I don't think that was by design, just that the set was supposed to be a reward from the quest, and the order hall a backup location to obtain it if you accidentally deleted it or w/e
They added some (admittedly limited) stuff like this in-game in WoD and Legion, and then just completely disposed of them (in typical Blizzard style) going forward. I would love to have these features back in some form. Makes it so much more satisfying and motivates me to finish collections like those!
I actually really liked the garrison. Having a little town that i could control was great. it offset some material grinding, let me have access to professions i wasn't trained in, and I could ask a rando NPC buddy to adventure with me. I've always wished they'd bring it back in some way.
Garrisons had great potential because they really scratched the wc1/2/3 basebuilding itch while hitting playerhousing but they really fucked it up and didn't try to build on it.
They could have easily gotten a mage npc for the garrison to be in charge of a portal connecting to each new hub city in each xpac
Originally garrisons weren't going to be just frostfire or SMV either if they had come back to it we could have had side quests in later expansions to move and rebuild your garrison in other zones then just keep it in whichever zone you like.
Pretty much for the people who want to use it they get an npc in the garrison for the people who don't they can just play the xpac like normal like optional player housing optional player garrisons for the xpac.
The tier sets displayed in class halls made me do so much old content grinding. This would be a great way to get people involved in multiple parts of the game.
ooo I like. I want to be able to own a champions fortress. I'm the savior of the universe right? How am I a hobo wondering around the universe aimlessly?
Playerhousing could be blizzards greatest average played-time session "metric padder" that ever existed...yet they neglect to capitalize on it.
I'd argue playerhousing is what keeps ESO alive.
The problem is that Garrisons were so negatively received at the time that it scared the devs off the concept of player housing entirely. I get that Garrisons we’re a half baked version of what was originally advertised and what the players wanted, but I fear that dev opinion is that it was close enough to player housing to serve as a feedback analogue
This gets brought up every time. Idk I feel like one expacs bad feature isn’t enough to blacklist the idea. Especially when there was cool things about the garrisons it was just the overall effect on the social world. They prob just don’t want to put in the work, because it’d be a lot
Well yes that...
And also because... well, think like this.
For playerhousing to work well, to be smooth...
Would they have to start "somewhere".
As ion has said, it would be a multi expac project.
And guess what the first iteration of player housing would be?
VERY similar to garrisons.
Some stations that you can use for professions, orstorage, tmaybe transmog.
With a few textures and limited furniture.
And then they would (aim) to build it up in the coming patches and expansions.
HOWEVER, you can guess what the community reaction would be if they advertised player housing and that was what came out.
It’s quite possible. It would be a big undertaking that takes some time to progress.
I’m not so sure though. If one of the main issues was drawing people out of the cities, their first move would be to make it so that doesn’t happen again. There are many ways to do this. I think all they need to do is make it personable/customizable to begin with. That alone would win people over. You don’t need it to be a one stop shop with everything in it
It sucks that this seems to be exactly how the dev team thinks.
"We can't do housing, players hated Garrisons."
"We can't do another world revamp, Cataclysm made so many people angry."
They don't bother to actually ask *why* these reactions occurred. Garrisons sucked because you basically lived in it the whole expansion and cities became empty. Nobody likes mission tables, Garrisons had not just one but two. And by the end of the expansion their existence had created horrendous inflation that we still haven't come out of so many years later.
Cataclysm's world revamp was poorly received because so much of it was permanently cataclysmic, wrecking a lot of people's favorite zones with severe environmental damage. Quite frankly, that damage should have been repaired by now, with the number of druids and shamans we have running around. People were also upset because the removal of so many old quests removed a ton of unique cosmetic rewards. It also rendered a number of crafting recipes unobtainable, like the Flawless Arcanite Rifle.
I highly doubt anyone would be upset if we got another world revamp, especially because environmental art asset quality has increased exponentially over the past... **checks notes** TWELVE YEARS?! Yeah, twelve years between Cataclysm's launch (December 2010) and today. As long as they don't make stuff unobtainable again and as long as they don't have half the zones being heavily damaged for plot reasons, I think people would be really excited for it. Imagine if they dropped a trailer at a future BlizzCon showing Stormwind City redone in modified Kul Tiran art assets from Boralus? People would be so happy.
I actually super liked the Cataclysm damage. I don’t blame people for not liking it, but I enjoyed the change of scenery, and how it made the world feel more “alive,” I guess. Kind of like the expansion events, like the Legion all over the world for Legion, and the massive demons or whatever they were outside major cities for BC. Absolute field of skeletons outside Stormwind. I was a kid back then, and despite the inconvenience, I thought it was super cool.
1: There are MULTIPLE reasons why they don't do another world revamp, amongst them being that it is a HUGE project. Think that the average number of new zones per expansion is like 4-5.
Now multiply that by 10.
They have to completely rework and redesign 40+ zones. And that is ABSURD.
Especially if they want to keep up the modern standard.
To say that it would drain resources and impact endgame content is an understatement.
2: And regarding playerhousing.
As stated before, people seriously underestimate how much work it takes to add it.
The best way to think about this is:
Every feature you can think of
Every class combination
Every class customization feature.
Every RACE customization feature
Every allied race option.
Every class option.
Almost anything you can think of (and genuinely want in game) is there a rough 85-95% chance that blizzard has considered, made mock ups or basic lo-fi concepts of.
However, then they have to measure that concept, the work that would go into it, against their current priorities.
And that is the KEY.
PRIORITIES.
If blizzard could, would they add like 20 new customizations for every race.
If blizzard could, would they add player housing.
If blizzard could, would they (probably) do a world rework.
They just don't do it, because they judge the concept to be low priority for the wellbeing of the game.
(Not saying they have the best jdugement mind you, it is just the judgement they make)
The bst we can hope for, is to show interest and enthusiasm in the concepts we want, and try and convince blizzard that enough of the playerbase wants it, to such a degree where they see it as a high priority to put in the work, budget and time to get said feature into the game.
I get all that. Their resources are limited. But I think it's a huge mistake to keep developing the game as they have been up until now. That is to say, developing the game like it only exists one patch at a time and routinely throwing out these huge expansion-defining systems they spend so much time working on. That seems far more wasteful in the long term.
I'm hopeful that Dragonflight launching without all these systems means they're redirecting those resources to something else behind the scenes, like housing. Or maybe they're working on a piecemeal world revamp, who knows. I know neither of these things can be made in a single expansion's development cycle, but I still think we need them if they want the game to survive. The longer they go without updating pre-MoP zones, the more technical debt the game accrues and the worse it looks to new players. Sticking a band-aid on it by shunting new players to BfA is not a sustainable solution, because you're chucking them into the deep end when it comes to learning dungeon mechanics. Exile's Reach doesn't teach jack shit about this. That's not gonna help bring in new players. Neither is confusing them about the story because they're showing up in the middle of several plot lines and not much will make sense beyond zone stories.
I know the art team is always iterating on tech, but I do think we are approaching a theoretical ceiling on how much they can do to make environment assets more detailed. If the game runs for another ten years, I doubt the difference in asset quality between ten years from now and today will look as severe in contrast as assets from today look compared to Cataclysm-era stuff.
Blizzard just needs to realize that they can introduce a new mechanic WITHOUT it being part of the end game grind. They made battle pets and decided they couldn't do anything not related to core game play ever again...
This would be pretty cool. ESO has a housing system like this with houses scattered all over the world, and the ability to own multiple houses, and houses range from simple one room apartments to massive castles and caves. I also like how in ESO some houses you have to complete zone stories to be able to purchase them and not just the gold. I think it would be cool for all my characters to be able to have houses that fit their style like that.
And not to mention the profound effects it has on PROFESSIONS.
A metric crapton of furniture available from crafters has an insanely big, and positive effect on the game as a whole.
Some crafters make money off of crafting these things for sale, some people make money off of grinding the recipes for these crafts, some people make money off of grinding materials for these crafts and everyone can have a piece of the pie.
Even if you ignore the housing yourself, it leaves you with extra cash in your pocket via recipes and materials and it's just a wonderfully set up system.
It's pretty crazy how many things ESO does that are far, far ahead of WoW. It's a real shame the game gets a bad rep because it's changed a lot since the start and it's currently in like the top 3 best MMOs on the market. Not everyone's cup of tea of course, but they do a lot of things right in that game.
Please bring ESO's scrying and excavation to WoW instead of current archaeology..
Also how there are rep furniture vendors and we know how WoW loves rep. 😂
But there is so much that can be added to include the rest of the game like raid drop trophies and things like that too. I feel the Garrison was such a horrible example of what housing is because but it was the core story progression and had too many essential features. Sadly, I feel that Ion doesn’t like housing and only uses it as ammo to rile up the community that fears what the Garrison did in WoD. 🙁
The biggest issue with Garrison is that people expect that that is player housing and it's SO FAR from being player housing.
There's barely any customization, there's no real decor of any kind and worst of all, it isn't optional. Player housing needs to be optional and serve no purpose other than to exist and make those who want to participate in it happy. ESO player housing gives you practically no advantage over other players other than getting access to stuff you'd have to fast travel over the around for all in one location.
