Guild Wars 2

This may seem like a stretch, but I personally would like to see housing handled like in Wizard 101. The houses you could get were bought, though in this game having one set aside in your home instance would suffice. Pets could be set to free roam, the items you bought or made were free place-able, unlike LotRO where you had hooks and limited space. You could plant a garden, that produces “cards” but here we could have them produce something else and give players a reason to visit their “home”.

On a seperate request though, I would love the ability to fish from within my home instance once fishing is implemented. There is nothing more relaxing that fishing from within my own front room through the media of an online MMO.]

edit: IMO the dev time is well worth the investment IF done right, IF NOT then it is indeed a waste. They just need to find what works and what doesn’t for the players.

Player housing is a great idea for all the reasons people have already posted about. To the OP, you don’t go to your house and just stay there. You would go there from time to time to decorate, store stuff and do other things, but there would be no benefit to just staying in your house and never leaving.

I don’t see the point of guild halls at all. I’d rather the time and money was spent on player housing then guild halls. Oh, and adding fishing.

I disagree with the OP. Just because you don’t want to be sociable and do more in a MMORPG than run around slaughtering monsters/other players the entire time your logged into the game, doesn’t mean everyone shares your opinion.

Having a “home” on an RPG game makes perfect since. In fact, it’s one of the features of Aion that keeps me going back there to play when I’m bored on GW2. Aion set up their housing system to give lots of perks and incentives to players. You go home when its time to log out and because your character has “rested” you receive repose(an XP bonus) when you log back on to play. Aion has their housing system set up in a way which makes it fun to visit friends and guildmates and this adds to the social aspect of the game. Guild members and friends can visit each others homes and do simple daily tasks like watering guestblooms and in return they receive items they can exchange for things that are useful in the game. Coins used for ranked gear, enchantment stones to add to armor, furniture, wallpaper, etc. It’s a very rewarding system with a minimum amount of effort. And the task of setting up your home is optional. Many people participate and enjoy it while others don’t participate at all.

I don’t feel adding housing would useless and if done correctly, it certainly wouldn’t take away anything from the social aspect of GW2. In fact, you may be surprised how much closer something like a housing option would make the community. Variety in a game is important. People need more things to do than just running through dungeons and going from point A to point B killing monsters/other players all day long. This can become very boring.

ANet can even include player housing activities to the dailies. For example, helping your guild members in their homes (planting, gathering, etc). More ways to achieve dailies is always a welcome. Could it be that the new dailies are precursor to player housing ?

gwawer.9805:

Some players have stated that they want to see player homies in Guild wars two in the future. But in a massive multiplayer game, wouldn’t player homes just segregate the player base? If everyone was spending their game time inside their own homes, then you would not be able to go out into the world or even a major city and see a myriad of players around you going about. To me this presence of other players is pretty important to make me feel like I am immersed in a lively world. That is why a lot of people want to transfer off of underpopulated servers and onto more populated ones in every MMO. But player housing Butch’s cause people to become hermits and destroy the social aspect of this game.

Even Guild Halls to a certain extent would cause this player segregation. I would rather have gills spend their time inside their cities for everyone to see because that would let me know that my server is alive and teeming with people and it’s fun to hear the chatter as I’m doing my own business. But if a group of players segregates themselves into their own little Guildhall and spends all their time socializing with in that instance, then the city is would feel very empty. And now players have two places to socialize in the cities or in their Guild Halls or player homes and all this further aggravates the issue of not having enough players exploring about in the open world.

Player homes can make sense in a game like sky rim, a single player game, but in a massively multiplayer game, player homes and even Guild Halls are detrimental to the social life overall.

You know, I can see why you’d think this BUT some of us bought this game soleey so we could kitten our ebuds in our ebed without prying e-eyes. So no, this is a GREAT kittenING WAY to spend company time.

Housing systems tend to be one of my favorite facets in games that involve them (EQ2’s housing system was fantastic; LotRO’s, not so much, but I still enjoyed it). Those of us who are collectors especially would love something like this.

Not everything in the game needs to be about combat. I think it says bad things about our society that the best thing we can do with virtual worlds is turning them into war simulators.

+1 for housing. SWG, EQ2, LotRO all had great housing systems. Great time sinks, great money sinks, plus a source of pride for some.

