Lets say that this is something FC is looking at, and lets say it could be potentially on the table as an option in the future.

Maybe they just need to know why the community would like to see this addition. (If at all)

With that in mind, adding for the sake of it is one thing, adding because there is general appeal for it is another.

From a technical point of view, there is quite a bit of work in the approach to get it added in, but what are the reasons why you would like to see it added?

Think of the question posed in respect to:

• Benefits

What are the benefits in player housing in other games you may of experienced and is it popular? Extra space / easy locale / social aspects / personal dungeon etc.   Why is player housing important to you? Do you spend a lot of time in your 'player house' in other games? RP is a big one here!  Dueling space?  Will keep ppl in game longer right?

• Drawbacks

Does the majority of the Conan community really want player housing? Does the ends justify the means? eg Would the time put in, in terms of development time be beneficial or would you rather they prioritize in other areas (think from business perspective)? Does it work with the lore and setting? Limitations of customizable items, how deep do you go. etc. Do you want a 'second life' aspect in AoC and does it really fit in?

• Implementation

So how would you have it set up in AoC? Seperate instance? How would people visit your house? What would you do there and how would that work? eg crafting / events etc.

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

Lets say that this is something FC is looking at, and lets say it could be potentially on the table as an option in the future.

Maybe they just need to know why the community would like to see this addition. (If at all)

With that in mind, adding for the sake of it is one thing, adding because there is general appeal for it is another.

From a technical point of view, there is quite a bit of work in the approach to get it added in, but what are the reasons why you would like to see it added?

Think of the question posed in respect to:

• Benefits

What are the benefits in player housing in other games you may of experienced and is it popular? Extra space / easy locale / social aspects / personal dungeon etc.   Why is player housing important to you? Do you spend a lot of time in your 'player house' in other games?

• Drawbacks

Does the majority of the Conan community really want player housing? Does the ends justify the means? eg Would the time put in, in terms of development time be beneficial or would you rather they prioritize in other areas? Does it work with the lore and setting? Limitations of customizable items, how deep do you go. etc. Do you want a 'second life' aspect in AoC and does it really fit im?

• Implementation

So how would you have it set up in AoC? Seperate instance? How would people visit your house? What would you do there and how would that work? eg crafting / events etc.

Although I no longer play, when I did I saw great potential for it. On the server I was playing I saw a real "server community" where guilds would have rivals, you would frequently see RPers. There would almost be a code of ethics. From what I could tell, prime of the AOC would not be against this IF done well.
 

Now AOC is very instanced, so the only way to handle it would be either "Plots", or insanced housing, maybe have it in the player cities?. A good example of instanced housing is EQ 2 where they had appartment districts that had anywhere from 10-40 different appartments/homes/suits, each you could rent out. The plus of this system is that it opened alot of room for imagination, you could custimize ALOT, so in the end, even though it was mostly fluff, It gave players a place to store items, and was loved by the RPers.

Another good example is the moghouse system implemented in FFXI. To make it have a use besides "Fluff" for furniture. They made it so in order to collect "Auction sales" you had to go to your moghouse and recieve the payment. So it worked like a AH sale pickup. Also you could plant certain types of trees or plants to grow fuits/items that gave stat bonuses or something like that. Lastly, the moghouse was absolutely neccesary because it was needed to store items. Which you would rack up hundreds of times the limit of your inventory. Also, it was used to swap between jobs which was essentially a interchangable class system.

Basically, to implement housing correctly, you need to go out on a limb. If you are going to have it be for fluff, then it better be pretty damn amazing as far as how much you are able to customize in the house. If you are going for mechanical, which imo makes it much more "practical", then that makes it all the better. But the worst thing you could do is give a player a home, weak custimization, and little/no reason to visit.

So in the end, I think the community would love it. The only huge drawbacks is if you could not find an actual reason to have homes. The number one rule is, "Make the players NEED it for one or more purposes". Also, make sure these purposes don't contradict any features currently in game rendering them useless. If you put something in like housing, you want to make sure it's not taking away from something you already have.

Anyway, as an earlier posted mentioned, the problem is instancing. Non-instanced housing (ala-SWG) can be a HUGE headache for devs, but realistically, instanced housing (ala-LoTRO) is near worthless, except as extra storage space.

Ya, I'd LOVE to see housing as adding an incredibly needed non-combat focus to the game, but until i could actually see how they implemented it, based mostly on the way the game is made and partly FC's track record, I'd be highly skeptical that it would be implemented in a way that would be appealing to me.

I'd like to see some quality job add by Funcom rather than those commerical stuff as if it tells people, hey, come to play AOC, we also have house like LOTRO. I understand the 3rd or 4th line mmorpg like AOC also wanted to upgrade itself to the position like LOTRO or even a WOW killer. But look closer at the game.

There are so many small zones in AOC but all use one Global chat, it is like multipurpose or all-in-one bathroom that you can cook in the bathroom, sleeping in the bathroom, yar, aslo eating in the bathroom as well. I'd expect Funcom could provide some useful and realistic chat sysytem for each zone. For example, if you are playing Field Of Dead then you have a LFF channel only for this map, if you go to Wild Land then you have a local chat channel.

Now that, even Tortage sharing the global chat and lot of them are just create a character to spam the global chat because the global chat channel is just like a all-in-one bathroom for you.

If some realistic thing is done then you may think about housing. However, I think Housing is the AOC killer. Enjoy yourself. 