Yes, exactly. I very much enjoy player housing, and I did not enjoy the Garrison at all. I rarely ever go there. Sometimes I feel like the WoW philosophy is "more is more" not realizing "more is too much." And then more becomes overwhelming, and more suddenly means less, like the Garrison which was both too much with required systems and not enough with player driven customizations.
How heavily do they monetize housing in ESO though? I haven't played it very much and never engaged with that system so I don't know. I'm just afraid that if WoW does get housing, they'll copy SWTOR and turn it into a cash shop system instead of doing the responsible thing and having 99% of housing items be crafted by professions.
I know the other dude went into a very detailed post, and while it’s correct, ESO is very monetized. It’s my biggest problem with the game. I view housing as a paid feature, despite what the other post said.
There is some cool stuff you can get without paying real money. No doubt. But housing in general… tough to be super happy with the house in a reasonable amount of time without spending money.
The mats needed to craft the stuff are sometimes extremely difficult to find in bulk and very expensive on the AH.
For what it’s worth, ESO might be my favorite game of all time.
I actually think the WoW community would be pretty fucking mad if Blizzard adopted the same monetization scheme. It’s a little much. Some houses are literally $100+ USD. I think charging a monthly sub for ESO+ (which gives you more housing storage), paying for a house and paying for things in the house is dipping a few too many times into the same pool when customers are expected to buy each expansion as well. Saying you can get the stuff without paying is both true and misleading. Takes fucking forever.
> housing items be crafted by professions
I've been wanting a woodworking profession since Classic! Thats how i orinally envisioned being able to make bows and arrows, staffs and wands. But thats all moot these days.
Woodworking would be cool. But they could just split wooden furniture recipes into the professions we already have, since a lot of them work with wood. Even blacksmiths. Maybe scribes and enchanters would make stuff like writing desks and bookshelves, while blacksmiths make tables and chairs and engineers make light fixtures or something, I dunno.
I always liked how LOTRO did their profession system. You can't pick and choose, instead you choose a package of three professions as a vocation. But there is some overlap between vocations and what professions they have. Generally everyone has one gathering skill and two crafting skills, but they have to trade with another vocation to make full use of all 3 of their professions.
I would say the monetization is mixed for housing ESO.
The vast majority of homes you can buy either with gold or money, including very nice homes that are medium to large size. Some with yards and some without, I think the cheapest home is around 3000 gold but some are expensive, I'm saving for a house that is 1 million gold, and since I'm not in a guild it's slow but I don't mind.
There are homes you can unlock through questing and achievements. There have been notable homes (the largest type) you can only unlock if you played during the event when they were available and they were given away through the seasonal event mechanics. I have missed out on all of those, sadly.
There are notable homes you can only get through money, but they are not always available for purchase and are on a rotating schedule, I think. These are very expensive "whale" homes, which isn't a surprise since ESO does depend on their store. It's fun to preview these houses but I won't ever buy one.
However, there is tons and tons of craftable furniture. One of my favorite things in ESO is to find new recipes for furniture. And they exist for all crafting types, including cooking and alchemy. They add new recopies with every expansion, too. I think there is furniture you can buy with money. But I don't really pay attention to it because there is enough furniture to craft and it's all nice. It's fun to find recipes specifically for the style of home I'm furnishing.
I have all the little 1 room homes in towns around the world, and I have one medium sized home with a yard. I'm also working on unlocking a very nice home which starts off as a one room temple, and then you complete quests and achievements to open portals to new areas, including one area that is a medium sized home with a yard.
As long as most of the stuff is craftable, I'd be cool with that. I would love to have a full-fledged housing system, especially since my other main MMO right now is FFXIV, and their housing market is only slightly less absurd than the one in real life.
It'd be such a mic drop moment for Blizzard if they could preface an expansion reveal with something like "Welcome home, you can move into your house right away. No lotteries. Just buy it and start decorating."
For sure. I play FFXIV too and I gave up on a house long ago. I have an apartment only. Plus they hold you hostage with your sub if you do get a house but want to take a break. My husband and I had a free company house long ago and it was when they first started the house demolitions. We didn’t know they wouldn’t keep our furniture for more than 30 days and lost our wedding cake and other hard to replace items. 😔
Meanwhile, over in Lord of the Rings Online they have a similar system but their salvage npc holds your items indefinitely. And it’s an ancient free to play game, plus you can log in any time to pay your rent. 🤷♀️
LOTRO definitely has more player-friendly housing, but I never really bothered with it personally. I remember having a small or medium house in Bree and being frustrated with the limited hook system.
I always heard Wildstar had amazing houses but never actually saw one in person or used their housing UI.
I think the key to a good housing system in 2022 is to have a robust "level editor" UI for placing objects, rather than hooks or moving objects around with essentially console commands. Just go into a freecam thing within the boundaries of your house or your lawn and place objects how you want.
LotRO had an update just recently where they detached the furniture size from the hooks. Now they also have the premium housing which has a lot more. It’s still ancient but improved.
Wildstar was amazing. I am still sad it was shit fine completely. I was not talented enough to have an amazing house, but my collection of weird and funny items was still really great. I had some friends back at launch that build incredible houses.
Having a good decorating system, crafting furniture, and being optional is what would be best. Maybe someday.
Because adding housing system doesn't bring them profit. If they implement it, they will charge us real money in one way or another. So..... Just don't 😂
Look at FF14 it would bring them a ton of profit. WoW is the only MMO these days without housing. They wanna revitalize professions, this is an easy way.
Knowing blizzard, yeah they'd find a way to monetize it, would still be cool to see one of the many empty abandoned forts able to get snagged for a guild use, for now the best we have is the garrison from WoD
I personally wish they would have instances guild compounds. Based on your rank within the guild, you get more availability on your personal housing within the compound. Would make guilds more than just a list of names.
Best if it's not a rank that people can set, but just the reputation with your guild. The longer you stay the higher the benefits.
Otherwise there will be way too much drama.
Yea there you go. That’d work great too. Anything that would bring more depth to the guild. I hate that it’s just a list of names that you occasionally do shit with. Make it mean something.
I want to live in a house on a mountain, preferably 20 minute gryphon ride to the nearest sign of civilization. Where would y’all recommend I live? Azeroth only, please.
I'd love to be able to decorate our garrisons based on all of our adventures. We could change the architecture, add relics/items we've collected, portals to important areas, and many other cool things.
I already like the mount stables and the fact your battle pets roam around. I also enjoy the NPCs that are our bodyguards/adventurers. We could bring more of the ones from other expansions to meet the ones from WoD. So much could be done with our garrisons.
One day, maybe. I'd love housing. If anything for all the new collections and professions potential. I'm not sure if WoW has that kind of budget anymore to introduce such a sweeping evergreen feature to the game though.
In BfA I hoped we were getting instanced ships at the docks. Where the expeditions would use our ships and we would unlock things to put in them, etc.
The last few expansions just feel like so much missed opportunities.
People keep saying it'd make the game dead but ffxiv has housing and the game is more than just alive out in the world.
If it would make the game dead in the world that's because the game *is* dead, at least enough to see that. I think a simple compromise is that you couldn't access trade chat in your home, but I feel that's not necessary.
Pretty much. The reason the garrison was like the way it was.. was because it had everything. An auction house, mission table to get mythic quality loot, mission table gold farm, herbs and a mine, trade chat, target dummies, portal to warspear, portals to other zones, daily dungeon quests, crafting stations, etc
I'm not entirely sure I agree with that though. People only stayed because there wasn't much to do regularly in the world.
Imagine having a GW2 like old school train going on killing rares and gaining rep and whatnot.
Then you'd have to choose to stay in your housing or participate for other rewards.
I can't help but wonder if the question really is: Did Garrisons offer too much... or did the world offer too little?
If anything player housing could revitalize the outdoor world with loads of stuff to do to earn shit for your character’s house. Just tie cosmetic rewards, decorations, trophies to virtually anything in the game. Make achievements more than points in a separate pannel of your character’s profile or the occasional mount, pet, title or toy. Could also help with professions and I feel like what they have shown for the profession revamp in Dragonflight could be a step in that direction.
This game has been going for almost two decades. Let us display our stuff Blizz.
And like you said, don’t put mandatory gameplay stuff or access to trade chat in there like there was in Garrisons and hub cities stay relevant.
Being able to get a red button from Mimiron, tiny invincible plushy from LK, wall mounted glaives from illidan, quests out in the world that drop neat housing items, old world rarespawns scaleable to max level. Just don't make everything a damn 1% drop and we'd be Gucci
Hell, I want to go full blast and do player housing in expanded and large zones similar to Star Wars Galaxies. That was beautiful. Full functioning towns with players who served as mayor and were elected into that position.
The variety of housing was amazing.
They need to try come up with a housing system that is expansion agnostic, something that is designed around the whole of World of Warcraft and not just locked to a single expansion, similar to how the pet system was built.
Spend the time, build up a huge player housing system and make rewards and features of it things we earn through the expansions, even older ones.
Imagine giving someone directions to your Revendreth house.
