Player housing, the tragic mistake.

[overtyped]

I thought this discussion deserved a thread of it's own rather than being a derailment.
Rather than stealing what Rockdelver wrote, i'd instead like to credit and add on it and talk about this issue here.


For my own part, I couldn't care less about Housing in games. I've played (and still play) games (AO, LotRO, Elder Scrolls Online are just a few) that featured Player Housing and I've never bothered with it. It's usually just there as a gold sink and generally serves no purpose I would consider useful at all. I hope the PG devs are never ever going to waste time and effort creating new zones just for vanity housing, not when zones such as Sun Vale are only semi-finished and there's more PLAYABLE content to add.

I agree what was said above and I would like to add on to that.
I understand that you guys have already painted yourself into a corner with your "gorgon shop packages" and have no choice , but there is a fine line to this I believe.

Now with that all being said, here's two things that you may not have considered.

1: The future side effects from player housing, like world of warcrafts garrisons shouldn't be repeated since even they themselves walked back from it. All that effort down the drain.

They isolated players, they offered generally unfun yet lucrative and even mandatory systems (such as follower and shipyard missions) and they greatly lowered the value of social interaction. (In gorgons case it would most likely be it's own gardening area and blacksmith etc)

Many enjoyed it while it was fresh and novel, but overall the garrison sucked up a huge amount of development resources to offer activities that mainly fell flat with the player base in the end. I hope you take care not to spend your limited development resources for something that becomes reviled and goes against what you believe project gorgons vision to be because you feel forced to make housing into a big deal.

2: Player housing and instancing in general when others cant afford it can breed exclusivity, and from what I've felt from project gorgon could severely damage the friendly atmosphere. Things like not having a static player level, even if the end result of this was not what you intended already went a long way to make the whole games atmosphere into a more positive one of inclusion. If you are not careful your efforts here unintended or not will be wasted.

All I hope is the housing becomes a place you can decorate with a little bit of storage and nothing more. It would add something small, and wouldn't become the new "single persons anti social hub"

[AgentBbrian]

World of Warcraft garrisons was not housing, it can't be compared to that because it was an expansion purchased content of whatever era in the story it was, you didn't get access to it for just owning the game, there was no house of yours or pets or real gardening or any of the features PG has and intends to have.
WoW has always fallen short of potential on everything after Wotlk, they add cool things but then remove or fail to add the cool and it just becomes a thing.
Blizzard is always rushing out its projects in glorious bugged glitchy messes of patch hotfix after another with content not even being added because they didn't have the time or whatever their inevitable excuse was.. what was the last one? china won't let them say.


Now if you wanted to talk housing in games where it was actual housing and was good then no everything you have said is wrong.
There are a handful of games i can think of with housing in games and it was amazing and fun until they cash-shopped the shit out of it and made things only available via microtransactions and daily idiot buffs with silly things with wife/husband/pet boons with weekly lockouts, and that's not mentioning the forced need to do it and being like a solo only thing.

But then you have games where they didn't and it was great and it still goes on today, ultima online is still going and is a subscription game unless you play the free servers, i think UO Outlands is the latest best free one on the market lately with real ocean piracy and taming and all the crazy housing and fun.
I think Albion Online's housing was ok, they made some silly restrictions on how to access and travel and what you could and couldnt do on the housing plots and the crafting issues, but friending people and guild houses and visiting others was pretty cool with how people decorated their stuff.

There are a few more games i'd like to mention that made housing fun and a few that made housing a chore and annoying but i don't think i need to, we just want the fun, it's a game, i dont login to grind to do a job to hit a daily or tickle a skeleton with my necro super powers of mute while my pets glitch out in the ground and stare off into the endless void wondering why theyre here at all.

But hey the 20 people who want wings and be a fae.. are gunna get their wish, the rest of us are just like ... dwarf dwarf dwarf oi oi oi.

[overtyped]

World of Warcraft garrisons was not housing, it can't be compared to that because it was an expansion purchased content of whatever era in the story it was, you didn't get access to it for just owning the game, there was no house of yours or pets or real gardening or any of the features PG has and intends to have.
WoW has always fallen short of potential on everything after Wotlk, they add cool things but then remove or fail to add the cool and it just becomes a thing.
Blizzard is always rushing out its projects in glorious bugged glitchy messes of patch hotfix after another with content not even being added because they didn't have the time or whatever their inevitable excuse was.. what was the last one? china won't let them say.