Player housing will just take up more server space and create lag.  so I think it would be a bad idea.  But 2 each their own.

I love player housing but funcom need to ask themselves how well they can do it before starting because if the the dev time or technology isn't there to do it properly then the time is better spent elsewhere. Very few games have done housing properly and that suggests it to be quite a challenge.

Instanceing, ideally of course houses would not be instanced, this makes a massive difference to immerson and to feeling you have a real place in the world. Of course the citys are already instanced which is a big downer though it should make it much easier for the houses themselves not to be instanced. Being able to collect resources, build, upgrade a house in your player city will add a time sink, a sence of belonging, it will remove the souless, lifeless identikit problem the citys have.

It's all the better really if a game is built around housing from the outset as with any crafting, rp, place in the world type discussions SWG did it better than anyone else, I do though think it can be added at this stage. I like to see the house as something that belongs to all of your characters not just one and provides a base of operations. Storage is the most obvious useful aspect to housing especially storage that allows easy transfer between characters.

Having funiture, chests, fabrics, food, items for the housing crafted by players can also improve the economy and also revitalise crafting.

Ideally I'd like to see % based improvement items that apply to your entire account. How about the bed constructed with rare timbers with the bedding made from the hide of tiger from a boss deep in a single group instance giveing +5% health to all the characters on your account. Using this you can encourage people to enter group instances more often. You can do this with all sorts of items with the improvements being varied and their strength based on the difficulty to obtain the item. Some materials can be easy to get solo, some hard and time consuming solo, others may need a group or perhaps even a raid, some items can come from pvp too.

Housing is definatly a good thing especially if you can make it a time sink and a way to continue progression of characters, the more things you can do to keep progression going when people hit max level the longer you will be able to keep them.

Having a pub/tavern building would be great too as a place for guildmates to meet, I'd add a few minigames to this building, just things to pass the time and encourage gathering. Perhaps winning an arm wrestling minigame against a guildmate before going out adventuring could give you a 3 hour strength buff, winning the drinking minigame a 3 hour damage resistance buff. I don't know enough about conan lore to give good suggestions but ideally there would be a couple of games mostly skill based and a couple more luck based.

It's also a great way to keep the RP crowd happy, make sure there is loads of customisation, lots of options, let people hang trophys from glorious kills, make sure its a nice place to gather, you need too allow proper placement of items, just a you have a picture frame and it can go in 2 specific places per wall isn't going to please people.

I do not want player housing in AoC. I never used player housing in any other game that offered it, LOTRO, DAOC, etc. My play time is limited and decorating this and that in a house is not fun for me.

The only housing I used was in EQ2 for the extra storage. Other than that it was a pretty bare living place.

I think adding more bank space is a better thing.

If housing comes to AoC I would like to see it done like it is in EQ2.

I understand it may be important to RP'ers but for me I'd say I'd definitely prefer the development time to be used elsewhere. I'm talking about PVP arena, PVP quests, proper well organised in-game events, new bosses other fluff in the cities that can keep people interested and having fun for a long time.

I guess it all depends on the size of the hardcore RP community in AoC though - at the end of the day, whatever attracts more people to the game is good for everyone who plays the game in the long run.  My 2 cents...

EDIT: If they could pull some staff from Secret World to handle "extra" stuff like player housing, that would be cool

I personally think player housing is useless, I'd never use it for anything but storage.

One intense for each country. one  in cimmeria ,one in aqui ,one in stygia and one in khitai.

Storage ,crafting (better item with instrument,tool,)and economy

my opinion , dont troll

i think one of the biggest problem with AOC is its lack of personalization. A house would be good to go into and do other content besides combat all the time. Just because im doing a fatality doesnt mean im bored. Just because the content isnt action packed, doesnt mean im not interested.

For me, player housing would be a great addition and much needed fluff. AOC really has no fluff, which is one of teh reasons why people get bored with it. At the endgame you can only raid, seige, and craft, and minigame, And those never change in style.

Originally posted by jadan2000

i think one of the biggest problem with AOC is its lack of personalization. A house would be good to go into and do other content besides combat all the time. Just because im doing a fatality doesnt mean im bored. Just because the content isnt action packed, doesnt mean im not interested.

For me, player housing would be a great addition and much needed fluff. AOC really has no fluff, which is one of teh reasons why people get bored with it. At the endgame you can only raid, seige, and craft, and minigame, And those never change in style.

damn that sounds like most mmo..including WOW which is the most successful, so your logic must be flawed

I would love to see some kind of housing in the game. I would introduce a skill for creating furniture from the fancy to the cheap. You should be able to have a house in the main city areas.

Originally posted by cybertrucker

Originally posted by jadan2000

i think one of the biggest problem with AOC is its lack of personalization. A house would be good to go into and do other content besides combat all the time. Just because im doing a fatality doesnt mean im bored. Just because the content isnt action packed, doesnt mean im not interested.

For me, player housing would be a great addition and much needed fluff. AOC really has no fluff, which is one of teh reasons why people get bored with it. At the endgame you can only raid, seige, and craft, and minigame, And those never change in style.

 

damn that sounds like most mmo..including WOW which is the most successful, so your logic must be flawed

wow has a huge huge ammount of fluff these days, hundreds of different mounts, hundreds of different social pets, acheivements, fireworks. little toys, santa outfits, wedding outfits. loads of seasonal and holiday events. While I also get bored of wow's endgame after a few months there is way more to do than aoc.