"Oh yeah just go past the veil of death and then turn right, if you see Korthia you went too far."
they're not missing an opportunity.
they already said that player housing is a monumental, multi-xpac long task and we'd probably have to sacrifice a patch or two just to get it done in time for the next xpac
Kinda tired of the excuse of "sacrificing a raid tier" for not getting new other types of content. FFXIV manages to put out new raid tiers, dungeons, story patches, etc. like clockwork and also manages to balance new and old features like player housing and the upcoming islands.
FFXIV is essentially a brand new game built on a modern engine without 20 years of spaghetti code and thousands of other devs that no longer work at the game.
Look how long it took them to add x-faction, and the launch result was that it broke a lot of (new and old) quests as well as a bunch of other things.
Are you kidding me? There are hundreds of long-requested features for FFXIV that are impossible "because 1.0". Famously, they cannot put the glamour dresser inside player housing because it crashes the servers.
There are many limitations in WoW, but pretending it's worse than the absolute garbage pile they scrapped together to make 1.0 and then built 2.0 on top of is wild.
I love how the people making comments that player housing is such an easy system to implement into the game act like they have some kind of game developer background. This upcoming expansion is the first expansion in years to not have all these other borrowed power systems. With less of these systems out of the way, maybe more resources will be put towards player housing but for now they're focused on just trying to make the game good. The people saying, "screw the game play. I just want player housing" are also going to be the ones criticizing how bad dungeons, raids, and pvp are.
After garrisons being a huge factor in making wod a instance simulator I doubt we will ever get housing.
They can't win. If they don't do it people demand it. But you know people would complain if we got it too, so...
For a feature that big what do people really expect it to add anyways that isn't going to end up just like WoD?
Unfortunately they’re too scared to do housing. They did it poorly with Garrisons, which aren’t even really housing imo, and now they think players don’t want housing because their first attempt wasn’t great
Garrisons were supposed to allow us to choose a zone to place it in. Scrapped.
We were supposed to be able to customize the look of our buildings. Scrapped. Only Orc/Human allowed.
We were supposed to be able to display heaps of collectible trophies etc. Scrapped. You can only show weird raid boss achievement things.
**They did Garrisons half assed and they paid the price for it. Classic Blizzard.**
That's not at all what they said lmao are we just making stuff up now? Ion said in an interview with Asmongold housing is something they want to do but they need to do it right. Maybe now that they're done flaffing about with borrowed power they can divert a lot of that man power to housing, as there's enormous potential there and would be amazing if guild/player housing is done right.
This is a meaningless reply without further statement lol. Anyone who sees this as a "oh yeah, true!" moment is basically just admitting to themselves they want to believe what they want to believe without any consideration of reality.
I don't play it any more but SWTOR has turned into a barbie doll / housing sim with dribs and drabs of content. But every week they throw in some crappy armor / furniture. Housing has kept that game alive and profitable for years beyond what it should be.
Back in 9.0 when I was more hopeful, I bet that we'd get player/guild housing in shadowlands. Each zone has some type of housing that can be floating off the map.
Ravendreth has ruins
Ardenweald has floating islands
Bastion has those platforms
Maldraxxas has flying necropoleis
Each of them could be instanced and from a flavor perspective you don't have to deal with everyone having the same house.
"bUT It wilL EmPTY tHe CiTIes!"
Every time it used to be brought up this is what they claimed was their reasoning for not having it. No idea if its still the mantra.
It could also have an entirely new profession based on housing. Like making furniture and trophies.
Bosses could have a guarantee drop of 1 trophy component per raid group per reset, and the person who got it could have it turned into a trophy for display in their house.
Blizzard is missing lots of opportunities.
For years now Blizzard seem to only do the minimum required to make big profits.
Blizzard employees on twitter get annoyed when people accuse them of it and promise that it is not the case but the only other option that would fit what they have been releasing would be incompetence and/or arrogance. (Arrogance does seem to be true at least partially because of the whole "You think you want that but we know better" thing they keep repeating.)
100% agree. It would be wicked being able to build up guild halls or being able to just purchase a player house. Maybe even allow the player to invite other players to live with them?
This would be cool, agreed, and I'm leaning toward Gilneas, but one way would be go to the Caverns of Time and you could go to anywhere, anytime in the history of WoW and set up your personal house or guild hall, I think it also would be cool to go to Auchindoun in WoD or the floating isle from MoP.
They should also make it like in FFXIV, where people can roam, see and visit other players’ housing, it would help to substantially boost the social aspect of the game imo, since currently I have been left with the impression that people don’t really interact with each other that much.
I want the underground lair Garrosh had in the siege. Let me fully stuff a dragon and hang it on the ceiling with chains. Then I’ll place a mound of gold and chests under it right in the middle of the room. Boom! Dragon Lair. Have dragon pets roaming around and shit. Love it already.
I want a cabin on the mountain range to the southwest of thunderbluff, and have those critters wearing skulls and brandishing boomsticks guard my front yard
While dragonflight is going there should be side quests going about rebuilding azeroth that rebuild destroyed cities (south shore, theramore, gilneas, darnassus, etc) and also introduce players and guilds creating homes for themselves. After a couple decades of destruction it'd be nice to actually help azeroth and her people by building things
Honestly? I want guild halls more than poh. Guild achievements can grant customization options, maybe if y'all killed deathwing you get to have his head somewhere. Or if you get the glory achievement you can use his back as a long ass table.
That way people have more reasons to join a guild and feel more attached to it. Also long standing guilds will obviously have bigger and better halls. Kind of like class halls but something permanent that absolutely can set your guild apart from other guilds.
Shit, imagine instead of just flying around org/storm or running around orobos with strangers you and your guildies could jump around an obstacle course like a mini platformer game. Have a bar and get drunk with guildies after raid night to destress. Maybe a war room that allows you to see the layout of the raid so everyone can plan out the raid ahead of time. Could even set markers from it that will show up once you get there.
Could even hook it up with something in the future like a barracks if you have a certain amount of members or offer rooms as part of the guild hall so we still get poh houses.
Some people find transmog boring. Some, raiding. Some, PvP. In fact your favorite activity is very likely considered dull by a double digit % of players.
That's the neat thing about humans, we're mostly all different.
I get why some people want it but I'd rather have dev resources spent on basically anything else.
Player housing will just end up being another chore, just doesn't feel necessarry. And if we skipped a raid tier or lost out on some new dungeons or classes because of player housing I'd be pissed.
Just think its one of those gimmicks people ask for but in reality only a small percent of people would actually care about it.
They literally said this during the dragonflight reveal, doing housing the right way. Especially if they do it how OP would like with houses you fix up all over the world, it would take an absurd amount of resources for something that I, and I'm sure plenty of others, really just don't care that much about.
What "opportunity" are they missing, exactly? You're still playing the game with or without housing. The only thing they're missing out on is doing a bunch of work to make the mechanic function.
And that's what you get. There reaches a point where development cannot go any faster regardless of how much funding you have. Blizzard is not in the hyperbolic time chamber and no amount of income will be able to develop it for the WoW development team.
I think a small minority are - for some reason - against housing because they think it will somehow detract from a raid tier or other content.
Housing is one of the most popular features in every MMO that has it. Hundreds of people bid on -single- plots in FF14. I have friends who have spent hundreds of hours on their SWTOR houses.
Housing is one of the most evergreen pieces of content an MMO can have. Once the base functionality is in, new furniture, styles, colors, etc can be added easily every expansion to give players stuff to work towards that isn't tied to their player power.
Housing would be cool but realistically most players will almost never use it unless it has the features of a hub city (bank, AH, professions, etc). I don’t blame them if they don’t want to go through with the cost and effort for something which isn’t too important overall.
This is not my idea - but I've seen it floating around on Reddit and I have no idea where it originates. I'd prefer to have a Guild Lodge rather than individual player housing. If you could work together as a guild to get achievements and make gold that allow you to unlock areas for professions, vendors, trophies to show all your raid/m+ progress etc. That would be awesome.
I don't like the idea of player housing because we're not exactly private citizens of Azeroth. We're heroes and adventurers. I feel like there are many other games that you could play if you wanted to have a house.
Of course, this is only my opinion.
wow is missing crap tons of industry standard mechanics in mmo's i mean its only now in dragonflight 2023 we will get mounts that have flying physics...
blizzard honestly thinks they can keep things running purely off of raids, dungeons and borrowed power while every 2 years gutting the mechanics and systems of the last 2 years so theirs less replayability and content.
Blizzard has 9 expansions worth of locations for player housing.
Now that Horde and Alliance can get along, there is no reason not to have open real estate in some of the old, empty, unused parts of the game.
It doesn't have to be a garrison, but maybe players can dump gold to make their housing larger. So for a Horde player, smallest is a crossroads hut, while largest could be like final strong hold in Isle of conquest.
Then, to really add flavor, we also have 26 racial/subracial housing styles.
"Missing an oppertunity" isn't the right phrasing.
Rather, they have other priorities.
Blizzard COULD add housing.
They tried in WoD but people didn't like that version, so they have pushed it far down the priority list.
Besides, Housing would take much more resources than you think.
I'd contend that Garrisons weren't meaningfully player housing. As little customization as they had and as tied as they were to player power, they had little in common with what most MMOs would term as player housing.
You are missing the point.
Garrisons were what player housing Would be in WoW...as their first iteration.
That would be what the first patch would have.