Now if you wanted to talk housing in games where it was actual housing and was good then no everything you have said is wrong.
There are a handful of games i can think of with housing in games and it was amazing and fun until they cash-shopped the shit out of it and made things only available via microtransactions and daily idiot buffs with silly things with wife/husband/pet boons with weekly lockouts, and that's not mentioning the forced need to do it and being like a solo only thing.

But then you have games where they didn't and it was great and it still goes on today, ultima online is still going and is a subscription game unless you play the free servers, i think UO Outlands is the latest best free one on the market lately with real ocean piracy and taming and all the crazy housing and fun.
I think Albion Online's housing was ok, they made some silly restrictions on how to access and travel and what you could and couldnt do on the housing plots and the crafting issues, but friending people and guild houses and visiting others was pretty cool with how people decorated their stuff.

There are a few more games i'd like to mention that made housing fun and a few that made housing a chore and annoying but i don't think i need to, we just want the fun, it's a game, i dont login to grind to do a job to hit a daily or tickle a skeleton with my necro super powers of mute while my pets glitch out in the ground and stare off into the endless void wondering why theyre here at all.

But hey the 20 people who want wings and be a fae.. are gunna get their wish, the rest of us are just like ... dwarf dwarf dwarf oi oi oi.

I think you as a player may be the exception to the rule. I did not think albion online housing was a good thing at all. You had people sitting alone on their island instead of interacting or being around other players which is the defining difference between a single player and an mmo.

Like i mentioned above, if housing in the process of adding something at the same time takes something away, (like social interaction) then the development time that went into it becomes a waste of resources.

I also think garrisons were housing. Just because it didn't fulfill your definition of housing does not mean it is not. This actually surprises me because it seems to tick all the boxes. People spend all their time there, there is a place you can decorate with your trophys of your previous exploits. Fishing, pet battles, dailies, it had everything, so on this point we would have to agree to disagree.

[AgentBbrian]

I think you as a player may be the exception to the rule. I did not think albion online housing was a good thing at all. You had people sitting alone on their island instead of interacting or being around other players which is the defining difference between a single player and an mmo.

Like i mentioned above, if housing in the process of adding something at the same time takes something away, (like social interaction) then the development time that went into it becomes a waste of resources.

I also think garrisons were housing. Just because it didn't fulfill your definition of housing does not mean it is not. This actually surprises me because it seems to tick all the boxes. People spend all their time there, there is a place you can decorate with your trophys of your previous exploits. Fishing, pet battles, dailies, it had everything, so on this point we would have to agree to disagree.

Not sure what guild you were in or if you were an alt-o-holic or what, but there were guild houses and areas where people would hang out and meetup before heading out to do hunting, they had people tending other peoples houses and visiting and meetings and lots of social things to do if you were involved in it, they wernt forced to do it by the game or get rewards to do it by the game but you could and people did maybe you didn't but we definitely did.
The towns were an absolute lag mess cluster of people, just people everywhere, you knew you were in town because your frames dropped a chunk and you could tell, some people on older computers couldnt go to the towns eventually or at certain times of day for fear of lag and crashing.
Is that what you want? the towns to be so bustling that you can't even see yourself in the mess? with 100 people playing a lute in your ear and speech bubbles flooding over everything?
Im not knocking that btw, because you are still going to get that anyway with the vendors and npc's and buff mechanics and stuff, but i do get miffed at the 20 fletching boxes scattered around everytime i go into town or the necromancer parking lot at the door ways to the towns, y'know?

If you want to force people into those places without giving them anything else or options to get away from that.. but people go on holiday to get away.. and they come back.. i mean the only places you can't are in prison.. and any prison documentary will show you the social areas just chockers with people in there too.. and they cant go home..

Exception to the rule is im not a criminal in jail unable to go home and do what i want coz the warden doesn't like garrisons in wow?
Wouldn't it be cool if there was a karma system and negative influences other than favor and you could get locked up in the games prison for an hour if caught stealing or pvp or whatever.

Garrisons were not housing in wow, if it was for some people then i agree with you as it was a super bad attempt at housing, but that isn't PG, i played wow and did the garrisons-it wasn't housing to me, it kinda could have been if they added a bit more but it was just a solo adventure for resources and exp.
It will be good to see what you have to say when we see anything PG has to offer with housing in the future, but right now comparing PG housing brainstorming to World of Warcraft housing which had none, is a dead end of a topic and i wish you could have played Ultima Online back in the day or give Outlands a try, or that new game thats in development trying to replicate UO stuff, atleast a emulated server of that game is remaking UO.. what was it called.. Legends of Aria or something, it has a bunch of servers with different staff that mod the server differently, one of them was remaking uo.