Lets Talk: Player Housing
A friendly Discussion about Player Housing.
I’ve never been too interested in this idea when playing other games, but in GW2 I am. The reason for this I believe is because it would add another form of content into the game and another outlet for players to express themselves, show off their achievements in a fun way and give the Home Instance a better sense of purpose. I also see it as giving players more to do, to work toward and collect for. It ALSO gives ANet a huge opportunity to make more profits from the game.
ANet could sell things like, armor dummies to display armor on, weapon racks for the same purpose, furniture, home upgrades such as increasing the size or adding a garden. If it was implemented as an Asura gate to the location of your home (maybe this would be an upgrade) then they could also sell relocation licenses that would allow you to change the location of your personal home from say the Shiverpeaks to Maguuma jungle.
I think we all know Anet has been working on something like this for some time (They have already confirmed that they have been working on guild halls, but don’t want to half-kitten it) if anything I’d REALLY hope they do something like runescape did back when it was in it’s prime in regards to houses, I know it’s a silly thing to reference, but they did housing in an amazing way, by giving out a password or code you could invite people into your housing instance for drinking competitions, 1 on 1 fights, and a lot of other things. You could add on additional things to your house by purchasing them with gold and materials. If Anet does what I hope they will be doing, housing with be incredibly in depth with plenty of things to get and HOPEFULLY we can have more than like 5 freakin people in an instance at once
I think we all know Anet has been working on something like this for some time (They have already confirmed that they have been working on guild halls, but don’t want to half-kitten it) if anything I’d REALLY hope they do something like runescape did back when it was in it’s prime in regards to houses, I know it’s a silly thing to reference, but they did housing in an amazing way, by giving out a password or code you could invite people into your housing instance for drinking competitions, 1 on 1 fights, and a lot of other things. You could add on additional things to your house by purchasing them with gold and materials. If Anet does what I hope they will be doing, housing with be incredibly in depth with plenty of things to get and HOPEFULLY we can have more than like 5 freakin people in an instance at once
Yeah that would be pretty sweet! Having events in a players house that players can activate and play with friends would be quite neat.
Whatever they do I think it’s got to have a lot of customization and offer a lot in the way of expression to the player.
Since posting this I have been thinking about the Asura gate idea. Having an Asura gate the leads to your personal home in the game and getting to choose the setting from locations in the game would be really awesome. Of course it likely wouldn’t be an actual place in the game but more like an area made to look like it’s in the Shiverpeaks or what-have-you.
another idea would be to be able to purchase a crafting station to put in your house. Perhaps this is going too far with the idea but what about a personal bank teller or trading post NPC? Yeah.. perhaps too far. But it’s fun to think about.
I think we all know Anet has been working on something like this for some time (They have already confirmed that they have been working on guild halls, but don’t want to half-kitten it) if anything I’d REALLY hope they do something like runescape did back when it was in it’s prime in regards to houses, I know it’s a silly thing to reference, but they did housing in an amazing way, by giving out a password or code you could invite people into your housing instance for drinking competitions, 1 on 1 fights, and a lot of other things. You could add on additional things to your house by purchasing them with gold and materials. If Anet does what I hope they will be doing, housing with be incredibly in depth with plenty of things to get and HOPEFULLY we can have more than like 5 freakin people in an instance at once
Yeah that would be pretty sweet! Having events in a players house that players can activate and play with friends would be quite neat.
Whatever they do I think it’s got to have a lot of customization and offer a lot in the way of expression to the player.
Since posting this I have been thinking about the Asura gate idea. Having an Asura gate the leads to your personal home in the game and getting to choose the setting from locations in the game would be really awesome. Of course it likely wouldn’t be an actual place in the game but more like an area made to look like it’s in the Shiverpeaks or what-have-you.
another idea would be to be able to purchase a crafting station to put in your house. Perhaps this is going too far with the idea but what about a personal bank teller or trading post NPC? Yeah.. perhaps too far. But it’s fun to think about.
No those are fantastic ideas, although you’d have to purchase or upgrade your house to have a personal banker or trading post. Also if I remember correctly in runescape you could make underground dungeons for people to fight mobs in, they were usually extremely hard and sometimes they dropped good loot. Now those are some old memories… I wonder what they’ve done to housing since then? Ah well, Im too busy with GW2 to check it out XD anyways keep ideas coming
I’m all for player and guild housing.
However it is so far down the list of things I’d rather see put into this game that I don’t even have the heart to discuss it.
Player housing (including the decoration and furbishing) amounts to content that for the most part only the owner, a single player can enjoy.
For many, this enjoyment is limited in direct proportion to the degree in which the housing can be displayed and shown off to others.
Instanced housing, while technically allowing players to do this, is a ‘sad’ and uninteresting method of implementation.
Unless a player can have his/her house in a ‘real’ non-instanced part of the world, i.e. have it freely viewable and accessible by other players, motivation and meaning is severely diminished.