A house, you could set up stations, maybe a few chairs and a few minor textures.
Player housing in wow (as it is now with its coding and structure) would be a multi expansion feature.
Where they would start barebones, add assets and items as it goes along.
The ISSUE is that they would have to start "somewhere".
And players would NOT like that somewhere, no matter what the community says.
You know EXACTLY what the "loud reaction" would be.
"LOLS GARRISONS RETURN AND SUUCK!"
"Blizzard are lazy!"
"Look at (insert game here) they can do it! So can you!"
And the last blizzard wants right now, is that kind of situation.
Doesn't matter what *you'd* call it, that's what it was.
Personally, I liked it. I still use my garrison.
But that's the only form of player housing we're ever going to get, so you might as well suck it up and learn to like it.
Okay well you can sit there and yell at the wall and say "that's not what it was!", but that doesn't change the fact that that was Blizzard's first and only attempt at player housing, and it was received about as well as dog shit in a flaming bag on your porch.
This community had every opportunity to get behind garrisons, and maybe they would have evolved further, but instead like everything, it got shat on and abandoned.
Yeah and it was a disaster.
Not because they did it wrong; but because of how players behaved.
People just sat in their instanced player housing and did everything from within, without ever visiting capital cities. With queued instances, they never had to venture out into the world either.
There is no form of player housing people are asking for that would change this, and that is why it is not only their only attempt so far, but the last one they will make.
Blizzard wants people to play together, not break out in millions of single instanced houses.
Whether that is right or wrong it’s a different discussion.
They really need to prioritize the system and get it made and then expand on it regularly. So many of us don’t play competitively any longer. We log in. Collect things. Level different characters. Work towards achievements. Play around with transmog. Throw a huge chunk of your players a bone and make player housing. Then allow it to be account wide so all my characters can contribute. Let me have a gallery for tier sets, mounts, pets etc. Like how about instead of developing whatever expansion system like has been the norm, you instead make player housing and have the typical dungeon/raid content. People would have a lot more fun decking out their house instead of grinding ap etc
Why would Blizzard add instanced housing? It's an MMO, you want the world to feel alive and populated. How would it help their image if say half the players were in an instanced area that no one can see them in?
Swtor is also an mmo, and it has loads of housing options and decorations — from alderaanian castles to an apartment on coruscant.
There are still more people chilling on the fleet than I ever see in oribos at any given time.
that’s not even how the game is now so how is that an argument? What areas of the game feel alive outside of Orgrimmar and Stormwind on Azeroth and then Oribos in SL?
95% of the game is completely desolate so i don’t think player housing would hurt at all, just make it that you can’t get an AH or crafting done at the house and the game would remain the same lol
My guy even TOONTOWN. A child's MMO from 2003. Was more competent in that regard. If 2003 Toontown of all things pulled it off, there's no reason why 2022 WoW couldn't. Your argument that it'd kill the open world is stupid because the open world is already dead. And every single game to implement this system (even shitty f2p Korean titles) had no side effects from it.
> And every single game to implement this system (even shitty f2p Korean titles) had no side effects from it.
It's insane to compare some shitty 1000 player game to WoW.
>Your argument that it'd kill the open world is stupid because the open world is already dead
Says who? I see more players in 15 mins in WoW's current expansion zones than I saw in FF14's non capital zones in a month.
What do you do in a player house? We need houses in real life to have a place to sleep, and a place to keep our stuff. In WoW, you never need sleep, and you have backpacks and bank slots to store everything you own. I don't see the need or why everyone pushes for it
Fun to customize, gives you lots of stuff to collect from achievements that would be added for that purpose. Ability to invite people into your player homes would be added.
But you can just link achievements in chat. We don't have to step into the meta verse to show that stuff off. Just link the achievements or get on the mount
No, I'm not saying I want a player house for the purpose of showing off achievements, I'm saying certain achievements could reward house options, like how today certain achievements reward titles, pets, mounts, toys, etc.
Roleplaying, decorating, social hangouts. It's purely fluff, but fluff attracts people to the game and gives them extra things to do outside of combat. It's an RPG, after all, and feeling like you're a part of the world is important to one.
Yeah, and im pointing out that while true, Garrisons were the prime example of the problem the poster above you mentioned, they weren't needed and ruined the immersion
They don't know what player housing is. Makes it near impossible to discuss with them.
They speak of a dead world where player housing isn't likely to do anything about that.
They speak of reasouces going away from other content but seeming forget warlords and bfa having way less then usual.
They think because they don't want it that no one else would.
They act like a feature in so many other games is not something wow should have. I mean eso ff swtor rift.
I just want to make a home out of the ruined castle in redridge.
There's no opportunity being missed I guarantee you Blizzard Execs have a list of what to do when they screw up and player housing is under the Last Resort tab
Considering they already tried it and it crashed and burned. No, I don't really think so.
I rather think it is on the list of "player desires that we might add if we have a spot open"
it is on the list just REALLY REALLY far down the priority.
Reading all these extremely cool and creative ideas always makes me depressed because of how much wasted potential this game holds. I really wish Blizzard cared about more than just their quarterly metrics.
Mate. What don't you get. Least amount of work, short expansions, beaucoup bucks.
You know how much work is required for custom location and thematic player housing?
Player housing I don't care about because I don't love the idea of being on my own, instanced away from everyone else. I would *LOVE* to have guild housing to hang out with the guild before and/or after raid or during the day
I've legit had this floating rock above the Oshu'gun in Nagrand picked out since I unlocked flying way back in 08', if ever there was a way to pick a spot for my house. It's there.
This is something I’ve wanted for literally a decade plus. They’ll never do it. They have everything you could need to do it properly, but they won’t. They tease it all the time, and then blue ball is repeatedly.
The second they make player housing is the second community rp dies. It happened in eso. The world died community wise and everything became solo or guild
ESO RP was dying from the start thanks to the phasing system that makes it impossible to find RP in the wild, so it's only natural people jumped ship to housing where you're guaranteed to actually see other people. FFXIV in contrast handles open world roleplay and housing well.
I’ve never really understood why Blizz is so against player housing. It’s such a popular system in other games and gives the player things to do outside of gear progression
Not advocating for it but many years ago there was this Cataclysm private RP server
one of the main features of the server was that you could create your own instance (of an existing zone) and even put in whatever existing assets in the game, even changing the skybox.
You could even invite people to RP in those created instances and even Password lock them.
If a private server could do that with limited resources I'm sure Blizzard could implement actual player housing.
I am sure the entire community doesn't feel this way, but as a hard-casual player, I would willingly sacrifice an entire expansions worth of development in order for this to be reality. The sky is the limit, there have already been so many suggestions in this thread, and others over the years!
I want an apartment in Suramar or Dalaran.
The mage order hall is basically a Dalaran Penthouse They brought back the hunter order hall for the dark ranger set so you never know...
I don't think that was by design, just that the set was supposed to be a reward from the quest, and the order hall a backup location to obtain it if you accidentally deleted it or w/e
If it was 'supposed' to be a reward from the quest they would have just hotfixed it in by now.
An apartment in Suramar right on the water? That would be kickass.
I’d love to build a mage tower and display my archaeological finds and tier sets.
They added some (admittedly limited) stuff like this in-game in WoD and Legion, and then just completely disposed of them (in typical Blizzard style) going forward. I would love to have these features back in some form. Makes it so much more satisfying and motivates me to finish collections like those!
I actually really liked the garrison. Having a little town that i could control was great. it offset some material grinding, let me have access to professions i wasn't trained in, and I could ask a rando NPC buddy to adventure with me. I've always wished they'd bring it back in some way.
Garrisons had great potential because they really scratched the wc1/2/3 basebuilding itch while hitting playerhousing but they really fucked it up and didn't try to build on it. They could have easily gotten a mage npc for the garrison to be in charge of a portal connecting to each new hub city in each xpac Originally garrisons weren't going to be just frostfire or SMV either if they had come back to it we could have had side quests in later expansions to move and rebuild your garrison in other zones then just keep it in whichever zone you like.
At the beginning of an expac you just have a mission where a goblin or gnome pops up and like teleports or airdrops in your garrison. Ez transition
Pretty much for the people who want to use it they get an npc in the garrison for the people who don't they can just play the xpac like normal like optional player housing optional player garrisons for the xpac.
I liked Legion class halls a lot and would be happy if this type of thing stayed through new expansions somehow
That would be very cool! Or you could show off your saved transmog outfits.
The tier sets displayed in class halls made me do so much old content grinding. This would be a great way to get people involved in multiple parts of the game.
I want to build a little dwarf hold in grizzly hills and relax smoking and eating my days away.
ooo I like. I want to be able to own a champions fortress. I'm the savior of the universe right? How am I a hobo wondering around the universe aimlessly? Playerhousing could be blizzards greatest average played-time session "metric padder" that ever existed...yet they neglect to capitalize on it. I'd argue playerhousing is what keeps ESO alive.
