I can’t believe I managed to get a post in before someone who doesn’t understand what “dead horse argument” actually means posts that stupid little gif.
As far as housing being “meaningful content”, it’s hard to get more meaningful than a proper, robust housing system. Utilized properly, a good housing system can provide purpose and context to everything you do, particularly in a game like GW2, where the rewards people chase after at end-game are largely cosmetic.
Honestly, it’s the next logical step when it comes to a place to display visible rewards. At the moment, the primary visible element that you have to decorate with your trophies is your avatar, and how much you can display there is limited. You can only show seven armor pieces, a mini, and in the case of the ranger, a pet. A “house”, unlike an avatar, is endlessly expandable in that regard and has the potential to provide huge amounts of entertainment value, a decent gold sink, and gem store profits as well. Players could start with a small cottage and expand to more impressive options as part of their storyline, as a result of content purchaseable directly with gold, or as gem store purchases. Bosses and Champions could drop trophies to display on walls. Achievements could grant unique furniture, background music, and wallpaper options. The BLTC could sell visual upgrades and various functional utilities. Given even a fraction of the freedom that systems like those in Wildstar, Rift, and EQ2, people will come up with absolutely amazing things. And if you don’t want to be stuck with an empty house because you’re not the decorating type, how about a system that lets you hire an NPC decorator and select from a list of pre-configured furniture configurations? All of this is practically the very definition of meaningful content.
As for the idea that this would have to exist in some kind of instanced void that no one but the owner ever sees… That’s completely ridiculous. Allow people to make their builds public if they choose to, and list them in a searchable directory with tags. People will absolutely come. Other MMO’s have generated huge amounts of positive press and built entire communities around a good, robust personal housing system. Some players will choose a game based almost entirely on its housing system. Hell, the only reason my girlfriend, two of my friends and I played Rift at all was because the housing was so good, and it was also the only reason we were willing to spend any money on it.
If you aren’t personally interested in housing, that’s fine. But it’s been shown time after time that it’s an immensely popular feature that attracts players and gets lots of positive press. There’s a reason it keeps popping up over and over and over again in the forums of pretty much any major MMO that doesn’t have it. It’s fun, it provides additional context and meaning to a player’s activities within a game (a sense of ownership, as some like to say), it gives players a way to express their presence visually in a way that extends beyond their avatar, and it aids in building a strong community. Attempts to dismiss it as “The Sims 5” and “Playing House” show a lack of understanding for what it can bring to a game, and how it can benefit the health of a community as a whole. I’m not the biggest fan of PvP, but you’ll never catch me saying “if you want to fight other players, go play Call Of Duty” or something equally ignorant, because while it might not be my thing, I understand the depth that it helps to bring to a game and the breadth that it brings to a community. Even the purest PvE’er who has an attitude of “don’t like it, don’t want it in the game” to any form of PvP whatsoever, or thinks the developers shouldn’t spend time on it, has a very limited understanding of what’s good for the long term health of a virtual world. The exact same can be said about a feature like housing.
(edited by Lunarhound.7324)