Guild Wars 2

I think the question for getting player housing started about 3 years ago…

I was just wondering if we are any closer in getting player housing?

Don’t get me wrong, the guild stuff is pretty nice looking ,however, I’m not going to invest time, mats, and gold/gems into some thing that isn’t mine. That simple.

Since HOT released I have secretly been hoping that Player Houses would come with the next expansion. And why not? After all we could say that the guild hall decorations and customization may have indeed been a testing ground for Anet with regards to the player housing part.

Also they wowed us in HOT with Gliding and the Guild Halls/decorations part. So again I say why not? They will have to do something pretty cool to wow us again like they did the first time around. So I am still hoping for it!

As far as I know Anet have never said they have any intention of adding player housing.

Which doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen (I don’t remember them talking about planning to add gliding to the game either), but it does mean you shouldn’t assume they’re working on it, or even considering working on it, regardless of how many people have asked.

We have home instances. I imagine that they would allow us to decorate our home instances before creating a separate player housing system.

Legendaries got canned. Don’t expect player housing for at least another 2-3 years.

I’ve just picked a nice spot in our GH and put my “House” there. Still, I could use a bed decoration, so I don’t have to sleep on the couch anymore…

There is a nice house in Divinity’s Reach that has no NPC’s inside. I think of it as mine. Also, one of the NPC girls in the tavern is my imaginary girlfriend who I am cheating on with that tramp on the 2nd floor. There’s an old man who keeps telling me to get out of his house in another building. I pretend he’s my grandfather and I let him stay in my old place, but he’s too senile to understand. Every day I pretend to water the plants in front of my pretend house. That’s why they always look so green.
. . .
. . .
. . .
I have no life! I am soooooooo loooooonely! sob

Nutjob.9021:

There is a nice house in Divinity’s Reach that has no NPC’s inside. I think of it as mine. Also, one of the NPC girls in the tavern is my imaginary girlfriend who I am cheating on with that tramp on the 2nd floor. There’s an old man who keeps telling me to get out of his house in another building. I pretend he’s my grandfather and I let him stay in my old place, but he’s too senile to understand. Every day I pretend to water the plants in front of my pretend house. That’s why they always look so green.
. . .
. . .
. . .
I have no life! I am soooooooo loooooonely! sob

Where is your house located at approximately? Do you lock the door? Do you have nice things?

ekarat.1085:

We have home instances. I imagine that they would allow us to decorate our home instances before creating a separate player housing system.

^This.

Yes, our player housing is the “home” instance. We can “decorate” it with trees, Nodes, ect.

… it would be awesome if we could use scribing and guild hall decorations in the home instance.

Danikat.8537:

As far as I know Anet have never said they have any intention of adding player housing.

Which doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen (I don’t remember them talking about planning to add gliding to the game either), but it does mean you shouldn’t assume they’re working on it, or even considering working on it, regardless of how many people have asked.

Actually, some of the Devs did speak about Player Housing before launch, and stated it would not come at launch, but probably with Guild Halls.

(Decided to look it up and provide the link:) http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/18447-guild-info-discussion-thread/page__st__180#entry887047

I really want player housing it’s the only reason why I still play one of my old MMOs.

Why is a house in an MMO fun? Do you get XP from vacuuming? Find random coins under the couch cushions? Gain materials from doing yard work?

I honestly don’t see the attraction.

DeanBB.4268:

Why is a house in an MMO fun? Do you get XP from vacuuming? Find random coins under the couch cushions? Gain materials from doing yard work?

I honestly don’t see the attraction.

Not everyone wants to find exp and stuff every step in Tyria. There are players who enjoy building houses for creativity and roleplay. It’s a kind of “fun” too. Also, player housing is always OPTIONAL in MMOs. You are NOT forced to do it. Just like I don’t see the “attraction” of fractals, that doesn’t mean others can’t enjoy it.

Mea.5491:

DeanBB.4268:

Why is a house in an MMO fun? Do you get XP from vacuuming? Find random coins under the couch cushions? Gain materials from doing yard work?

I honestly don’t see the attraction.

Not everyone wants to find exp and stuff every step in Tyria. There are players who enjoy building houses for creativity and roleplay. It’s a kind of “fun” too. Also, player housing is always OPTIONAL in MMOs. You are NOT forced to do it. Just like I don’t see the “attraction” of fractals, that doesn’t mean others can’t enjoy it.

Exactly this. Sometimes it’s nice and/or relaxing to do something in a game that doesn’t reward anything and doesn’t require skill. Some people like to sit in player housing decorating it for a long time, even if no one else will see it. Its one of those things you either get or you don’t get.