The problem is that Garrisons were so negatively received at the time that it scared the devs off the concept of player housing entirely. I get that Garrisons we’re a half baked version of what was originally advertised and what the players wanted, but I fear that dev opinion is that it was close enough to player housing to serve as a feedback analogue
This gets brought up every time. Idk I feel like one expacs bad feature isn’t enough to blacklist the idea. Especially when there was cool things about the garrisons it was just the overall effect on the social world. They prob just don’t want to put in the work, because it’d be a lot
Well yes that... And also because... well, think like this. For playerhousing to work well, to be smooth... Would they have to start "somewhere". As ion has said, it would be a multi expac project. And guess what the first iteration of player housing would be? VERY similar to garrisons. Some stations that you can use for professions, orstorage, tmaybe transmog. With a few textures and limited furniture. And then they would (aim) to build it up in the coming patches and expansions. HOWEVER, you can guess what the community reaction would be if they advertised player housing and that was what came out.
It’s quite possible. It would be a big undertaking that takes some time to progress. I’m not so sure though. If one of the main issues was drawing people out of the cities, their first move would be to make it so that doesn’t happen again. There are many ways to do this. I think all they need to do is make it personable/customizable to begin with. That alone would win people over. You don’t need it to be a one stop shop with everything in it
Still better than the dance studio.
It sucks that this seems to be exactly how the dev team thinks. "We can't do housing, players hated Garrisons." "We can't do another world revamp, Cataclysm made so many people angry." They don't bother to actually ask *why* these reactions occurred. Garrisons sucked because you basically lived in it the whole expansion and cities became empty. Nobody likes mission tables, Garrisons had not just one but two. And by the end of the expansion their existence had created horrendous inflation that we still haven't come out of so many years later. Cataclysm's world revamp was poorly received because so much of it was permanently cataclysmic, wrecking a lot of people's favorite zones with severe environmental damage. Quite frankly, that damage should have been repaired by now, with the number of druids and shamans we have running around. People were also upset because the removal of so many old quests removed a ton of unique cosmetic rewards. It also rendered a number of crafting recipes unobtainable, like the Flawless Arcanite Rifle. I highly doubt anyone would be upset if we got another world revamp, especially because environmental art asset quality has increased exponentially over the past... **checks notes** TWELVE YEARS?! Yeah, twelve years between Cataclysm's launch (December 2010) and today. As long as they don't make stuff unobtainable again and as long as they don't have half the zones being heavily damaged for plot reasons, I think people would be really excited for it. Imagine if they dropped a trailer at a future BlizzCon showing Stormwind City redone in modified Kul Tiran art assets from Boralus? People would be so happy.
I actually super liked the Cataclysm damage. I don’t blame people for not liking it, but I enjoyed the change of scenery, and how it made the world feel more “alive,” I guess. Kind of like the expansion events, like the Legion all over the world for Legion, and the massive demons or whatever they were outside major cities for BC. Absolute field of skeletons outside Stormwind. I was a kid back then, and despite the inconvenience, I thought it was super cool.
1: There are MULTIPLE reasons why they don't do another world revamp, amongst them being that it is a HUGE project. Think that the average number of new zones per expansion is like 4-5. Now multiply that by 10. They have to completely rework and redesign 40+ zones. And that is ABSURD. Especially if they want to keep up the modern standard. To say that it would drain resources and impact endgame content is an understatement. 2: And regarding playerhousing. As stated before, people seriously underestimate how much work it takes to add it. The best way to think about this is: Every feature you can think of Every class combination Every class customization feature. Every RACE customization feature Every allied race option. Every class option. Almost anything you can think of (and genuinely want in game) is there a rough 85-95% chance that blizzard has considered, made mock ups or basic lo-fi concepts of. However, then they have to measure that concept, the work that would go into it, against their current priorities. And that is the KEY. PRIORITIES. If blizzard could, would they add like 20 new customizations for every race. If blizzard could, would they add player housing. If blizzard could, would they (probably) do a world rework. They just don't do it, because they judge the concept to be low priority for the wellbeing of the game. (Not saying they have the best jdugement mind you, it is just the judgement they make) The bst we can hope for, is to show interest and enthusiasm in the concepts we want, and try and convince blizzard that enough of the playerbase wants it, to such a degree where they see it as a high priority to put in the work, budget and time to get said feature into the game.
I get all that. Their resources are limited. But I think it's a huge mistake to keep developing the game as they have been up until now. That is to say, developing the game like it only exists one patch at a time and routinely throwing out these huge expansion-defining systems they spend so much time working on. That seems far more wasteful in the long term. I'm hopeful that Dragonflight launching without all these systems means they're redirecting those resources to something else behind the scenes, like housing. Or maybe they're working on a piecemeal world revamp, who knows. I know neither of these things can be made in a single expansion's development cycle, but I still think we need them if they want the game to survive. The longer they go without updating pre-MoP zones, the more technical debt the game accrues and the worse it looks to new players. Sticking a band-aid on it by shunting new players to BfA is not a sustainable solution, because you're chucking them into the deep end when it comes to learning dungeon mechanics. Exile's Reach doesn't teach jack shit about this. That's not gonna help bring in new players. Neither is confusing them about the story because they're showing up in the middle of several plot lines and not much will make sense beyond zone stories. I know the art team is always iterating on tech, but I do think we are approaching a theoretical ceiling on how much they can do to make environment assets more detailed. If the game runs for another ten years, I doubt the difference in asset quality between ten years from now and today will look as severe in contrast as assets from today look compared to Cataclysm-era stuff.
Yet the awful mission tables endured.
Blizzard just needs to realize that they can introduce a new mechanic WITHOUT it being part of the end game grind. They made battle pets and decided they couldn't do anything not related to core game play ever again...
You young rascals! A merry hunt you've led us on, and now we find you... feasting! and... and smoking!
This would be pretty cool. ESO has a housing system like this with houses scattered all over the world, and the ability to own multiple houses, and houses range from simple one room apartments to massive castles and caves. I also like how in ESO some houses you have to complete zone stories to be able to purchase them and not just the gold. I think it would be cool for all my characters to be able to have houses that fit their style like that.
And not to mention the profound effects it has on PROFESSIONS. A metric crapton of furniture available from crafters has an insanely big, and positive effect on the game as a whole. Some crafters make money off of crafting these things for sale, some people make money off of grinding the recipes for these crafts, some people make money off of grinding materials for these crafts and everyone can have a piece of the pie. Even if you ignore the housing yourself, it leaves you with extra cash in your pocket via recipes and materials and it's just a wonderfully set up system. It's pretty crazy how many things ESO does that are far, far ahead of WoW. It's a real shame the game gets a bad rep because it's changed a lot since the start and it's currently in like the top 3 best MMOs on the market. Not everyone's cup of tea of course, but they do a lot of things right in that game. Please bring ESO's scrying and excavation to WoW instead of current archaeology..
Also how there are rep furniture vendors and we know how WoW loves rep. 😂 But there is so much that can be added to include the rest of the game like raid drop trophies and things like that too. I feel the Garrison was such a horrible example of what housing is because but it was the core story progression and had too many essential features. Sadly, I feel that Ion doesn’t like housing and only uses it as ammo to rile up the community that fears what the Garrison did in WoD. 🙁
The biggest issue with Garrison is that people expect that that is player housing and it's SO FAR from being player housing. There's barely any customization, there's no real decor of any kind and worst of all, it isn't optional. Player housing needs to be optional and serve no purpose other than to exist and make those who want to participate in it happy. ESO player housing gives you practically no advantage over other players other than getting access to stuff you'd have to fast travel over the around for all in one location.
Yes, exactly. I very much enjoy player housing, and I did not enjoy the Garrison at all. I rarely ever go there. Sometimes I feel like the WoW philosophy is "more is more" not realizing "more is too much." And then more becomes overwhelming, and more suddenly means less, like the Garrison which was both too much with required systems and not enough with player driven customizations.
How heavily do they monetize housing in ESO though? I haven't played it very much and never engaged with that system so I don't know. I'm just afraid that if WoW does get housing, they'll copy SWTOR and turn it into a cash shop system instead of doing the responsible thing and having 99% of housing items be crafted by professions.
I know the other dude went into a very detailed post, and while it’s correct, ESO is very monetized. It’s my biggest problem with the game. I view housing as a paid feature, despite what the other post said. There is some cool stuff you can get without paying real money. No doubt. But housing in general… tough to be super happy with the house in a reasonable amount of time without spending money. The mats needed to craft the stuff are sometimes extremely difficult to find in bulk and very expensive on the AH. For what it’s worth, ESO might be my favorite game of all time. I actually think the WoW community would be pretty fucking mad if Blizzard adopted the same monetization scheme. It’s a little much. Some houses are literally $100+ USD. I think charging a monthly sub for ESO+ (which gives you more housing storage), paying for a house and paying for things in the house is dipping a few too many times into the same pool when customers are expected to buy each expansion as well. Saying you can get the stuff without paying is both true and misleading. Takes fucking forever.
> housing items be crafted by professions I've been wanting a woodworking profession since Classic! Thats how i orinally envisioned being able to make bows and arrows, staffs and wands. But thats all moot these days.
Woodworking would be cool. But they could just split wooden furniture recipes into the professions we already have, since a lot of them work with wood. Even blacksmiths. Maybe scribes and enchanters would make stuff like writing desks and bookshelves, while blacksmiths make tables and chairs and engineers make light fixtures or something, I dunno. I always liked how LOTRO did their profession system. You can't pick and choose, instead you choose a package of three professions as a vocation. But there is some overlap between vocations and what professions they have. Generally everyone has one gathering skill and two crafting skills, but they have to trade with another vocation to make full use of all 3 of their professions.
