I do not care about player housing in anyway and never have. However some people like it a lot.
The thing I do not get is that a lot of people seem to think player housing is simple. I suggest you go read the regulations for real estate and zoning and possibly whatever home owners assoication you belong to or whatever lease you have signed that exist wherever you happen to live.
Then in a couple years when you have finished that you can come back here and suggest how the developers can implement a true "world-like" housing system that has meaning.
Or in others words real-estate and owning land is a fundamental and extremely important aspect of real life. Something that billions and billions of humans have killed each other for thousands of years. Its not a simple matter. Just creating a game that simulated this to even modest degree would be a huge undertaking. Even what exists in Eve with POS and stations and systems and travel/scale is barely a skeleton of the underlying stuff.
There isn't more of it, because it takes a fundamental aspect of life, trivializes it into virtual meaninglessness and doing anything past that is a huge and complex undertaking that would require a design that strated with the idea from the ground up. And even when you trivialize to a lesser extent like in UO or SWG you still run into all kinds of problems because the issue to complex and fundamental to really do that.
As a best guess, from the developers point of view, player housing takes a lot of dev resources and provides questionable content benefits. I.e. it takes up very little of a player's time in game.
Let me start off by saying I think player housing is great. It helps to show you where gaming and media as a whole is going. I think player housing is a necessary part of new MMO's, stemming from the fact the people as a whole (and yes fellow gamers we are people two, be it ones with our computers attached to at least one finger at all times but people none the less) gravitate to. Media as a whole is moving to more user controlled/generated content. This is why things like MySpace, Facebook, and even this forum is so appealing to all of us, because we want to give our two cents, we want to express our style, and this is something that even applies to gaming.
This also means that gaming will evolve to meet the need of the gamer. This is why games like Second Life are so popular because along with housing, a person can customize and entire island and game identity to themselves down to the most trivial of aspects to the game. Sorry to tell you this fellow gamers but bigger MMO's will probably start to move in that direction. I some cases it has already started to happen. Look at games like City of Heroes/ City of Villains you can completely customized your base and your Super Hero Teams base to look the way you want you just start with a empty room, or even GuildWars (personal favorite game) you have your guild hall to customize with your merchants of choice but also the individual hall of monuments where a player can choose which achievements to display and which ones not to. This is just the beginning of this shift in gaming I expect as we see newer games we will continue to see this grow (and sadly the games will no longer be about just killing stuff).
Alright now I know this is getting lengthy but I have one more thing to say about this, player housing and other customization features are also what will propel MMO's into a new arena where more people hardcore to casual gamers will join in playing. These features are the ones that help to bring those people from the fringes of gaming into the fold because let’s just face it they only don’t play like we do because there is no drawing factor for them. This is that drawing factor.
Alright I will stop ranting for now sorry if I bored you.
MMORPG's are for killing... housing is for virtual Barbie games or Hello Kitty....
what he said
But seriously, there's no real purpose for them that I'd really care for....
Get the other things done right first. Housing can be last...
Crazy statement - NOTHING in MMOs has any REAL purpose it's a virtual environement, you don't need clothes, you need a head or arms or fingers or eyes, or a sun in the sky or clouds or grass - Everything is in place to enrich the experience and help the players imagination.
Housing has as much importance as the visual representation of a sword or a horse. In fact housing has MORE right to be in an MMO since we all live in houses it's an integral part of most peoples mindset. Especially with games concerned with building communities. Home is a powerfull concept and can be a good tool for bringing players together and assist in many aspects of non-combat gameplay. We are building worlds here not just fighting games.
Why not play Sims Online. Seriously if I wanted to decorate and furnish my house I'd either play Sims Online if I couldn't afford to do so or actually do it in real life.
Because people don't just sit around in MMOs and decorate their houses. They like to do other things, like craft, setup shops, explore, grind xp, and kill boss mobs. Housing adds something extra to take away from the tediousness of killing mobs every moment in the game. There's a reason why people get burnt out on wow in about two years. All you do is kill mobs. When you add housing, crafting, exploring, etc to a game you increase retention rate by allowing more freedom and preventing burnout. Housing also attracts more players, providing a larger community that sticks around for a longer period of time. There is so much more to an MMO then simply grinding xp and killing boss mobs for phat lootz. Unfortunately, wow has made a lot of players forget this.
