It came up in that other thread, so seemed to make sense to just...make a thread for it itself for anyone wanting to talk about it.
Honestly, what do people want to see in housing? Housing has plusses and minuses. The plusses are obviously creative expression and a place to call home. The minuses are that it CAN mess with imersion (people doing silly decorations) and can isolate people in the community (people spending all their time in houses, particularly if housing is instanced. And there are also a lot of different options for housing.
Instanced - Means there's always enough housing to go around...with the downside that it doesn't have an exact physical presence in the world, can seem like copy/paste housing, etc.
FFXIV has this form of housing, and I'm mixed on it. On the one hand, I love the guild house, as the guilds I was in tended to have a room dedicated to meetings (tables/chairs), and it's neat to have people physical together in a sort of "guild hall" in the game. On the other hand, the housing plots are instanced copies of the same map. Each map has the same 20 or so plots in the same configureation, and you simply jump between instances to go between them. This also means if you want to buy a house but an instance is full, you have to go to a different one. And it also has this weird feel of being untethered to the rest of the world - you go through zones lines to get to them, but they don't feel connected to the rest of the world well (partly because most of them aren't associated exactly with the nearby cities, and party because they are copy/paste instances). I should note XIV also introduced "apartments" as cheap, affordable housing for people that can't afford or don't want one of the houses...but this is an instance-within-an-instance, as you just go to the apartment building in one of the housing instances and then, from there, use an elevator thing to go to your specific room, which is now twice removed from having a physical presence in the world.
Non-instanced - Means the housing has a physical presence in the world...with the downsides of shanty towns and sometimes limited real estate.
SWG did this, and other games have, too. The abandoned town bit, it should be noted, is also an issue with instanced housing (in XIV, they deal with that by freeing a housing slot if its owner abandons it for an extended amount of time. The imersion breaking can be limited somewhat by the developers not putting TOO silly stuff in the game to use as decoration...but you always get that ONE GUY who wants to make various monumnents to the male anatomy. (There's ALWAYS one...) It can also be more resource intensive, which leads to less options for decorations and arrangements.
Guild vs Personal - More can be less.
Personally, I like guild housing. It brings people together. There are also far fewer guilds on a given server than there are players, meaning it's far more possible to ensure guilds can have houses than it is to ensure that all players can, given any amount of real estate. I'm not sure any games have done this, but it could also give physical presence - I maybe use this term a lot, but it makes worlds more real, imo - to things. For example, what if your guild bank was in your guild house? Not some bank you can access anywhere in the world, no. You go to your guild house/hall and access the vault there.
While the idea of outposts in the world is cool, it's also limited. Even with very large zones, how many outpost spots will there be? And even with an arbitrary limit of one per guild (which, in game terms, really makes no sense - provided you have the money, you can buy as many houses as you want in real life, why is there some sort of weird magical seal/boundary on your guild having more than one?), many guilds will be SOL on getting one until zones are more or less abandoned. While this can give trailblazing guilds or small guilds that reach far off the beaten path a neat experience of having that outpost out in the middle of no-where, it seems to have a lot of negatives. I kind of like the idea of having various homes available in cities, of various sizes. Did anyone ever play Fable 2? Remember how you could buy houses in most of the towns, from small to large (same with shops, from a street vendor to a large department store)? Imagine having a "guild row" like how some large world cities have "embassy row" where all the embasies of nations are. Maybe have some small shanty areas with small, crappy houses, but still a place to call home for a smaller guild or one that moved to a high population server where the larger things are taken. And, like the instanced housing in XIV, if a guild goes inactive for long enough, their house can be vacated (their stuff moved into storage in case of their eventual return) to free up plots.
Personal housing, on the other hand, some people love. Creativity and expression and all that. The problem I have with it is it tends to separate people more. They spend a lot of time in THEIR space, but that separates the population. WoW's Garrisons basically ended up this way. While people COULD visit each others' Garrison...in practice, no one did. They were more or less all the same anyway, and there was nothing really to do there, plus they were kind of big to walk around and didn't have much customization. FFXIV, btw, has "personal rooms" in its guild houses, which kind of serves to bridge this gap by allowing people to get their own room in the house and decorate that however they want it (it's basically just like the apartment thing, just within the guild house instead of the random apartment building...)
Outposts, if they AREN'T instanced like WoW's garrisons, though, I think could be kind of cool for guilds, too. Personally, though, I'd rather have organic player camps. Like have non-combat player skills where people can set up camps to persist. Maybe the Ranger can set up a cook fire, the Druid can grow a fruit tree, the Summoner can conjur a water fountain, the Bard can play buff music, and so on. I like the idea of groups of players making camp (and not /camp as a form of logout, an ACTUAL basecamp). While an outpost design can provide a safe space for this (maybe a longhall with a rampart and a campfire/square either in the longhall or just out in front of it), I'm hoping that the mechanics will favor class skills/abilities to provide services. All you really need NPC type amenities for are banking and vendoring. Players can even provide for repairs via tradeskills, in theory.
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Anyway, there are a lot of potential arrangements and options. What do you guys like and dislike about them? What do you see as the positives and negatives of the various systems?
There exists already a huge Thread ;)
http://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/2510/housing-is-it-planned-to-be-a-major-part-of-the-game/view/page/1
Hm, is there a line on necroing threads (considering Necros haven't been added to the game yet? :p)
Basically, that other thread people started talking about housing, so thought a separate thread would be waranted. But yeah, is December of last year too dead, or can we bounce that one?
MyNegation said:there are no pluses in player housing, even guild housing. only minuses.
all the 'pluses' that you have elaborated are short term, but the 'minuses' are forever, it removes players from the world and put them in a private game.
Obviously your opinion and one that I wholeheartedly disagree with. They are a vehicle for socialization not the opposite if done in a meaningful way. Just because YOU haven't seen it done in a way that meets the tenents of the game does not mean it's impossible to achieve.
Edit in an example: DAoC had no auction houses. The system it had was a bit clunky but still works as an example of sorts. Housing was in an instanced zone that contained many neighborhoods. If you chose to do so, you could buy a personal vendor to sell your goods. These vendors were on the porch of your house. Mine alone drew about 50 people a day into the housing zone to buy my goods. If going on a shopping spree, you would stop by the bulliten board and see what was for sale and at what address, plan your route and go to various houses and shop. Many times, I left the door to the house open so they could wander in and view my trophies (set permissions) also many times I was present and chatted with them, they would even make farming requests. Tell me that violates any of the tenents of the game.
Zazazuu said:Due to the fact, that the searching function of this forum is a bit "shitty", Kilsin prefers necroing the old thread. So newer members can find the information collected in one thread. :)
There is nothing wrong with the search function at all, it works perfectly man. It would work even better if people used it more frequently, though lol ;P
Renathras said:Hm, is there a line on necroing threads (considering Necros haven't been added to the game yet? :p)
Basically, that other thread people started talking about housing, so thought a separate thread would be waranted. But yeah, is December of last year too dead, or can we bounce that one?
Necroing is fine if you want to continue the discussion after reading the threads. I would prefer it over starting a new thread just to keep the information consolidated and easy to find/read for everyone.
Necroing to just reignite an argument or repeat what someone has already said will probably result in the thread being cleaned or closed, though, just as a heads up.