Nutjob.9021:

There is a nice house in Divinity’s Reach that has no NPC’s inside. I think of it as mine. Also, one of the NPC girls in the tavern is my imaginary girlfriend who I am cheating on with that tramp on the 2nd floor. There’s an old man who keeps telling me to get out of his house in another building. I pretend he’s my grandfather and I let him stay in my old place, but he’s too senile to understand. Every day I pretend to water the plants in front of my pretend house. That’s why they always look so green.

This was amazing, thanks. Haven’t laughed that hard in a while.

On topic: /yes to player housing!

DeanBB.4268:

Why is a house in an MMO fun? Do you get XP from vacuuming? Find random coins under the couch cushions? Gain materials from doing yard work?

I honestly don’t see the attraction.

It’s like a guild hall, on a small scale. Right now we have a “Home Instance” and it would be nice to be able to make it look more like Our home, as opposed to section of the map that we can put harvesting nodes into.

The idea of having a home instance is for the same reasons why a player wants various skins they can use, or dyes, or Mini’s ,. They want homes for the same reasons why they buy glider skins and Total Make over kits, or any of the other various hundreds of means to look someway or another.

By the logic you put out, since there is no EXP, Loot, or Coin gained from having a custom look to your character, so why not have every character look the same?

As it stands, I like the idea of player housing. Just maybe some way to make my Home Instance more Mine would be enough.

STIHL.2489:

DeanBB.4268:

Why is a house in an MMO fun? Do you get XP from vacuuming? Find random coins under the couch cushions? Gain materials from doing yard work?

I honestly don’t see the attraction.

It’s like a guild hall, on a small scale. Right now we have a “Home Instance” and it would be nice to be able to make it look more like Our home, as opposed to section of the map that we can put harvesting nodes into.

The idea of having a home instance is for the same reasons why a player wants various skins they can use, or dyes, or Mini’s ,. They want homes for the same reasons why they buy glider skins and Total Make over kits, or any of the other various hundreds of means to look someway or another.

By the logic you put out, since there is no EXP, Loot, or Coin gained from having a custom look to your character, so why not have every character look the same?

As it stands, I like the idea of player housing. Just maybe some way to make my Home Instance more Mine would be enough.

Yeah, mine is full of people I don’t know, standing around yakking and looking at my nodes in a way I find unsettling. Can I trust them with my nodes when I’m not there?

No to Player Housing.

No a million times to Player Housing.

Every time ArenaNet focuses on features it’s always to the detriment of “real content”. I do not understand the obsession with GW2: The Sims, and likely never will.

One of the issues with player housing I have experianced in other games that have it , is what to do with the houses when the player leaves the game.
You can easily end up with the equivalent of deserted cities full of abandoned houses.
MMO companies are reluctant to take someones house for the same reasons that they dont delete your characters even if you havnt played for many years.

Maybe an assumption but the houses would be account wide and you could maybe invite people in as you can do with your home instance. They wouldn’t be per character so you’d easily end up with a situation where your norn mesmer was in your asura necro home and really unhappy about all the minion food bowls on the floor.
So you’re already unpleasing some people.

They’d have to be for paying customers only or require a f2p player to spend money to unlock it and to avoid empty housing there should be an ongoing fee for keeping it going. Fail to pay and it gets archived and then deleted at some point.
Pretty much everything would need to be behind a paywall as if you’re not playing the rest of the game you’re not making anet any money altho everything could be mat/gold/quest based collections with recipes in a vendor like scribe is. But then people would complain about the costs and having to do stuff when all they want to do is rearrange furniture.

If it was a home instance then you may need to make a different one for each one that exists at the moment as Black Citadel is a different shape/size to Divinity’s Reach. That could mean not having a customised home instance in each area or making several and if there is a cost to that, paying multiple times. It could also mean accepting the fact that the old wood dresser you love in DR isn’t available in BC and BC gets an aggressive fireplace that you can’t get in DR. This could be great as your charr could have a charr home and your asura could have an asura home or it could just lead to thousands of threads asking for x from y home instance to be made available in z home instance.

And of course no matter how much stuff you make, we’ll always want more. And then be disappointed when the devs don’t want to make yet another set of free curtains and you don’t want to pay 100 gems for them.

And all in all I can’t see why the devs would bother, it adds some flavour for a few people but nothing really to the game in terms of sell able features that they consistently advertise. New map – advertise. Player housing with a million caveats.. hard to advertise.

mauried.5608:

One of the issues with player housing I have experianced in other games that have it , is what to do with the houses when the player leaves the game.
You can easily end up with the equivalent of deserted cities full of abandoned houses.
MMO companies are reluctant to take someones house for the same reasons that they dont delete your characters even if you havnt played for many years.