1) NO need for a personal store. Something like an AH is more efficient. Yeah. Efficient and boring as hell. I can't stand auction houses, and would much more prefer to visit player owned shops. The entire experience is far more unique and requires the player to know more about the market then simply analyzing auction house prices to try and determine the average price of an item. That being said, I do understand why some people don't like to travel everywhere to find stuff to buy. I just don't really care about their lazy playstyle. 2) Perform & heal them??? You can heal them anytime anywhere you want right now. Why gimp the function? He's referring to SWG and healing up mind points, which were required to be healed by an entertainer. Maybe you already know this, but that's where that point comes from. I don't know if I think that solution is best for long term gameplay, but I do know that I had a lot of fun in SWG in cantinas going to see a dancer and heal my mind. It was meaningless, and I wasn't progressing, but it was social and actually fun in a wierd sort of way. 3) Just a guild bank and a chat channel will do. Sure, it will do fine. But is it as fun? Not IMO. I don't care about efficiency in every aspect of the game. I care about fun. And fun can be found in more ways then progressing to the next raid. That being said I appreciate that this method may not appeal to you. 4) No one RP in MMORPGs anyway. (Or some few people that it does not justify the costs to make the housing) Sure, people don't RP very much, but when people setup a guild city it is pretty neat to visit other people's houses, whether to store stuff or to pickup stuff, or simply to browse. It's the same reason people go out and drive around looking at houses. It doesn't serve any other purpose then to experience and enjoy human creativity. 5) None of the examples requiers player housing. There are plenty of more efficient way of achieving the same results. You're right. No MMO *requires* player housing. Wow has certainly proven this. However, a lot of people out there agree that housing makes a MMO more fun. You may not think so, but you seem to be discounting a large amount of people who do. Perhaps your opinion is not as representative of the gaming community as you would like to believe.
I find it quite odd that 81.9% of people in this poll said they either loved or liked player housing, yet from reading all of the posts, a lot of people are spamming how player housing is pointless and stupid. I get the feeling it is a small vocal minority(tm of SOE) that doesn't quite "get" what player housing is for and is speaking very loudly against it.
I love player housing. I am not a role player by any means, but player housing almost initiates passive RP. It is such a great feeling to go into your house and know "This is mine". Its awesome to go into your guild city and look around and think "We built this. We control this. This is ours." You get the feeling of actually having an impact on the world. I can remember going to my house to log out every time I was logging. Not because it served a benefit, but it gave me the feeling that I was putting my character in his home to rest, safe from the outside world. Passive RP, so to say. Not being much of a decorator myself(just a little bit to make the inside actually look like a house), I loved seeing all of the different ways people found use for different items to decorate their houses in Star Wars Galaxies. It was a really awesome feature.
I can remember meeting in our guild hall every Saturday night for a guild meeting. We had a podium set up at the front like a stage, and rows of chairs for the other members. Sure, it didn't serve any actual benefit to go to the guild hall for the meeting since we were mostly talking on team speak anyway, but it really made the guild feel closer and tight knit.
I can remember a few of our guild wars with rival guilds that had very large and important battles take place right in our city, or right on our guild hall steps. It gave us a sense of reason to fight. This was our city. This was our territory. They weren't going to take it from us. And in my favorite battle where we were out numbered 2 to 1, we gave them hell and drove them out of our town.
I loved how when I asked guildies for resources or parts, I didn't just meet them anywhere in the entire world and have them give the items to me. No, it went more along the lines of "Oh yeah, I have that in one of my storage buildings. Meet me in town and we can go get them out of there". That is immersion.
I guess that was kind of long. In short, I love player cities and housing because it is one of the biggest factors in making an MMORPG feel like a world, not just a game. There are many single player and multi-player games out there. I play MMORPG's to play in a World.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike Loved: Star Wars Galaxies Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
Player/Guild housing is probably the least important feature an MMO could add. Why spend so much in time and resources just so a few people can role play? EA needs to make a fantasy version of The Sims for these people. The housing in MMOs like SWG, EQ2 and most recently AoC have caused nothing but problems. Developers don't want to deal with the head ache that housing creates and get nothing in return for it.