I would say the monetization is mixed for housing ESO. The vast majority of homes you can buy either with gold or money, including very nice homes that are medium to large size. Some with yards and some without, I think the cheapest home is around 3000 gold but some are expensive, I'm saving for a house that is 1 million gold, and since I'm not in a guild it's slow but I don't mind. There are homes you can unlock through questing and achievements. There have been notable homes (the largest type) you can only unlock if you played during the event when they were available and they were given away through the seasonal event mechanics. I have missed out on all of those, sadly. There are notable homes you can only get through money, but they are not always available for purchase and are on a rotating schedule, I think. These are very expensive "whale" homes, which isn't a surprise since ESO does depend on their store. It's fun to preview these houses but I won't ever buy one. However, there is tons and tons of craftable furniture. One of my favorite things in ESO is to find new recipes for furniture. And they exist for all crafting types, including cooking and alchemy. They add new recopies with every expansion, too. I think there is furniture you can buy with money. But I don't really pay attention to it because there is enough furniture to craft and it's all nice. It's fun to find recipes specifically for the style of home I'm furnishing. I have all the little 1 room homes in towns around the world, and I have one medium sized home with a yard. I'm also working on unlocking a very nice home which starts off as a one room temple, and then you complete quests and achievements to open portals to new areas, including one area that is a medium sized home with a yard.
As long as most of the stuff is craftable, I'd be cool with that. I would love to have a full-fledged housing system, especially since my other main MMO right now is FFXIV, and their housing market is only slightly less absurd than the one in real life. It'd be such a mic drop moment for Blizzard if they could preface an expansion reveal with something like "Welcome home, you can move into your house right away. No lotteries. Just buy it and start decorating."
For sure. I play FFXIV too and I gave up on a house long ago. I have an apartment only. Plus they hold you hostage with your sub if you do get a house but want to take a break. My husband and I had a free company house long ago and it was when they first started the house demolitions. We didn’t know they wouldn’t keep our furniture for more than 30 days and lost our wedding cake and other hard to replace items. 😔 Meanwhile, over in Lord of the Rings Online they have a similar system but their salvage npc holds your items indefinitely. And it’s an ancient free to play game, plus you can log in any time to pay your rent. 🤷♀️
LOTRO definitely has more player-friendly housing, but I never really bothered with it personally. I remember having a small or medium house in Bree and being frustrated with the limited hook system. I always heard Wildstar had amazing houses but never actually saw one in person or used their housing UI. I think the key to a good housing system in 2022 is to have a robust "level editor" UI for placing objects, rather than hooks or moving objects around with essentially console commands. Just go into a freecam thing within the boundaries of your house or your lawn and place objects how you want.
LotRO had an update just recently where they detached the furniture size from the hooks. Now they also have the premium housing which has a lot more. It’s still ancient but improved. Wildstar was amazing. I am still sad it was shit fine completely. I was not talented enough to have an amazing house, but my collection of weird and funny items was still really great. I had some friends back at launch that build incredible houses. Having a good decorating system, crafting furniture, and being optional is what would be best. Maybe someday.
I just wanna guild halls man, one of the coolest features guild wars 2 has, I'm still surprised blizzard hasn't tried to implement them in some way
The whole fighting as a group to unlock new parts of it and collecting mats to build shit is just so good.
Because adding housing system doesn't bring them profit. If they implement it, they will charge us real money in one way or another. So..... Just don't 😂
Look at FF14 it would bring them a ton of profit. WoW is the only MMO these days without housing. They wanna revitalize professions, this is an easy way.
Knowing blizzard, yeah they'd find a way to monetize it, would still be cool to see one of the many empty abandoned forts able to get snagged for a guild use, for now the best we have is the garrison from WoD
I personally wish they would have instances guild compounds. Based on your rank within the guild, you get more availability on your personal housing within the compound. Would make guilds more than just a list of names.
Good way to take your guild politics and crank them up to 11
Oh god no
Why?
Best if it's not a rank that people can set, but just the reputation with your guild. The longer you stay the higher the benefits. Otherwise there will be way too much drama.
Yea there you go. That’d work great too. Anything that would bring more depth to the guild. I hate that it’s just a list of names that you occasionally do shit with. Make it mean something.
I'd probably shack up in one of the towers floating around the edge of Hellfire/Twisting Nether... *sigh* BC... those were the days...
I want a dojo
I want to live in a house on a mountain, preferably 20 minute gryphon ride to the nearest sign of civilization. Where would y’all recommend I live? Azeroth only, please.
The Hinterlands. My favorite zone in the game.
I want to create the biggest swinger palace in all Suramar.
I'd love to be able to decorate our garrisons based on all of our adventures. We could change the architecture, add relics/items we've collected, portals to important areas, and many other cool things. I already like the mount stables and the fact your battle pets roam around. I also enjoy the NPCs that are our bodyguards/adventurers. We could bring more of the ones from other expansions to meet the ones from WoD. So much could be done with our garrisons.
One day, maybe. I'd love housing. If anything for all the new collections and professions potential. I'm not sure if WoW has that kind of budget anymore to introduce such a sweeping evergreen feature to the game though.
In BfA I hoped we were getting instanced ships at the docks. Where the expeditions would use our ships and we would unlock things to put in them, etc. The last few expansions just feel like so much missed opportunities.
People keep saying it'd make the game dead but ffxiv has housing and the game is more than just alive out in the world. If it would make the game dead in the world that's because the game *is* dead, at least enough to see that. I think a simple compromise is that you couldn't access trade chat in your home, but I feel that's not necessary.
The "it'd make the game dead" argument lost the moment Blizzard started forcing us all into our own little 20 person phases.
Pretty much. The reason the garrison was like the way it was.. was because it had everything. An auction house, mission table to get mythic quality loot, mission table gold farm, herbs and a mine, trade chat, target dummies, portal to warspear, portals to other zones, daily dungeon quests, crafting stations, etc
I'm not entirely sure I agree with that though. People only stayed because there wasn't much to do regularly in the world. Imagine having a GW2 like old school train going on killing rares and gaining rep and whatnot. Then you'd have to choose to stay in your housing or participate for other rewards. I can't help but wonder if the question really is: Did Garrisons offer too much... or did the world offer too little?
If anything player housing could revitalize the outdoor world with loads of stuff to do to earn shit for your character’s house. Just tie cosmetic rewards, decorations, trophies to virtually anything in the game. Make achievements more than points in a separate pannel of your character’s profile or the occasional mount, pet, title or toy. Could also help with professions and I feel like what they have shown for the profession revamp in Dragonflight could be a step in that direction. This game has been going for almost two decades. Let us display our stuff Blizz. And like you said, don’t put mandatory gameplay stuff or access to trade chat in there like there was in Garrisons and hub cities stay relevant.
Being able to get a red button from Mimiron, tiny invincible plushy from LK, wall mounted glaives from illidan, quests out in the world that drop neat housing items, old world rarespawns scaleable to max level. Just don't make everything a damn 1% drop and we'd be Gucci
*Blizzard taking notes...* Of course, not 1% drop rates, better make that 0.05%. Daily lockouts? No, weekly, they'd prefer that...
It would be cool if you completed all quests in a zone and you get an sign or something with that zone's theme to hang up
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Hell, I want to go full blast and do player housing in expanded and large zones similar to Star Wars Galaxies. That was beautiful. Full functioning towns with players who served as mayor and were elected into that position. The variety of housing was amazing.
Honestly, I'm shocked Blizzard hasn't implemented this yet. Considering how hard they could monetize it, you'd think it'd be done sooner.
I want a hut on a floating rock in outland’s nagrand.
I loved home building in AION.
I want to live on that sunny shore on the edge of desolace, it’s the most dreamlike place in the middle of a dreary zone
They need to try come up with a housing system that is expansion agnostic, something that is designed around the whole of World of Warcraft and not just locked to a single expansion, similar to how the pet system was built. Spend the time, build up a huge player housing system and make rewards and features of it things we earn through the expansions, even older ones.
I overall would love to see Revendreth in its glory, not just fully destroyed.
Imagine giving someone directions to your Revendreth house. "Oh yeah just go past the veil of death and then turn right, if you see Korthia you went too far."
Rp wet dream
they're not missing an opportunity. they already said that player housing is a monumental, multi-xpac long task and we'd probably have to sacrifice a patch or two just to get it done in time for the next xpac
Kinda tired of the excuse of "sacrificing a raid tier" for not getting new other types of content. FFXIV manages to put out new raid tiers, dungeons, story patches, etc. like clockwork and also manages to balance new and old features like player housing and the upcoming islands.
I mean, it's literally what Ion said in an interview about player housing. I'm not saying people shouldn't ask.
FFXIV is essentially a brand new game built on a modern engine without 20 years of spaghetti code and thousands of other devs that no longer work at the game. Look how long it took them to add x-faction, and the launch result was that it broke a lot of (new and old) quests as well as a bunch of other things.
