The game that had the most appealing player housing to me was UO.

I dream that one day I can play an MMORPG that has the open-world housing and character customisation of The Sims and a totally player-driven economy. A game where combat is NOT the first and foremost motivation but merely another path a player may choose.

Originally posted by Zayne3145

The game that had the most appealing player housing to me was UO.

I dream that one day I can play an MMORPG that has the open-world housing and character customisation of The Sims and a totally player-driven economy. A game where combat is NOT the first and foremost motivation but merely another path a player may choose.

No, that game had crap furniture and other stuff.

The front of the fridge for example always faced inwards towards the wall no matter how you tried to place it and you couldn't even buy a bed for your apartment.

I mean what the *bleep* is up with that?!

EverQuest II had the best furniture of all MMO:s made so far.

In my opinion SWG had the best system. Yes, there were problems with it but nothing is perfect.  I had several houses and decorating them was very, very fun for me.    I built one of my houses along the town square and I had a good view of the shuttle port and cantina.  I would be on my balcony and wave to people and they'd come up and visit and we'd plan our next adventure.  Most of my friends took pride in our houses, and enjoyed showing them off to each other.  There was also a considerable amount of freedom in where you could place items within your house, which really fostered that creative aspect of interior design.

LOTRO on the other hand is not so great.  The main problem with LOTRO's housing is that the neighborhoods are instanced and I never see anyone in my neighborhood.  This makes the feature seem uninteresting to me.  Also, unlike SWG, you can not place items anywhere in your house.  Their whole 'hook' system just feels too restrictive to me.

Originally posted by daarco

Originally posted by Locklain

Player housing is going to die off right along with grouping.  The new generation of MMOers would much rather solo their way to cap and then spout off their leet speech while T-bagging a guy they just ganked. 

 

What about the old generation? They should earn a game to. And dont the developer get that a 30 year old person have more money then a 13 year old child! Why not make a game for grow ups?

I mean, its the people in thier 30s that made the gaming industry so big in the first place. Why abandon them now?

Because older gamers also don't care about the housing feature. If there is resources, I bet players (all of them .. old and young) would prefer a new dungeon zone with bosses + scripting events, then player housing.

Remember it cost resource to do this .. and ask yourself what other content one has to give up to get it.

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Originally posted by nariusseldon

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Originally posted by daarco

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Originally posted by Locklain

Player housing is going to die off right along with grouping.  The new generation of MMOers would much rather solo their way to cap and then spout off their leet speech while T-bagging a guy they just ganked. 

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What about the old generation? They should earn a game to. And dont the developer get that a 30 year old person have more money then a 13 year old child! Why not make a game for grow ups?
I mean, its the people in thier 30s that made the gaming industry so big in the first place. Why abandon them now?

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Because older gamers also don't care about the housing feature. If there is resources, I bet players (all of them .. old and young) would prefer a new dungeon zone with bosses + scripting events, then player housing.
Remember it cost resource to do this .. and ask yourself what other content one has to give up to get it.
 

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Originally posted by Midnitte

 

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Originally posted by nariusseldon

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Originally posted by daarco

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Originally posted by Locklain

 

Player housing is going to die off right along with grouping.  The new generation of MMOers would much rather solo their way to cap and then spout off their leet speech while T-bagging a guy they just ganked. 

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What about the old generation? They should earn a game to. And dont the developer get that a 30 year old person have more money then a 13 year old child! Why not make a game for grow ups?
I mean, its the people in thier 30s that made the gaming industry so big in the first place. Why abandon them now?

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Because older gamers also don't care about the housing feature. If there is resources, I bet players (all of them .. old and young) would prefer a new dungeon zone with bosses + scripting events, then player housing.
Remember it cost resource to do this .. and ask yourself what other content one has to give up to get it.
 

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Which is why the genre is the way it is, developers aren't taking risks. They're following the generic formula brought forth by blizzard.

 

Which is great .. because they are responding to customers. I am sure if playing housing is the #1 wanted feature of WOW's player-base, blizzard will implement it. There is no point doing it for a few people while making a new dungeon can benefit everyone.