What problems has housing caused for SWG?
The biggest one is that it makes server merges more complicated. You have to deconflict real estate claims when merging servers. One group of players will not be happy with whatever solution the developers come up with.
I think player housing is a huge plus, but it does complicate management of the world. There's still a great deal of clutter in SWG caused by player structures, even after modification of resource extraction structures and one housing cleanup.
So there are tradeoffs to be contemplated.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Player/Guild housing is probably the least important feature an MMO could add. Why spend so much in time and resources just so a few people can role play? EA needs to make a fantasy version of The Sims for these people. The housing in MMOs like SWG, EQ2 and most recently AoC have caused nothing but problems. Developers don't want to deal with the head ache that housing creates and get nothing in return for it.
What problems has housing caused for SWG?
The biggest one is that it makes server merges more complicated. You have to deconflict real estate claims when merging servers. One group of players will not be happy with whatever solution the developers come up with.
I think player housing is a huge plus, but it does complicate management of the world. There's still a great deal of clutter in SWG caused by player structures, even after modification of resource extraction structures and one housing cleanup.
So there are tradeoffs to be contemplated.
True, but if you didn't completely destroy the game with changes and "Upgrades" to run the player base off, there would be no need for server merges in the first place now would there?
I think with enough preventive measures, player housing could pose little to no complications. For instance, make the game worlds big enough to where a player city does seem like an oasis in the middle of no where, making it take a lot lot more players to clutter the ground. SOE had a good thought in making house pack up. Simply make it so that if your account goes in-active for 30, or 60 days, your house and all of your other buildings get packed up. You will still have your house and items, but they won't clutter the ground any more. This way, only people playing will have buildings down. Worried about people that will pay there subscription without playing and clutter things up, make it so that they have to pay maintenance on the house, but limit the money they can deposit to a one month time period. If their maintenance runs out, they have 3 days to put more money in or the house gets packed up.
There are many simple solutions to prevent the problems of player housing that anyone could implement.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike Loved: Star Wars Galaxies Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
Why not play Sims Online. Seriously if I wanted to decorate and furnish my house I'd either play Sims Online if I couldn't afford to do so or actually do it in real life.
Sorry, can't decorate my house with krayt skulls in SIms Onlilne. Furthermore, cannot decorate my house with a stuffed peko peko. Or a Xris Acid Sword. Or an Endorian landscape painting.
Housing in SWG allows you to put YOUR mark on the world. People can enter my house in a player city east of Keren on Naboo and see some of the things I managed to accomplish in SWG.
In WoW, instead of selling rare weapons to a vendor, or disenchanting them, to free up bank space after you've outgrown them by leveling, you could display them so that your fleeting accomplishment of getting Cookie's Tenderizer on a Dead Mines run isn't so fleeting. You could put it in your kitchen as a trophy!
It's the RP in MMORPG that so many players of this game shy from like Dracula avoids garlic or the cross.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
To make Housing work you really need a sandbox. Housing in Linear theme park = FAIL
Housing is great in open worlds like UO / EVE because it gives Guilds a place to live together and you can grind on mobs around your community. You dont have to travel 2/3 hours away to some far off place to grind mobs.
I find it ironic I see some posters that frequent EVE's forums that claim they dont like housing. WTH do you think you live in 0.0!!! Player owned structures (aka forcefielded deathstar) you setup in space is a 'house' of a sort. you dock there, craft, refine, defend, attack, etc.
Housing is cool because you have a private place to hold guild meetings and so forth w/o having to worry bout noobs coming in there disrupting everything
I like Housing becomes it allows players to impact the world. what is point in $15 a month just to watch your character grow I can do that in a single player RPG. but wait a sec- even the SP RPGs allow me to own a house (like Fable, etC)
The biggest one is that it makes server merges more complicated. You have to deconflict real estate claims when merging servers. One group of players will not be happy with whatever solution the developers come up with. I think player housing is a huge plus, but it does complicate management of the world. There's still a great deal of clutter in SWG caused by player structures, even after modification of resource extraction structures and one housing cleanup. So there are tradeoffs to be contemplated.