In my opinion Anet just wants to keep releasing things over and over to keep the hype high and “ride the lightning” of GW2 success.
They want the game to look fresh and new all the time regardless if of all these 1000 features 990 are either unnecessary, underdeveloped or bugged.
This way they can draw more people to buy the game because they can say “we have a ton of things! we have this and this and this! we are the best!”.

By my standards instead, success is measured by quality.
I would never risk suggesting GW2 to friends saying it’s a revolutionary MMO just to have them then find out gear treadmills/fetch quests/bugs and a ton of bloat-features.

GW2 is becoming pretty much a bloat-game, too many currencies, too many materials, messy crafting, yet too little depth to characters.
But chaos looks fun and tempting from the outside so from a marketing perspective they are doing it right.

I pretty much abandoned the bloatware that PvE has become, I’ll stick to PvP and keep my hopes up that Anet remembers GW2 has a PvP part.

i agree with housing.
this is add more thing to do in the game,
such as showing trophy, crafting furniture, visiting friend’s house, and many more.
at least we will have something unique to display from personal story rather than home instance.

In FFXI there were player homes… nobody ever “hung out” in their home. It was a just a room basically, where you could manipulate the environment, display trinkets and seasonal reward items, and display event and accomplishment rewards. That game came out in 2003. It is now 2013… there is no way that it would be a tremendous developmental effort at this point.

Housing would add (more items), more then just gear to play for.

If they place the housing in cities, and attach housing the /map chat, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference in regards to the playerbase. Most cities except LA are already semi-dead, since everyone AFKs in LA and stands in LA screaming for fractals. It might, in fact, revitalize the /map chats of other cities besides just LA and DR. To me, that would be a good thing.

I remember I used to have a great time in SWG buying paintings and furniture for my house on Dantooine. I like player housing. Just adds another aspect to the game…which is never a bad thing

gwawer.9805:

But in a massive multiplayer game, wouldn’t player homes just segregate the player base?

If they use the home instance, then yeah, it’s worthless.

If they do it DAoC style with player housing suburbs, then it’s worth the effort.

Ansultares.1567:

gwawer.9805:

But in a massive multiplayer game, wouldn’t player homes just segregate the player base?

If they use the home instance, then yeah, it’s worthless.

If they do it DAoC style with player housing suburbs, then it’s worth the effort.

I used to be all about non-instanced player homes, having come from Shadowbane and other city building type MMOs… but after seeing it in a themepark MMO, particularly Aion, I realized its not a good idea at all.

Aion did an awesome job of implementing it- adding in a MASSIVE area with tons and tons of non-instanced houses and then a single instanced “studio” apartment complex for everyone to start with. The problem is that despite how much effort they put into adding a ridiculous number of houses… it just wasn’t enough. It’ll be worse for this game, since there are no factions. Servers can house how many people? 5,000-6,000 active at a shot? 10,000-20,000 total? Even if they went CRAZY and added 4,000 individual houses, which is a completely unrealistic goal for the devs to finish it any time soon… it won’t be enough. Even if they limited the houses to 1 per account, that is still only 4,000 out of how many people who will get to have homes. And tbh, a more realistic number of houses would probably be closer to 1,000.

Instanced homes are used for a reason, unfortunately, and this is one of them.

Tolmos.8395:

Instanced homes are used for a reason, unfortunately, and this is one of them.

You don’t just plop them down 1000 to a map. Even DAoC didn’t do that, instead breaking them into several zones before further segregating them into sub-divisions with terrain.

But you need something that other people can actually interact with. Personal instances, even if you can invite people over, don’t cut it.

I’d like to see Housing but something more guild interactive or with friends and the world itself

As to it being worth Dev time..Instanced Player housing and home items are a huge cash cow for SOE’s EQ2 ingame store, with many players owning the limit of 20 houses.

Home decoration has become a minigame of its own there, with achievements, displayable trophies, and a game mechanism to transport to homes put on display.

To bluntly state it isn’t worth Dev time is wrong. Dev time is also used to generate income for their employer, and SOE most certainly makes income from Player Housing with their cash store housing.

In a way now I remember that in about Items for gem store housing would be huge, but it needs to be interactive enough and fun to visit other players, and have parties at our home, everything.

With house items, expansions, etc… It’s good for ANet itself xD

Ansultares.1567:

Tolmos.8395:

Instanced homes are used for a reason, unfortunately, and this is one of them.