If it’s in your home instance then it won’t be a deserted city full of abandoned houses.

What I think they should do is have players designate one character as their primary which gets a homestead and the other characters on the account basically live on the homestead. Have it where they are NPCs in it if they were parked there.

Homesteads could be something like Cragstead on Wayfarer Foothills. It would act like the current home instance but nodes would be transferred to it and you could purchase upgrades. You could give people access via a list and they could visit when your not home. A homestead would give you space to put in a small farm of nodes and maybe a way to display your weapons, armor and achievements.

They could have homes inside cities, one home per city, that you have access to. (Everyone uses the same home in a city. The interior is instanced). Each home will be account or character bound but is separate from the homes in the other cities. Being separate, unlike the current home instance, means each can be decorated individually so your Charr(s) can have a Charr home, your Sylvari(s) can have a Sylvari home and so on.

I was surprised they didn’t just allow us to decorate the existing home instances with the launch of HoT, it’s probably a storage space issue, but I’d love to have decoratable, account-wide home instances. Give people a reason to level scribing. Maybe next expansion.

Player housing would be nice, but after seeing the gold sink monstrosity that Anet made of the guild halls suddenly the idea doesn’t excite me as much.

I’m not opposed to housing, but still don’t see the attraction. It’d have to be in the Home Instance, so only NPCs would be wandering around. Lonely. Worse still if it was its own instance, then there would be nobody. Unless you can Buy A Bride/Groom from the gem store, then 9 months later they let you Buy a Baby…

Sure, you could invite others in, but still.

I want my housing from Star Wars The Old republic—They were called Galactic Strongholds…Those houses were HUGE!!! They had multi-rooms and different planets with different locations. (you can reference Dulfy.net for what they are like)
That could be done in this game with regions instead of planets. And with new expansions—make a new house…simple.

General Health.9678:

and to avoid empty housing there should be an ongoing fee for keeping it going. Fail to pay and it gets archived and then deleted at some point.

No. No. 15,000 chars of NO.

This game is made so you can build up your characters and account, walk away, and come back later when life allows and not have lost anything except the chance to get at things that happened while you were away. Rent/Tax/Mortgage on game items turns it into a must-do chore to log in and if you do have RL reasons you can’t do that, then you lose what you had and there goes your interest in returning.

The open world doesn’t have room for all the players to have homes anyway. It’ll have to be instanced, at which point dead housing isn’t an issue. Other than maybe in the area of data storage, but I think these days that’s probably not the biggest concern in designing the system.

Steven.7534:

I want my housing from Star Wars The Old republic—They were called Galactic Strongholds…Those houses were HUGE!!! They had multi-rooms and different planets with different locations. (you can reference Dulfy.net for what they are like)
That could be done in this game with regions instead of planets. And with new expansions—make a new house…simple.

Dashingsteel said something relevant

Dashingsteel.3410:

Player housing would be nice, but after seeing the gold sink monstrosity that Anet made of the guild halls suddenly the idea doesn’t excite me as much.

I’d hate to see the price tag that ANet would put on a multi region home.

Sartharina.3542:

… it would be awesome if we could use scribing and guild hall decorations in the home instance.

That seems pretty reasonable to me. (provided the code allows for it — just because the code has home instances and guild halls does not mean it’s easy to decorate home instances like guild halls — or maybe it is easy, I can’t know as I don’t have access to the code)

I would rather that they do a small improvement over the current system than take the time to get a whole new system. It’s hopefully less effort for them and hopefully fewer bugs and imbalances for us.

Decorations…
Could be Gem shop
Could be Scribe…..or even…..something like we had in GW1….
Like the Hall of Monuments—Achievements from doing things in the game!!

mauried.5608:

One of the issues with player housing I have experianced in other games that have it , is what to do with the houses when the player leaves the game.
You can easily end up with the equivalent of deserted cities full of abandoned houses.
MMO companies are reluctant to take someones house for the same reasons that they dont delete your characters even if you havnt played for many years.

Having played FF14 I can see what you are talking about but I think this stems from devs trying to satisfy the vocal minority that cry about needing to be able to lord their swag over others rather than an inherent problem with housing.

Thus, we get a system where houses are in a neighborhood of sorts where you are essentialy forced to look at other’s property when interacting with yours.