True, but if you didn't completely destroy the game with changes and "Upgrades" to run the player base off, there would be no need for server merges in the first place now would there?
I think with enough preventive measures, player housing could pose little to no complications. For instance, make the game worlds big enough to where a player city does seem like an oasis in the middle of no where, making it take a lot lot more players to clutter the ground. SOE had a good thought in making house pack up. Simply make it so that if your account goes in-active for 30, or 60 days, your house and all of your other buildings get packed up. You will still have your house and items, but they won't clutter the ground any more. This way, only people playing will have buildings down. Worried about people that will pay there subscription without playing and clutter things up, make it so that they have to pay maintenance on the house, but limit the money they can deposit to a one month time period. If their maintenance runs out, they have 3 days to put more money in or the house gets packed up.
There are many simple solutions to prevent the problems of player housing that anyone could implement.
You're right, server merges wouldn't be an issue if the devs hadn't put months of work into depopulating the servers via the CU and NGE.
One of the reasons that SWG hasn't been more aggressive in cleaning up "abandoned" player housing is that the last thing they want to do is provide any new players with "empty" worlds. Never mind the lack of avatars in say Coronet or Mos Espa might clue them in...that can be dismissed as "they're not online right now", while the illusion of player cities with dozens of structures creates the appearance of a "lived in world" that is important from both a PR and a lore standpoint.
It used to be that if you ran out of maintenanc in a strucutre, in a matter of days it would "poof" and disappear from the landscape. But then for some inexpliable reason they changed that, and I know of buildings that still are "condemmed by the Empire" on Ahazi that didn't get flagged "abandoned" for last year's TIE bomber runs.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
I dig housing, it helps create that in the world and living in it feel, some games dont need it i guess, but i definatly prefer it, the games off the top of my head that i can think of that i liked with player housing is swg, eq2, lotro, and vanguard, some of the games i mentioned ahve quests where the rewards are things you can put in your house that give you a buff to yourself that last an x amount of time before you go out adventuring, also a place to do buisiness from as well, like haveing brokers in yer house with salseman crates to throw yer loot up on the market, and the same with swg market wise,
IMO, player housing is only of value when: 1) It is persistent, meaning not hidden in some intance. 2) Provides in-game benefits such as experience bonus from resting, or a place to store items (replacing bank slots, essentially). But instanced worthless player housing, as appears in many games, is an annoyance. As I say, if another player cannot see it, it ain't there.
100% agree, instanced player housing is just as bad as no housing at all.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike Loved: Star Wars Galaxies Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
I dig housing, it helps create that in the world and living in it feel, some games dont need it i guess, but i definatly prefer it, the games off the top of my head that i can think of that i liked with player housing is swg, eq2, lotro, and vanguard, some of the games i mentioned ahve quests where the rewards are things you can put in your house that give you a buff to yourself that last an x amount of time before you go out adventuring, also a place to do buisiness from as well, like haveing brokers in yer house with salseman crates to throw yer loot up on the market, and the same with swg market wise,
We have a similar relationship in EVE. Researchers can build a lab and enjoy access to being able to research blueprints. Other people rent out slots from the researcher. There are some NPC slots but those are hard to find. so the player run research laboratories are a really huge perk t
Comments
I do not care about player housing in anyway and never have. However some people like it a lot.
The thing I do not get is that a lot of people seem to think player housing is simple. I suggest you go read the regulations for real estate and zoning and possibly whatever home owners assoication you belong to or whatever lease you have signed that exist wherever you happen to live.
Then in a couple years when you have finished that you can come back here and suggest how the developers can implement a true "world-like" housing system that has meaning.
Or in others words real-estate and owning land is a fundamental and extremely important aspect of real life. Something that billions and billions of humans have killed each other for thousands of years. Its not a simple matter. Just creating a game that simulated this to even modest degree would be a huge undertaking. Even what exists in Eve with POS and stations and systems and travel/scale is barely a skeleton of the underlying stuff.