You don’t just plop them down 1000 to a map. Even DAoC didn’t do that, instead breaking them into several zones before further segregating them into sub-divisions with terrain.

But you need something that other people can actually interact with. Personal instances, even if you can invite people over, don’t cut it.

I didn’t mean unrealistic in terms of location, I meant unrealistic in terms of developer time and effort. Even reusing the same 5 houses over and over, placing them is a little more of a complex process than point and clicking 1,000 times. That would require a heap of a lot of work on their part.

chronus.1326:

They didn’t seggregate anyone in Everquest 2.

It was actually an awful lot of fun to decorate them; have your cat there and everything; craft furniture through crafting professions.

That was a good game; had a good economy too where you could make money out of crafting.

Dont know which game you played but i played EQ2 from day 1 and Guild halls killed people being in the towns everyone just went to their guild halls and hung out .

Player house,s were not not as bad but did not help.

If they bring these 2 things in it will hurt seeing any toons in the towns they will become ghost towns i have seen it happen before. We had a guild hall and had no reason to go to any of the cities.

I hope they dont bring in either or rides.

Beeca.9467:

chronus.1326:

They didn’t seggregate anyone in Everquest 2.

It was actually an awful lot of fun to decorate them; have your cat there and everything; craft furniture through crafting professions.

That was a good game; had a good economy too where you could make money out of crafting.

Dont know which game you played but i played EQ2 from day 1 and Guild halls killed people being in the towns everyone just went to their guild halls and hung out .

Player house,s were not not as bad but did not help.

If they bring these 2 things in it will hurt seeing any toons in the towns they will become ghost towns i have seen it happen before. We had a guild hall and had no reason to go to any of the cities.

I hope they dont bring in either or rides.

I agree regarding guild hall amenities in EQ2, they killed cities simply because they had every function a city had, including portals to nearly any location in game.

The new home function in EQ2 of putting homes on display, and having the ability to port to them from any location has led to increased participation, discussion of new decoration schemes in Chat, and a very active subset of decorators who do socialize quite a bit. Their homes are built with an eye towards public enjoyment.

Personally, I don’t care if they put instanced housing in or not. We have instanced home zones that are, for me, an ignored joke. They exist already, and could be vastly improved upon.

Raf.1078:

EQ2 has an extensive Guild Hall / Player home system. Every single Player and all their alts can have mutiple personal instances for homes and other projects…i.e private islands etc…

So, it can be done and not affect the general game play. Would love to see that sort of system here.

Anet should commit completely to the system if they’re going to put it in. If done poorly it’s going to be a huge waste of time resources, and I’m very scared that’s what’s going to end up happening here.

I could think of no better MMO housing model than EQ2’s. It is simply amazing. On the flip-side though, I also agree: Guild halls in EQ2 killed the community and cities. It was sad to see.

The OP’s concerns seem like they can be avoided by allowing the map chat of your house’s local area work inside the house instance. It would actually probably bring a lot more chat-based socialization to the cities if there’s 20+ people all putzing around in their houses instead of blazing through after a 2-minute bank trip or mission run. Assuming housing takes place in cities, that is, but it still applies to whereever so long as houses have a public shared chat.

This game is so full of go-go-go momentum, it could benefit from some more things that are low-key, that allow people to type and talk casually.

gwawer.9805:

Some players have stated that they want to see player homies in Guild wars two in the future. But in a massive multiplayer game, wouldn’t player homes just segregate the player base? If everyone was spending their game time inside their own homes, then you would not be able to go out into the world or even a major city and see a myriad of players around you going about. To me this presence of other players is pretty important to make me feel like I am immersed in a lively world. That is why a lot of people want to transfer off of underpopulated servers and onto more populated ones in every MMO. But player housing Butch’s cause people to become hermits and destroy the social aspect of this game.

Even Guild Halls to a certain extent would cause this player segregation. I would rather have gills spend their time inside their cities for everyone to see because that would let me know that my server is alive and teeming with people and it’s fun to hear the chatter as I’m doing my own business. But if a group of players segregates themselves into their own little Guildhall and spends all their time socializing with in that instance, then the city is would feel very empty. And now players have two places to socialize in the cities or in their Guild Halls or player homes and all this further aggravates the issue of not having enough players exploring about in the open world.