While instanced housing won’t appeal to vapid narcissists, it will help avoid the terrible “subdivision” problem. It would also allow Anet to let us build houses in multiple locals so you can have a beach house in S Kryta or a nice cabin on the side of a mountain in the Shiverpeaks.

mauried.5608:

One of the issues with player housing I have experianced in other games that have it , is what to do with the houses when the player leaves the game.
You can easily end up with the equivalent of deserted cities full of abandoned houses.
MMO companies are reluctant to take someones house for the same reasons that they dont delete your characters even if you havnt played for many years.

Since it’s instance based, and everyone uses the same port, and section of the map, there would be no sense or feeling of “Abandonment” or Deserted Cities, even if a million people left their homes behind.

As it’s all the same foot print.

ekarat.1085:

We have home instances. I imagine that they would allow us to decorate our home instances before creating a separate player housing system.

This. It would be my hope that ANet would put less resources into such features and more into sustainable, regular releases of playable content.

IndigoSundown.5419:

ekarat.1085:

We have home instances. I imagine that they would allow us to decorate our home instances before creating a separate player housing system.

This. It would be my hope that ANet would put less resources into such features and more into sustainable, regular releases of playable content.

Ok, I understand the resources for this would take up some devs…but think of this….
They put out a set of weapon skins and glider wings about every two weeks, so SLOWLY adding a house and furniture at some point and slowing down the glider research to make more money for the game might help on the other end to get more sustainable, regular releases of playable content (Money into game= more game to play)

IndigoSundown.5419:

ekarat.1085:

We have home instances. I imagine that they would allow us to decorate our home instances before creating a separate player housing system.

This. It would be my hope that ANet would put less resources into such features and more into sustainable, regular releases of playable content.

Have to go with this aswell.

My personal reason is simple, I’ve never been a big fan of player housing to begin with (pure subjective opinion). Main reason being, it’s always either heavily instanced meaning arenanet spends vast ressources on things a huge part of the playerbase will never see (the ones not caring about housing). Or it creates vast areas of content out of hand of the developer (looking at you DaoC housing) where you are very reliant on taste, effort and style of players (and we all know those things are heavily subjective).

I like the take of the home instance and think the idea is very underdeveloped. It would be great to have arenanet expand on this (maybe allow for some decorations similar to the guild decorations in a select area in the home instance).

I’d love for a proper type of housing system, but I doubt the ability to properly implement this. There is a reason many western MMOs have been dialing back on this issue. It essentially has the developer give up some of his influence to the playerbase (which can be good and bad). This is also the reason I believe you’ll never see player housing in WoW. I doubt Blizzard for example would ever allow for so much player contoll.

And yet anyone who saw any of the amazing places created in City Of Heroes will know how, once you have a framework, this should be relatively easy to provide because essentially you are just using existing assets.

With CoH you had a blank squared area and added walls, levels, decorations and with relatively few options people still made amazingly different yet cohesive bases. Check out google images for examples.

To keep them going you paid some upkeep. Which I know was hated on earlier but if you want to keep it, pay for it, to paraphrase Beyonce.

CoH Bases… Oh how I miss those…
Once you got the hang of it, it was amazing what you could build… Man, I miss my castle and forest. T-T

As far as the subject at hand about Player Housing, perhaps the current Guild Hall system can be adjusted for it?
The current guild halls we got are huge, clearly meant for bigger guilds. Nothing wrong with that, per say… but if they added smaller plots of land in the future, and adjusted the cost of things, then I think the current Guild Hall system could work well.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I’d hate to see the price tag that ANet would put on a multi region home.

Those SWTOR houses weren’t cheap either. I remember it going up to 7-9mill credits to fully unlock the bigger strongholds.

Going off the kinda things that would buy you in SWTOR, that’s 3-4 BIS crafted weapons or 3-4 nightmare raid carries (at the prices my former team charged). Roughly equal to multiple legendary money in GW2 I’d say.

Ubik.8315:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I’d hate to see the price tag that ANet would put on a multi region home.

Those SWTOR houses weren’t cheap either. I remember it going up to 7-9mill credits to fully unlock the bigger strongholds.

Going off the kinda things that would buy you in SWTOR, that’s 3-4 BIS crafted weapons or 3-4 nightmare raid carries (at the prices my former team charged). Roughly equal to multiple legendary money in GW2 I’d say.

^^^^^^^^—-you got the Idea!!! Loved the SWTOR houses!!! they were HUGE and you could put a BUNCH of stuff in them…being able to use trade network, mail, at the house instead of going to Fleet rocked!

If they ever do something like this,Rift and W* are the games with the best housing,so they can take ideas from there.

