Housing in MMORPGS

[mynameismortis]

I was thinking about this today when i saw the new WoW housing, what was the most memorable house you built in an mmorpg? Or what mmo build the closest system to your liking?

[Oyster Sauce]

It only gets added to bad/feminized games so I wouldn't know

[Maledict]

I was thinking about this today when i saw the new WoW housing, what was the most memorable house you built in an mmorpg? Or what mmo build the closest system to your liking?

I've never bothered. I just want to explore n kill.

[rusty_shackleford]

Really can't think of any reason I'd care about instanced housing, which is nearly every example I can think of.
FO76 let me build a base and people could come by and use facilities I setup, interact with my vending machines, etc., That was significantly more interesting, but not really MMO.

[Maledict]

FO76 let me build a base and people could come by and use facilities I setup, interact with my vending machines, etc., That was significantly more interesting, but not really MMO.

That was very cool. I liked that. And it was out in the map, so you could place it near somewhere where people frequent to get more people seeing your stuff.

I think the aspect attracting female players could result in nerds finding gfs and having pureblooded White babies, so I think it's neat.

I found some Wildstar housing screens on Steam:






Afaik you were getting an entire floating island to decorate.

[Xenich]

I absolutely hated UO's housing because it ruined the landscape.

EQ2 was fine for what it became I guess, but I could live without it.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The best housing in an MMO was in Lego Universe and in Everquest Next. There, you got a large property to yourself and had granular control, being able to place small bricks or voxels and build anything rather than being reliant on manipulating and clipping prebuilt decor items. Lego Universe also allowed you to program your bricks to do something, so you could create elevators that move up and down or even minigames. No other MMO housing has done this. Peria Chronicles was going to do it but sadly that game was cancelled.

For the current big two MMOs I play on and off, FF14 and WoW, I like to AFK in my houses. For FF14 I built a glass garden, and for WoW I built a Tauren tent. Unfortunately in WoW, larger rooms - and the room that looks like an outdoor environment - is timegated behind housing exp, which you can only get 2,000 of per month. So it would take several months before I'd be able to unlock the large interir room or the outside looking room to build a grandiose castle for my pandaren character (large throne room, and a large courtyard). Decor items are also very expensive, starting at 3k per pop on the AH and rapidly getting to 10k+. In a game where it takes serious play over at least a week or so to get 100k+. FF14 in contrast, your average AH decor items ranges from 20k to 200k but the game showers you in gil so that you can make a million gil in about a week of serious play, so it's not that bad.

My FF14 glass garden in the Empyreum, Ishgard:












My Tauren yurt:

[Kalarion]

I liked the implementation of FFXI's player housing. It gave you a full hp/mp recharge, allowed you to switch out your job and sub (you couldn't do it anywhere else), gave you a big, expandable storage vault, and allowed your decorations to give minor bonuses to the non-gameplay aspects of the game (affected crafting chances, drop rate of crystals, affected gardening harvests, stuff like that). It was also directly tied to your faction—your room in foreign home nations were just that, rooms—which increased your investment in your realm's fortunes.

[rusty_shackleford]

I liked the implementation of FFXI's player housing. It gave you a full hp/mp recharge, allowed you to switch out your job and sub (you couldn't do it anywhere else), gave you a big, expandable storage vault, and allowed your decorations to give minor bonuses to the non-gameplay aspects of the game (affected crafting chances, drop rate of crystals, affected gardening harvests, stuff like that). It was also directly tied to your faction—your room in foreign home nations were just that, rooms—which increased your investment in your realm's fortunes.

EQ2 likewise has a bunch of stuff you build that is beneficial in nature, but it has been so long that I cannot remember.

MMOs with housing that is cosmetic or nearly only cosmetic(e.g., ESO is only used for crafting stations) gets an F- from me. I think SWTOR is similar, I remember doing very little with my housing.

---

I recall WoW "garrsions" being intriguing from what I read but I know nothing of them. I also recall players hating them, so maybe not.

[Xenich]

I liked the implementation of FFXI's player housing. It gave you a full hp/mp recharge, allowed you to switch out your job and sub (you couldn't do it anywhere else), gave you a big, expandable storage vault, and allowed your decorations to give minor bonuses to the non-gameplay aspects of the game (affected crafting chances, drop rate of crystals, affected gardening harvests, stuff like that). It was also directly tied to your faction—your room in foreign home nations were just that, rooms—which increased your investment in your realm's fortunes.

EQ2 likewise has a bunch of stuff you build that is beneficial in nature, but it has been so long that I cannot remember.

MMOs with housing that is cosmetic or nearly only cosmetic(e.g., ESO is only used for crafting stations) gets an F- from me. I think SWTOR is similar, I remember doing very little with my housing.

---

I recall WoW "garrsions" being intriguing from what I read but I know nothing of them. I also recall players hating them, so maybe not.

EQ2 practical things were mostly crafting stations, merchants, bank stations, gathers, etc... You also had numerous things you could build/buy to store your equipment and display it. Also, portals to various content around the world both general and specific "special" port points if you beat certain raids and the like.

Aside from that, a lot of it was pretty much just collecting various drops from dungeons, raids, collections and rare named to display.