Player homes can make sense in a game like sky rim, a single player game, but in a massively multiplayer game, player homes and even Guild Halls are detrimental to the social life overall.

I want player housing and guild halls and no it’s not a waste of time.. Who are you to dictate how I spend my gaming time? If I choose to be in my player house decorating it that is my prerogative. Who says it’s a rule that I have to out and about among the lot of you people? If I’m not logged on I’m that there in the world anyway.

Broom.2561:

I played that game for 2.5 years. I’ve never played a game since with a stronger sense of community, and I dare say that it was the most social game I ever played. Our community is still unbroken. My guild and many other original Bloodfin (our server) guilds are still around, and we still tend to flock to the same servers when new MMO come out. We’re still in contact after all those years. How many other games can say the same?

So I dare say that if implemented right, player housing and player cities can make a community stronger and A LOT more social, not weaker.

I feel the same as you do. I still miss my home in UO and SWG. Whereas I had very little fond memories of games like WoW.

Even something similar to the Hall of Monuments in GW1 would be cool.

To be honest, I’m expecting it to the point where I’d start demanding it to be implemented. It’s been promised to be added soon when the game was released, before the game was released, and for me personally, it was one of the reasons I actually bought the game.

Because I couldn’t care less about what fractal rank to get, but I’d love to have a personal space.

if i wanted to build a house i’d play the sims. i’d rather have new dungeons and areas than a house to never visit.

vespers.1759:

if i wanted to build a house i’d play the sims. i’d rather have new dungeons and areas than a house to never visit.

And that is your choice and your playstyle- please understand that many of us would pay any money for our own housing even instanced.

(BTW there is a reason Sims was so popular for so long :P)

I would love my own space- just to have some down time in and maybe hang with some friends.
It doesn’t need crafting benches, bank and TP access- that is what cities are for.
But I would really love it if we can customize it and open up new crafts for it.

I understand the problem with open world houses but having players actually be able to see your house and enter it would be so awesome.- Maybe instanced neighborhoods?
Either in the cities or out in the world like our personal stories are currently?
That way you can still have a sense of community without cluttering up the landscape.

There was an added feel of realism to the housing system used in LOTRO, the first MMO (actually ONLY MMO) that I played that had a system. As someone posted above, LOTRO had it’s strengths and weaknesses – the way LOTRO implemented it would put it in the solo as opposed to sociable content. What I loved about it was the different maps each neighborhood had, depending on race, and each house occupying a different plot of land – if you wanted a waterfall view, you had to visit a number of neighborhoods to find one where this piece of land was up for sale. But yeah, you could make a case that it was more Sims than having value to the game.

The LOTRO Guild Halls were another thing though. Our guild had many private parties there and it was awesome to see our entire guild together at one time, drinking from a beer keg, yakking it up – pretty fun.

What I would like to see, if they implement housing, would be a reason to have a house that goes beyond cosmetics or being a gem sink. Maybe something like staying in an inn, ala WoW, where you get a buff for either experience or something the longer your toon stays in his house prior to going back out and adventuring. Also having a number of crafting stations available, but not a crafter, which would be in line with your toon buying crafting equipment so he could craft at home.

Also, maybe have an instances and non-instanced part of the house, a foyer open to the public in which you can mount your trophies or suits of armor (as someone mentioned above) and then the rest of the house which is yours. We could go visit the showroom of some of the more elite players on the server and admire their rare trophies. I’d love to see housing used as another element to round out my toon’s character in relation to the rest of the world.

Varielle.9074:

Broom.2561:

I played that game for 2.5 years. I’ve never played a game since with a stronger sense of community, and I dare say that it was the most social game I ever played. Our community is still unbroken. My guild and many other original Bloodfin (our server) guilds are still around, and we still tend to flock to the same servers when new MMO come out. We’re still in contact after all those years. How many other games can say the same?

So I dare say that if implemented right, player housing and player cities can make a community stronger and A LOT more social, not weaker.

I feel the same as you do. I still miss my home in UO and SWG. Whereas I had very little fond memories of games like WoW.

I have to 2nd this. The community I met on Valcyn I still keep in touch with. 2003 I set a little house on a spot outside Bestine to sell weapons. 8 years later, still that same little house, (and a GH, 4 other houses, and two Imperial SF det HQs) same spot, different server. Those houses were a record of 8 years of play, with mementos of “everything”. My final log out as the servers shut down was in my first little home.