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Originally posted by nariusseldon

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Originally posted by Midnitte

 

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Originally posted by nariusseldon

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Originally posted by daarco

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Originally posted by Locklain
 
Player housing is going to die off right along with grouping.  The new generation of MMOers would much rather solo their way to cap and then spout off their leet speech while T-bagging a guy they just ganked. 

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What about the old generation? They should earn a game to. And dont the developer get that a 30 year old person have more money then a 13 year old child! Why not make a game for grow ups?
I mean, its the people in thier 30s that made the gaming industry so big in the first place. Why abandon them now?

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Because older gamers also don't care about the housing feature. If there is resources, I bet players (all of them .. old and young) would prefer a new dungeon zone with bosses + scripting events, then player housing.
Remember it cost resource to do this .. and ask yourself what other content one has to give up to get it.
 

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Which is why the genre is the way it is, developers aren't taking risks. They're following the generic formula brought forth by blizzard.
 

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Which is great .. because they are responding to customers. I am sure if playing housing is the #1 wanted feature of WOW's player-base, blizzard will implement it. There is no point doing it for a few people while making a new dungeon can benefit everyone.

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I think I'd rather see something new and exciting rather then the same thing done wrong 25 times.

Just an aside from a devils advocate perspective:

We're kinda reminisching about SWG/UO housing with rose-tinted glasses on here; while the player houses in those two games were extremely good and had an unparalleled degree of customization and variety; both had their downsides. I'm sure all of us who played them can remember the vast areas of land festooned with houses that had been abandoned or just reserved by people who had no intention of really using them.

And let's not forget the eBay sales of UO castles for hundreds of quid.

I'm actually in favour of instanced housing a la LotRO as the most accessible and least intrusive method.

Originally posted by Midnitte

 

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Your missing the point, developers are taking the safe, generic road. Its like making the same movie over and over again. You'd get Garfield 25 instead of Wall-e, Shawshank Redemption and pulp fiction.

 

I think I'd rather see something new and exciting rather then the same thing done wrong 25 times.

New != better. I would much rather see Return of the Jedi than Wall-e (which is not that new anyway).

Same idea implemented differently and implemented RIGHT = win.

Godfather 2, Spiderman 2, Xmen 2 ... plenty of good examples. In the entertainment business (that include movies & games), often execution >>>>> new ideas.

New ideas are cheap. Put two fresh grad in a room for 3 hrs and you have more new ideas you can implement in 10 years. Getting something that works ... that is hard.

WOW is a better game than 99% of the crap out there because NOT of new ideas, but better execution and polish. That is a lesson developers should learn.

I think V:SoH was the last game that I played with open player housing, and I thought it was decent later on.

I didn't like having so many plots bunched up in one area to the point that it would have more buildings than nearby "towns".

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Originally posted by nariusseldon

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Originally posted by Midnitte

 

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Your missing the point, developers are taking the safe, generic road. Its like making the same movie over and over again. You'd get Garfield 25 instead of Wall-e, Shawshank Redemption and pulp fiction.
 
I think I'd rather see something new and exciting rather then the same thing done wrong 25 times.

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New != better. I would much rather see Return of the Jedi than Wall-e (which is not that new anyway).
Same idea implemented differently and implemented RIGHT = win.
Godfather 2, Spiderman 2, Xmen 2 ... plenty of good examples. In the entertainment business (that include movies & games), often execution >>>>> new ideas.
New ideas are cheap. Put two fresh grad in a room for 3 hrs and you have more new ideas you can implement in 10 years. Getting something that works ... that is hard.
WOW is a better game than 99% of the crap out there because NOT of new ideas, but better execution and polish. That is a lesson developers should learn.

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Being new or old has nothing to do with how great something is, what you'd rather see is an opinion, but the fact return of the jedi was made and not another porky's is because of risks taken. New ideas are not cheap, they're merely misunderstood, you could get the idea of making an MMO with ASCII graphics and not understand how it should be implemented. And WoW only has alot of subscriptions, that doesn't make it 99% better, by this logic Hilter was great because 100% of newspapers praised him. WoW is in no way polished, it's PVP is a great demonstration of this, a majority of arena teams are Death Knights and Paladins, if that doesn't speak imbalance I've no clue what does. Even still is the fact WoW is only as polished as it is because of time, you could take the buggiest game and in time it would be stable, this is purely the result of testing and patching.

