undone to the extent that it can. That’s why I reject your idea so completely. I want WoW to be WoW; you want something else. If you don’t want WoW to be WoW - if you don’t care about the fundamental design pillars and the core values that WoW was built upon, and you clearly don’t, then I suggest you go and play another game.
After all, there are plenty of games that already work the way you’re suggesting, and that’s central to your argument so you know it, and that means you’re obviously not at a loss for games to play that align with what you enjoy, but I am.
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Even club Penguin had player housing, and the cities were always full!
Wow should take some notes from FF14
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18 classes, but better balanced
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Better customizations
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Fun mini games that reward coins
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Better graphics
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listens to community
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Player housing, and visiting other players homes
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FF14 has more classes but the classes don’t have different specs though
*limited player housing.
Getting a house is a huge issue for the majority of the player base. And that’s not a hyperbolic ‘majority’ it is the majority.
Instanced apartments are available to everyone but that’s your Garrison equivalent.
18 Jobs with 0 customization. In this comparison you’d have to count each WoW spec as a separate class.
Different engine and newer - and don’t forget it was the focus on graphics that partly led to the death of its first iteration (you know - the one before they copied a lot of WoW’s core game play loops.)
FFXIV is obviously the better of the two here - if that’s your thing.
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Eh? Everyone I knew who wanted a house had one when I still played it.
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That’s not the current situation.
Totally irrelevant point because what EveO has is NOT player housing by any stretch of the imagination.
Certainly not in the sense that people here are suggesting, no.
EVE does have player-run fleets and economies and player-owned world assets, just line this suggestion introduces. However, unlike what’s being proposed here, it serves a socially useful end and create gameplay and community. These player houses offer both more than instanced sightseeing.
EVE takes the concept of players owning part of the world and runs with it and creates a totally unique and very powerful playing experience.
The OP’s ideas do not. It’s just a bunch of trash distractions that drain people out of the open game world.
Could you make a Warcraft MMO where people make guilds and own zones and some zones have various desirable materials and players fight over them and build their houses in those zones - and have that kind of a sandbox? And can you have NPC factions that try to invade us as we invade them?
Yes. And that would be really friggin’ cool, but it’s not WoW. It’s something else.
Again, this is not player housing, there is no where you can customise or decorate those POS’s (Player Owned Structures).
You obviously (like many others in this thread) don’t know what is being discussed here so really you should keep quiet.
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I know perfectly well what’s being discussed, you just haven’t noticed I’m drawing a distinction to make a comparison and instead think I’m saying they’re the same thing.
In a cruel twist of irony, you then use that misconception to tell me to keep quiet for not reading what the thread is about, while reality is that you didn’t read the post you’re responding to.
How on earth can you equate EveO’ system of POS’s with player housing is beyond me.
You don’t have the facility to modify or change those zones your corporation (EveO’s version of a guild) owns or controls.
The clue is in the name ‘Player Housing’, it’s a house where a player can decorate and personalise to suit their tastes. It’s not ‘Player controlled zones’ or ‘Player owned buildings’ that can be built and look the same as every other players buildings.
No I didn’t read the rest of you overlong and bloated post because most of your posts strike me as troll posts with no other purpose than to provoke argument. I cherry picked that one comment because it was wrong and seems to me to be an attempt to derail the original topic.
Add it already
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