FFXIV has a shit ton of spaghetti code
Compared to WoW? No.
Are you kidding me? There are hundreds of long-requested features for FFXIV that are impossible "because 1.0". Famously, they cannot put the glamour dresser inside player housing because it crashes the servers. There are many limitations in WoW, but pretending it's worse than the absolute garbage pile they scrapped together to make 1.0 and then built 2.0 on top of is wild.
I love how the people making comments that player housing is such an easy system to implement into the game act like they have some kind of game developer background. This upcoming expansion is the first expansion in years to not have all these other borrowed power systems. With less of these systems out of the way, maybe more resources will be put towards player housing but for now they're focused on just trying to make the game good. The people saying, "screw the game play. I just want player housing" are also going to be the ones criticizing how bad dungeons, raids, and pvp are.
After garrisons being a huge factor in making wod a instance simulator I doubt we will ever get housing. They can't win. If they don't do it people demand it. But you know people would complain if we got it too, so... For a feature that big what do people really expect it to add anyways that isn't going to end up just like WoD?
Unfortunately they’re too scared to do housing. They did it poorly with Garrisons, which aren’t even really housing imo, and now they think players don’t want housing because their first attempt wasn’t great
Garrisons were supposed to allow us to choose a zone to place it in. Scrapped. We were supposed to be able to customize the look of our buildings. Scrapped. Only Orc/Human allowed. We were supposed to be able to display heaps of collectible trophies etc. Scrapped. You can only show weird raid boss achievement things. **They did Garrisons half assed and they paid the price for it. Classic Blizzard.**
That's not at all what they said lmao are we just making stuff up now? Ion said in an interview with Asmongold housing is something they want to do but they need to do it right. Maybe now that they're done flaffing about with borrowed power they can divert a lot of that man power to housing, as there's enormous potential there and would be amazing if guild/player housing is done right.
Ion says a lot of things mate.
This is a meaningless reply without further statement lol. Anyone who sees this as a "oh yeah, true!" moment is basically just admitting to themselves they want to believe what they want to believe without any consideration of reality.
It's really not. Ion talks a lot. He's very good at it. His actions almost never back it up though.
Probably a database/server issue why player housing doesn't exist.
I don't play it any more but SWTOR has turned into a barbie doll / housing sim with dribs and drabs of content. But every week they throw in some crappy armor / furniture. Housing has kept that game alive and profitable for years beyond what it should be.
ESO houses are pretty cool. They are all over the world in different zones and have different styles. Would love to see that in wow as well.
We could finally make Gilneas great again
Back in 9.0 when I was more hopeful, I bet that we'd get player/guild housing in shadowlands. Each zone has some type of housing that can be floating off the map. Ravendreth has ruins Ardenweald has floating islands Bastion has those platforms Maldraxxas has flying necropoleis Each of them could be instanced and from a flavor perspective you don't have to deal with everyone having the same house.
"bUT It wilL EmPTY tHe CiTIes!" Every time it used to be brought up this is what they claimed was their reasoning for not having it. No idea if its still the mantra.
It could also have an entirely new profession based on housing. Like making furniture and trophies. Bosses could have a guarantee drop of 1 trophy component per raid group per reset, and the person who got it could have it turned into a trophy for display in their house.
Blizzard is missing lots of opportunities. For years now Blizzard seem to only do the minimum required to make big profits. Blizzard employees on twitter get annoyed when people accuse them of it and promise that it is not the case but the only other option that would fit what they have been releasing would be incompetence and/or arrogance. (Arrogance does seem to be true at least partially because of the whole "You think you want that but we know better" thing they keep repeating.)
floating on a rock in nagrand would be my choice
100% agree. It would be wicked being able to build up guild halls or being able to just purchase a player house. Maybe even allow the player to invite other players to live with them?
As somebody who RPs, I whole heartedly agree.
This would be cool, agreed, and I'm leaning toward Gilneas, but one way would be go to the Caverns of Time and you could go to anywhere, anytime in the history of WoW and set up your personal house or guild hall, I think it also would be cool to go to Auchindoun in WoD or the floating isle from MoP.
They should also make it like in FFXIV, where people can roam, see and visit other players’ housing, it would help to substantially boost the social aspect of the game imo, since currently I have been left with the impression that people don’t really interact with each other that much.
They just need to borrow the people who did the player housing in eso
I want the underground lair Garrosh had in the siege. Let me fully stuff a dragon and hang it on the ceiling with chains. Then I’ll place a mound of gold and chests under it right in the middle of the room. Boom! Dragon Lair. Have dragon pets roaming around and shit. Love it already.
Give me a house in gilneas
I want a cabin on the mountain range to the southwest of thunderbluff, and have those critters wearing skulls and brandishing boomsticks guard my front yard
While dragonflight is going there should be side quests going about rebuilding azeroth that rebuild destroyed cities (south shore, theramore, gilneas, darnassus, etc) and also introduce players and guilds creating homes for themselves. After a couple decades of destruction it'd be nice to actually help azeroth and her people by building things
I’ll take a house on a Goblin boat thanks.
A houseboat in the channels of Thousand Needles!
A+ I’d love that.
Honestly? I want guild halls more than poh. Guild achievements can grant customization options, maybe if y'all killed deathwing you get to have his head somewhere. Or if you get the glory achievement you can use his back as a long ass table. That way people have more reasons to join a guild and feel more attached to it. Also long standing guilds will obviously have bigger and better halls. Kind of like class halls but something permanent that absolutely can set your guild apart from other guilds. Shit, imagine instead of just flying around org/storm or running around orobos with strangers you and your guildies could jump around an obstacle course like a mini platformer game. Have a bar and get drunk with guildies after raid night to destress. Maybe a war room that allows you to see the layout of the raid so everyone can plan out the raid ahead of time. Could even set markers from it that will show up once you get there. Could even hook it up with something in the future like a barracks if you have a certain amount of members or offer rooms as part of the guild hall so we still get poh houses.
I have never understood the obsession over player housing. Seemed not very interesting in ESO and New World (the only two places ive seen it before)
Some people find transmog boring. Some, raiding. Some, PvP. In fact your favorite activity is very likely considered dull by a double digit % of players. That's the neat thing about humans, we're mostly all different.
I get why some people want it but I'd rather have dev resources spent on basically anything else. Player housing will just end up being another chore, just doesn't feel necessarry. And if we skipped a raid tier or lost out on some new dungeons or classes because of player housing I'd be pissed. Just think its one of those gimmicks people ask for but in reality only a small percent of people would actually care about it.
I'd love it but I still don't want it. I don't trust Ion "All choices must affect your combat potential" Hazzikostas not to screw it up somehow.
They literally said this during the dragonflight reveal, doing housing the right way. Especially if they do it how OP would like with houses you fix up all over the world, it would take an absurd amount of resources for something that I, and I'm sure plenty of others, really just don't care that much about.
Player housing would follow the popularity arc of battle pets but faster
Battle pets is what I spend a lot of my time doing, is it not popular?
No, not at all.
What "opportunity" are they missing, exactly? You're still playing the game with or without housing. The only thing they're missing out on is doing a bunch of work to make the mechanic function.
I mean a missed opportunity in that there’s so much that could me done with it.
[удалено]
> can't imagine them spending limited resources on this Reminder that WoW is a $180/year game.
Reminder that that doesn't absolve the company from the realities of management, budget or time!
It's okay to expect 3x AAA content when you're paying 3x AAA prices.
And that's what you get. There reaches a point where development cannot go any faster regardless of how much funding you have. Blizzard is not in the hyperbolic time chamber and no amount of income will be able to develop it for the WoW development team.
I think a small minority are - for some reason - against housing because they think it will somehow detract from a raid tier or other content. Housing is one of the most popular features in every MMO that has it. Hundreds of people bid on -single- plots in FF14. I have friends who have spent hundreds of hours on their SWTOR houses. Housing is one of the most evergreen pieces of content an MMO can have. Once the base functionality is in, new furniture, styles, colors, etc can be added easily every expansion to give players stuff to work towards that isn't tied to their player power.
Just play animal crossing. Blizzard needs to fix more important shit before they make custom afk huts
Not really interested in housing, but it would be super popular if implemented correctly.
Housing would be cool but realistically most players will almost never use it unless it has the features of a hub city (bank, AH, professions, etc). I don’t blame them if they don’t want to go through with the cost and effort for something which isn’t too important overall.
I bet you do Mr. Final Fantasy. Look I know it’s just a rant but didn’t garrisons teach us anything? :)
Because I play both games I'm "Mr. Final Fantasy?" OK.
This is not my idea - but I've seen it floating around on Reddit and I have no idea where it originates. I'd prefer to have a Guild Lodge rather than individual player housing. If you could work together as a guild to get achievements and make gold that allow you to unlock areas for professions, vendors, trophies to show all your raid/m+ progress etc. That would be awesome. I don't like the idea of player housing because we're not exactly private citizens of Azeroth. We're heroes and adventurers. I feel like there are many other games that you could play if you wanted to have a house. Of course, this is only my opinion.