I agree, I would be happy if it were something like dimensions in Rift. Also, housing items should come from: NPC (building blocks and basic stuff), crafting and gem store.

Back when they were asking for feedback on the idea of guild halls, my biggest suggestion was that they make sure that any system they put in was able to be used with player housing as well. While we have yet to see if they did that or not, I really hope they did.

Any art assets needed for it should mostly exist. The big question is how do we want them to implement it? If it’s based off of the same systems as a guild hall, then I’d expect it to be that you pay to claim a “house” area (instanced, naturally), and then you talk to an NPC in the instance to decorate and buy upgrades.

You could start with a tent, and if you supply the NPC with enough items, then you can upgrade to a small building. More items, and you eventually upgrade to a larger building. Depending on which area you’ve purchased/claimed, your home will be in one of the different styles used in the game.

Extras: I would say either no crafting stations, or only one of the player’s choosing once they’ve built up enough. The home instance nodes should stay in the home instance (there can be a lot of them, they’d take up too much space), but a few different nodes could then be sold for the personal home. A small garden with a few basic plants you can harvest, for example. Or a chicken coop that yields a couple of eggs/bird meat a day.

What ANet gains: The answer there is pretty much what they gained with guild halls, time investment and a material/gold sink. Let’s look at those big guilds that have fully decked out guild halls, and ask ourselves “How many of them are really funding that?” If they split it fairly amongst all the members, then each person had to provide very little. That’s the kind of sink player housing would be. Many small sinks, rather than the big one we tend to think of guild halls being.

And by making it something you can upgrade and/or decorate, you encourage players to invest time and effort into working with it. That makes them more invested into the game, and less likely to just walk away. It also means that they can put something in the gemstore for it (such as maybe a version of the personal farm that grows flax), and some people will snap it up. Gem sales are always good for ANet.

I still think that the guild hall system was a test for player housing, if it can be done on a grand scale of the guild hall maps, making housing for players would be relatively easy. Hell, they could even expand scribe by doing that as more people will want to build decorations. Also, like a few others have pointed out gem items would sell like hot cakes with the amount of RPers/ those that want to decorate everything.

Palador.2170:

Back when they were asking for feedback on the idea of guild halls, my biggest suggestion was that they make sure that any system they put in was able to be used with player housing as well. While we have yet to see if they did that or not, I really hope they did.

Any art assets needed for it should mostly exist. The big question is how do we want them to implement it? If it’s based off of the same systems as a guild hall, then I’d expect it to be that you pay to claim a “house” area (instanced, naturally), and then you talk to an NPC in the instance to decorate and buy upgrades.

You could start with a tent, and if you supply the NPC with enough items, then you can upgrade to a small building. More items, and you eventually upgrade to a larger building. Depending on which area you’ve purchased/claimed, your home will be in one of the different styles used in the game.

Extras: I would say either no crafting stations, or only one of the player’s choosing once they’ve built up enough. The home instance nodes should stay in the home instance (there can be a lot of them, they’d take up too much space), but a few different nodes could then be sold for the personal home. A small garden with a few basic plants you can harvest, for example. Or a chicken coop that yields a couple of eggs/bird meat a day.

What ANet gains: The answer there is pretty much what they gained with guild halls, time investment and a material/gold sink. Let’s look at those big guilds that have fully decked out guild halls, and ask ourselves “How many of them are really funding that?” If they split it fairly amongst all the members, then each person had to provide very little. That’s the kind of sink player housing would be. Many small sinks, rather than the big one we tend to think of guild halls being.

And by making it something you can upgrade and/or decorate, you encourage players to invest time and effort into working with it. That makes them more invested into the game, and less likely to just walk away. It also means that they can put something in the gemstore for it (such as maybe a version of the personal farm that grows flax), and some people will snap it up. Gem sales are always good for ANet.

It could make A-net some good money….if….they would do it….

Mea.5491:

I agree, I would be happy if it were something like dimensions in Rift. Also, housing items should come from: NPC (building blocks and basic stuff), crafting and gem store.

Rift Housing sounds interesting too

Guild halls certainly provide the foundations for it. I hope it happens someday, but I don’t think it will happen soon unfortunately. Would be great for making custom backdrops for screen shots while not interfering with any guildy’s creations.

Suggestion for the future to add continuity for the players, create housing in the game so that players like me can afk in it. Maybe have crafting stations a bank, and a trade post, also you can invite others to your house and duel. And also have different house layouts so that rich players can have mansions and poor/new/me can have huts or shacks until they can afford an upgrade. These are just some suggestions that were on the top of my mind. I know anet will find something creative to envelope housing.

Home instances are the best you’re going to get.