Overall, it wasn't bad... and if you did enough collecting/crafting you could deck out a space pretty extravagantly.

In the end though, it was just a hub to avoid having to go to towns/cities to do things your normally would.

[DecadeRiptide]

Housing is generally pointless. It's almost always monitized and isninstanced yet doesn't provide any value for the player. Non instanced housing should be a thing by now but it's not

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I recall WoW "garrsions" being intriguing from what I read but I know nothing of them. I also recall players hating them, so maybe not.

The garrisons were good. Disregard the regurgitated echochamber opinions of the masses. Garrisons were not housing though. Their function tied into the story which is that you are now appointed by the High King or Warchief as the general in charge of the Draenor operation, and this is your base for that op. There was a Suikoden-lite element where as you were progressing through the WoD campaign, NPCs you helped would come join you at your base (and some of them would become follower party members that would fight with you in the open world), so you saw the fruits of your labor as you were building up a small army.

The problem with WoD has to do with how Blizzard doubled the size of the WoW team after MoP. The veterans had to stop developing work to teach the new hires how to use WoWedit, how to use the pipeline, etc. A lot of the original WoD content got scraped because "there was too much orc". This led to the 14 month long 5.4 content drought, and then another content drought during WoD culminating in the infamous 6.1 patch that just had a 15 minute long main story quest and the selfie camera. WoD was barebones. Once you finished the levelling questline, there was nothing to do but raidlog. There were no level cap reputation questlines to go through like the MoP reputation questlines. Open world PvP was dead. And most importantly, the dev team run out of time and did not finish the two planned capital cities of Bladespire Citadel and Karabor. The dev team placed city services in the small military camps at Ashran, but nobody really liked those camps and they are not considered to be real cities on par with Dalaran, etc. So a lot of people by default wound up hanging out in their instanced garrisons. This then lead to the complaints about garrisons when garrisons were not the problem. Garrisons were never intended to be the place you spend all of your time in, but became so due to enormous deficiencies in the rest of the expac. People who hung out in Stormwind had a better time.

The difference between the garrisons and the new Midnight housing is that 1. the rest of the expansion at least somewhat exists. There is an actual proper player city in Dornogal, so people default to there. There is also at least some stuff to do out in the world. Not much but actually there unlike in WoD where there was literally nothing after killing Garrosh. And 2. you truly decorate your house and disguise it as other structures. Build faux airships, build Zandalari temples, build Yurts, build caves. Etc. So people have more satisfaction than with the garrisons where you couldn't really customize it. There were plans for you to be able to place the garrison in different zones or to retheme it as Forsaken, Tauren, Dwarf, etc, but like the rest of the expac, that was never implemented.

[Maledict]

My Tauren yurt:

HOME

[rusty_shackleford]

I want to live in a yurt.

[J1M]

Really can't think of any reason I'd care about instanced housing, which is nearly every example I can think of.
FO76 let me build a base and people could come by and use facilities I setup, interact with my vending machines, etc., That was significantly more interesting, but not really MMO.

I would only care about it as social proof for overcoming challenges in the game. Similar to how the plagued proto drake functioned in Wrath. Ugly mount, but was a tangible reward.

[asf]

need a base to dump all the useless loot

[Manny V]

runescape gang

[DemoGraph]

[DemoGraph]

I was thinking about this today when i saw the new WoW housing

Also

[rusty_shackleford]

"I don't want to hate on the artists"
I do

foidslop

[J1M]

I can't tell if they are unable to make things in the correct style anymore or if they truly believe the mobile slop market is what they should be targeting.

[J1M]

Addendum: The stylized blood elf female in this short is especially embarrassing for them because they claimed the reason the blood elf female in the Midnight cinematic has a human manjaw face was because they can't portray emotions in non-human faces. So any debate about whether that was incompetence or lying to cover different incompetence is now resolved as being the latter.

It is a directional problem. They are choosing to make ****.

[Norfleet]

Oh, hey, someone clearly liked Factorio.

[Norfleet]

Addendum: The stylized blood elf female in this short is especially embarrassing for them because they claimed the reason the blood elf female in the Midnight cinematic has a human manjaw face was because they can't portray emotions in non-human faces.

I mean, you can portray emotion in non-human faces just fine. Observe!

[J1M]

Addendum: The stylized blood elf female in this short is especially embarrassing for them because they claimed the reason the blood elf female in the Midnight cinematic has a human manjaw face was because they can't portray emotions in non-human faces.

I mean, you can portray emotion in non-human faces just fine. Observe!

Of course. They said that they cannot do it as a retroactive excuse for lack of quality control.

[rusty_shackleford]

quality control is racist and sexist and homophobic

[Oyster Sauce]

I don't think any game has better housing than Morrowind

[rusty_shackleford]

I don't think any game has better housing than Morrowind

Morrowind has housing?

[Oyster Sauce]

I don't think any game has better housing than Morrowind

Morrowind has housing?

Yeah

I still like books.

A fellow books enjoyer!
My stacks are not as impressive though.



In SHotN I switched to collecting gems.

Growing more powerful...

[Tadeusz]

Pillow fort is awesome. It's also infinitely expandable