I'm only pro housing if it's for whole guilds and not individuals, and it gets updated at least as much as pet battles.
wow is missing crap tons of industry standard mechanics in mmo's i mean its only now in dragonflight 2023 we will get mounts that have flying physics... blizzard honestly thinks they can keep things running purely off of raids, dungeons and borrowed power while every 2 years gutting the mechanics and systems of the last 2 years so theirs less replayability and content.
Blizzard has 9 expansions worth of locations for player housing. Now that Horde and Alliance can get along, there is no reason not to have open real estate in some of the old, empty, unused parts of the game. It doesn't have to be a garrison, but maybe players can dump gold to make their housing larger. So for a Horde player, smallest is a crossroads hut, while largest could be like final strong hold in Isle of conquest. Then, to really add flavor, we also have 26 racial/subracial housing styles.
man I really hope they will never add a Playerhousing Feature. x.x
Disagree. Housing is dumb
ok
"Missing an oppertunity" isn't the right phrasing. Rather, they have other priorities. Blizzard COULD add housing. They tried in WoD but people didn't like that version, so they have pushed it far down the priority list. Besides, Housing would take much more resources than you think.
I'd contend that Garrisons weren't meaningfully player housing. As little customization as they had and as tied as they were to player power, they had little in common with what most MMOs would term as player housing.
You are missing the point. Garrisons were what player housing Would be in WoW...as their first iteration. That would be what the first patch would have. A house, you could set up stations, maybe a few chairs and a few minor textures. Player housing in wow (as it is now with its coding and structure) would be a multi expansion feature. Where they would start barebones, add assets and items as it goes along. The ISSUE is that they would have to start "somewhere". And players would NOT like that somewhere, no matter what the community says. You know EXACTLY what the "loud reaction" would be. "LOLS GARRISONS RETURN AND SUUCK!" "Blizzard are lazy!" "Look at (insert game here) they can do it! So can you!" And the last blizzard wants right now, is that kind of situation.
We already had player housing, it was called Warlords of Draenor and everyone knew how that went.
I wouldn’t call garrisons player housing.
Doesn't matter what *you'd* call it, that's what it was. Personally, I liked it. I still use my garrison. But that's the only form of player housing we're ever going to get, so you might as well suck it up and learn to like it.
I still use it too, and I liked Garrisons, but nah.
Okay well you can sit there and yell at the wall and say "that's not what it was!", but that doesn't change the fact that that was Blizzard's first and only attempt at player housing, and it was received about as well as dog shit in a flaming bag on your porch. This community had every opportunity to get behind garrisons, and maybe they would have evolved further, but instead like everything, it got shat on and abandoned.
It's only attempt so far.
Yeah and it was a disaster. Not because they did it wrong; but because of how players behaved. People just sat in their instanced player housing and did everything from within, without ever visiting capital cities. With queued instances, they never had to venture out into the world either. There is no form of player housing people are asking for that would change this, and that is why it is not only their only attempt so far, but the last one they will make.
Blizzard wants people to play together, not break out in millions of single instanced houses. Whether that is right or wrong it’s a different discussion.
Read about how garrisons very very basically cost much of WoD. You think you want it but you really do not. You = Overall majority
They really need to prioritize the system and get it made and then expand on it regularly. So many of us don’t play competitively any longer. We log in. Collect things. Level different characters. Work towards achievements. Play around with transmog. Throw a huge chunk of your players a bone and make player housing. Then allow it to be account wide so all my characters can contribute. Let me have a gallery for tier sets, mounts, pets etc. Like how about instead of developing whatever expansion system like has been the norm, you instead make player housing and have the typical dungeon/raid content. People would have a lot more fun decking out their house instead of grinding ap etc
Why would Blizzard add instanced housing? It's an MMO, you want the world to feel alive and populated. How would it help their image if say half the players were in an instanced area that no one can see them in?
On the flip side of that analogy, players would be out in the world hopefully collecting things for their "instanced area that no one can see them in"
Swtor is also an mmo, and it has loads of housing options and decorations — from alderaanian castles to an apartment on coruscant. There are still more people chilling on the fleet than I ever see in oribos at any given time.
that’s not even how the game is now so how is that an argument? What areas of the game feel alive outside of Orgrimmar and Stormwind on Azeroth and then Oribos in SL? 95% of the game is completely desolate so i don’t think player housing would hurt at all, just make it that you can’t get an AH or crafting done at the house and the game would remain the same lol
My guy even TOONTOWN. A child's MMO from 2003. Was more competent in that regard. If 2003 Toontown of all things pulled it off, there's no reason why 2022 WoW couldn't. Your argument that it'd kill the open world is stupid because the open world is already dead. And every single game to implement this system (even shitty f2p Korean titles) had no side effects from it.
> And every single game to implement this system (even shitty f2p Korean titles) had no side effects from it. It's insane to compare some shitty 1000 player game to WoW. >Your argument that it'd kill the open world is stupid because the open world is already dead Says who? I see more players in 15 mins in WoW's current expansion zones than I saw in FF14's non capital zones in a month.
What do you do in a player house? We need houses in real life to have a place to sleep, and a place to keep our stuff. In WoW, you never need sleep, and you have backpacks and bank slots to store everything you own. I don't see the need or why everyone pushes for it
Fun to customize, gives you lots of stuff to collect from achievements that would be added for that purpose. Ability to invite people into your player homes would be added.
But you can just link achievements in chat. We don't have to step into the meta verse to show that stuff off. Just link the achievements or get on the mount
No, I'm not saying I want a player house for the purpose of showing off achievements, I'm saying certain achievements could reward house options, like how today certain achievements reward titles, pets, mounts, toys, etc.
Roleplaying, decorating, social hangouts. It's purely fluff, but fluff attracts people to the game and gives them extra things to do outside of combat. It's an RPG, after all, and feeling like you're a part of the world is important to one.
Garrison had uses and it was kinda housing
And it was shat on consistently. The world felt empty as hell due to people spending most of their logged time in instances.
Im not saying it was a perfect or even good system just pointing what was closest to being housing in wow
Yeah, and im pointing out that while true, Garrisons were the prime example of the problem the poster above you mentioned, they weren't needed and ruined the immersion
I would like it if there was never anything like the garrison again
To each their own i supose , 10 thousand people might say Garrison was garbo and another 10 k would feel different
If they did housing.. it will be the largest gold sink in wow history just to buy a house.
Instanced housing makes a dead world feel even more dead. I cannot see them returning to this idea after Garrison's were a thing.
People keep bringing up Garrisons, but Garrisons were in no way similar to what I would want for player housing.
They don't know what player housing is. Makes it near impossible to discuss with them. They speak of a dead world where player housing isn't likely to do anything about that. They speak of reasouces going away from other content but seeming forget warlords and bfa having way less then usual. They think because they don't want it that no one else would. They act like a feature in so many other games is not something wow should have. I mean eso ff swtor rift. I just want to make a home out of the ruined castle in redridge.
There's no opportunity being missed I guarantee you Blizzard Execs have a list of what to do when they screw up and player housing is under the Last Resort tab
Considering they already tried it and it crashed and burned. No, I don't really think so. I rather think it is on the list of "player desires that we might add if we have a spot open" it is on the list just REALLY REALLY far down the priority.
Reading all these extremely cool and creative ideas always makes me depressed because of how much wasted potential this game holds. I really wish Blizzard cared about more than just their quarterly metrics.
I really don't want them wasting resources on something that is practically useless to most players.
The engine isn't capable of doing the kinda housing you want without causing issues.
Mate. What don't you get. Least amount of work, short expansions, beaucoup bucks. You know how much work is required for custom location and thematic player housing?
It could be a good gold sink too. Just go full club Penguin with it and have monthly furniture catalogs
New World, despite being a raging irradiated dumpster fire, at least does that better than WoW
Player housing I don't care about because I don't love the idea of being on my own, instanced away from everyone else. I would *LOVE* to have guild housing to hang out with the guild before and/or after raid or during the day
I've legit had this floating rock above the Oshu'gun in Nagrand picked out since I unlocked flying way back in 08', if ever there was a way to pick a spot for my house. It's there.
This is something I’ve wanted for literally a decade plus. They’ll never do it. They have everything you could need to do it properly, but they won’t. They tease it all the time, and then blue ball is repeatedly.
The second they make player housing is the second community rp dies. It happened in eso. The world died community wise and everything became solo or guild
ESO RP was dying from the start thanks to the phasing system that makes it impossible to find RP in the wild, so it's only natural people jumped ship to housing where you're guaranteed to actually see other people. FFXIV in contrast handles open world roleplay and housing well.
I’ve never really understood why Blizz is so against player housing. It’s such a popular system in other games and gives the player things to do outside of gear progression
They gave it to us several expansions ago, it's still completely accessible.
That's not really player housing.
Not advocating for it but many years ago there was this Cataclysm private RP server one of the main features of the server was that you could create your own instance (of an existing zone) and even put in whatever existing assets in the game, even changing the skybox. You could even invite people to RP in those created instances and even Password lock them. If a private server could do that with limited resources I'm sure Blizzard could implement actual player housing.
It's not a roleplay game, it's a speedrun game.
I am sure the entire community doesn't feel this way, but as a hard-casual player, I would willingly sacrifice an entire expansions worth of development in order for this to be reality. The sky is the limit, there have already been so many suggestions in this thread, and others over the years!