If it exists only in an instance, it doesn’t really exist.
i personally liked how lotro handled it, you had neighborhoods where you’d have your house so you could see your neighbor’s place and they could see yours. i dunno how much strain that added to the servers though.
and it took kind of long for them to reset neighborhoods after some veteran players hadn’t played the game for a long time and new players couldn’t even get a house due to the limited amount of neighborhoods. so not a perfect system by any means but one of the more interesting ways it was implemented.
dunno how housing worked in everquest 2.
Ideally:
– player housing would offer a ton of customization based on race, etc
– furnishings would be crafted using existing metal, wood, leather, and cloth
– said furniture making craft would be able to make a bag that auto-sorted consumables
– trophies would be earned through in-game accomplishments
– gem shop items would be minimal, we’d craft or earn our stuff rather than buying it
Housing only seems logical if you could do things with your home. With a few games you could grow plants and gain gems and other stuff from them. There was a reason for the housing, hell it was on FFXI and that’s an ancient game so not sure why it’s not in Gw2 which is more modern.
But if they do put in housing they may charge like 6k gems for it etc.
ofcourse i am super for this idea, have you read my thread “new building skill and player owned housing”?
Let’s Not Talk: Player Housing.
Mud Bone – Sylvari Ranger
I’m keen.
I didn’t like the construction skill on Runescape particularly because of how much of an unnecessary click-intensive money sink it was for little gain, but it did have some awesome uses. You could train prayer efficiently, create teleportation portals, have extra storage, make custom boxing arenas and stuff, and even make your own mini dungeons with mob spawns and treasure chests.
There’s loads of potential for it on GW2 but my gosh it would require an immense amount of development time. I’ll have you know that on 6/6/06, ‘the falador massacre’ happened where a player was able to exploit a major bug with a POH (player-owned-house) allowing him to attack other players and steal their items… and yes, this did happen on that date. I was there… there were so many ingame riots. People went nuts (it was really fun LOL).
So, while I am perfectly cool with these getting implemented into GW2 one day I won’t be surprised if they aren’t because of how massive the project will be and to be honest there’s a lot of things I’d prefer them to focus their attention on over this. This shouldn’t be at the top of their list of things to do imo.
Player housing (including the decoration and furbishing) amounts to content that for the most part only the owner, a single player can enjoy.
For many, this enjoyment is limited in direct proportion to the degree in which the housing can be displayed and shown off to others.
Instanced housing, while technically allowing players to do this, is a ‘sad’ and uninteresting method of implementation.
Unless a player can have his/her house in a ‘real’ non-instanced part of the world, i.e. have it freely viewable and accessible by other players, motivation and meaning is severely diminished.
If it exists only in an instance, it doesn’t really exist.
And I believe I have a solution for that. You know that game, Dragon’s Prophet? I never played the game and but you can have a house, but you have to buy land.
So in Guild Wars 2, how about you go to the race-specific home instance, and instead of just some district, it’s actually a portal to an endless neighborhood. How would this work? It would be separated in streets, and a new street cannot be generated until all of the land is filled up with houses, and you can choose which land and how big your house can be. There can be exclusive items from the Gemstore, you can have a wall rack of weapons you collect, you can create jumping puzzles and custom dungeons. It’s like Runescape (I love that game despite its out-dated graphics because of the massive amount of content, lore, and customization).
Player housing like I described above would be amazing, GvG can be similar but instead it can be attacked by another guild and go through their traps, bosses they got, and stuff.
Probably I took these things from WS and other games that have features I admire, but GW2 has a gaping hole in it that I really want to be filled in.
Well either the homes are an indoor instance or a outdoor + indoor instance but that would require a system like Avascar is purposing. The problem with outdoor instances is that some people have very bad taste… and it’s technically more complicated. So I’d image we’d have rather a since in-door instance. Although a choice would be nice, since an indoor garden would be odd. Also my thief would be more comfortable with a camp site (but that’ll just create more technical difficulty for little gain).
We can look at the current home instance and look at what is right and wrong. Some of the issues: limited/no customization (the mining nodes were a step in the right direction), changes weren’t easily noticeable (personal story would introduce new characters but most players didn’t notice this), no reason to really go there (well nodes helped a bit).
Customisation would be one of the core things you’d have to include. There are plenty of other good ideas (such as mini-events or activities) but at it’s core you’d want to allow for the same personalisation as you can do to your characters (so your home can have a personality matching your character). So things like furniture, coloring / wall textures and in-game achievable trophies would be the easiest way of doing this.
The size and layout is an interesting consideration. Will everyone have the same indoor layout or will we be able to define this? We could start out with a small-ish room and then spend gold to expand, add more rooms, a window, a fireplace etc. To a certain extent of course, we don’t want a single instance crashing servers because of the number of rooms. Would rooms only scale horizontally but also vertically (for those that want a wizards tower)?
New rooms could possibly have themes. A armoury (where you could have a number of mannequins you could store armour templates on or where you could hang your legendaries for bragging purposes). A gallery could depict some of your achievements (a portrait of you standing on a mountain of Jotun for your Jotun slaying achievement).