Player Housing leaves me totally uninterested.  I've played at least one game that featured it, and I didn't even bother to try it out.

Player housing is about immersion which is about RP. And sadly thats just not a major feature in a lot of games today.

The online fantasy games generally played are not really Role-Playing games.  They're just online Hack and Slash games with fantasy graphics and a chat system.  To me, other players are just NPCs with reasonable AI (sometimes not even THAT much!)  that I can chat with should I wish to - there's no incentive to role-play, no system that encourages or even rewards it.  They all boil down to grinding the mobs and questing endlessly for better gear by getting daft items like 6 Pristine Bat Wings or killing 20 Wolves.  With cookie-cutter races, classes, spells, abilities and equipment there is no real scope for Role-Playing.  Even on RP servers, if you blink, you'll miss it, because for every 1 person that would like to Role Play, another 20 couldn't care less.

These games pass the time well enough, and I like them to varying degrees, but let's not kid ourselves they are actually Role-Playing games.

i miss my old swg house =\

Alot of people don't really care about player housing. Not that its not cool. But they have to cater to the larger crowd and player housing isn't it at least not at this time.

The line of thinking in MMO-Land now is that, any feature not directly related to combat/quests/phat loot is only fluff.  The funny part is, all of those fluff features are what made MMOs unique in the first place and with out them the genre is just a half-assed imitation of other genres. 

Combat?  Pfft.  MMO combat has always been weak and that hasn't changed.  Quests?  Running the quest train in one of these MMOs is only slightly more interactive than watching a movie.  It's hilarious to think of that as quality gaming.  Every single player goes through every one of those freakin quests with the exact same outcome.  A retarded lab monkey could fumble his way through an instanced quest.  Loot?  Come on.  In most of these loot centric games every one basically ends up with the same shit any way, so what the hell is the point?

That said, I agree that you need non-instanced housing.  Put some sort of restriction on where and how the players can build their houses, just don't push them off to some isolated, detached zone.

Why is there an assumption that older players would tend to want player housing?  I'd think that if there was a discrepancy at all, players with more gaming experience would be less likely to be seduced by fluff.  Why would you need an in-game house if you have a real one, anyway?

Instanced housing is kind of pointless.  You can go home, but you live in the same place as everyone else, or at least a lot of other players.  Isn't it kind of jarring to see some stranger go in the front door of what is supposed to be your house?

As for non-instanced housing, the problem is that there are too many players.  In A Tale in the Desert, you had to be a good 5 minutes from the nearest interesting location if you didn't want someone else to come drop a camp on top of yours.  And that's in a game that topped out at about 2000 subscribers, spread out on an enormous map, in a game where the game mechanics largely discourage alts, and players can take the resources of those who have quit by destroying their camp.

If you were to instead start with a game where a server can have a couple thousand players online concurrently, players have a lot of alts, and there isn't strong reason to destroy housing of players who have quit, you could easily end up with hundreds of thousands of houses.  That's enough to blanket the map in some games.  If the game's scenery isn't meant to be covered with houses that hardly anyone ever visits, that will look really dumb.  ATITD's game world managed to seem rather deserted even though players would spend a large fraction of their time standing in their camp.
 

If you only allow as many players to have a house as looks decent on the map, that may satisfy a tiny fraction of hardcore players, but "content" that only a miniscule fraction of players will ever get access to isn't really content.

The issue isn't that player housing is worse than having nothing at all.  It's that player housing is worse than other uses for the development time it takes to implement it.

Housing never went away. If you'd stop playing WoW and try a different MMO, you'd see that for yourself.

The Credit Crunch hit us and no one could afford their monthly silver coin mortgage payments any more. :)

Housing has its place but only in so far as it develops in game community, if it does not do that its just another hobby like fishing.