There isn't more of it, because it takes a fundamental aspect of life, trivializes it into virtual meaninglessness and doing anything past that is a huge and complex undertaking that would require a design that strated with the idea from the ground up. And even when you trivialize to a lesser extent like in UO or SWG you still run into all kinds of problems because the issue to complex and fundamental to really do that.
As a best guess, from the developers point of view, player housing takes a lot of dev resources and provides questionable content benefits. I.e. it takes up very little of a player's time in game.
Let me start off by saying I think player housing is great. It helps to show you where gaming and media as a whole is going. I think player housing is a necessary part of new MMO's, stemming from the fact the people as a whole (and yes fellow gamers we are people two, be it ones with our computers attached to at least one finger at all times but people none the less) gravitate to. Media as a whole is moving to more user controlled/generated content. This is why things like MySpace, Facebook, and even this forum is so appealing to all of us, because we want to give our two cents, we want to express our style, and this is something that even applies to gaming.
This also means that gaming will evolve to meet the need of the gamer. This is why games like Second Life are so popular because along with housing, a person can customize and entire island and game identity to themselves down to the most trivial of aspects to the game. Sorry to tell you this fellow gamers but bigger MMO's will probably start to move in that direction. I some cases it has already started to happen. Look at games like City of Heroes/ City of Villains you can completely customized your base and your Super Hero Teams base to look the way you want you just start with a empty room, or even GuildWars (personal favorite game) you have your guild hall to customize with your merchants of choice but also the individual hall of monuments where a player can choose which achievements to display and which ones not to. This is just the beginning of this shift in gaming I expect as we see newer games we will continue to see this grow (and sadly the games will no longer be about just killing stuff
).
Alright now I know this is getting lengthy but I have one more thing to say about this, player housing and other customization features are also what will propel MMO's into a new arena where more people hardcore to casual gamers will join in playing. These features are the ones that help to bring those people from the fringes of gaming into the fold because let’s just face it they only don’t play like we do because there is no drawing factor for them. This is that drawing factor.
Alright I will stop ranting for now sorry if I bored you.
what he said
But seriously, there's no real purpose for them that I'd really care for....
Get the other things done right first. Housing can be last...
Crazy statement - NOTHING in MMOs has any REAL purpose it's a virtual environement, you don't need clothes, you need a head or arms or fingers or eyes, or a sun in the sky or clouds or grass - Everything is in place to enrich the experience and help the players imagination.
Housing has as much importance as the visual representation of a sword or a horse. In fact housing has MORE right to be in an MMO since we all live in houses it's an integral part of most peoples mindset. Especially with games concerned with building communities. Home is a powerfull concept and can be a good tool for bringing players together and assist in many aspects of non-combat gameplay. We are building worlds here not just fighting games.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
Nothing out there beats Neocron's housing, to be quite fucking honest.
WTB more mmo's that use housing like that.
Because people don't just sit around in MMOs and decorate their houses. They like to do other things, like craft, setup shops, explore, grind xp, and kill boss mobs. Housing adds something extra to take away from the tediousness of killing mobs every moment in the game. There's a reason why people get burnt out on wow in about two years. All you do is kill mobs. When you add housing, crafting, exploring, etc to a game you increase retention rate by allowing more freedom and preventing burnout. Housing also attracts more players, providing a larger community that sticks around for a longer period of time. There is so much more to an MMO then simply grinding xp and killing boss mobs for phat lootz. Unfortunately, wow has made a lot of players forget this.
I find it quite odd that 81.9% of people in this poll said they either loved or liked player housing, yet from reading all of the posts, a lot of people are spamming how player housing is pointless and stupid. I get the feeling it is a small vocal minority(tm of SOE) that doesn't quite "get" what player housing is for and is speaking very loudly against it.
I love player housing. I am not a role player by any means, but player housing almost initiates passive RP. It is such a great feeling to go into your house and know "This is mine". Its awesome to go into your guild city and look around and think "We built this. We control this. This is ours." You get the feeling of actually having an impact on the world. I can remember going to my house to log out every time I was logging. Not because it served a benefit, but it gave me the feeling that I was putting my character in his home to rest, safe from the outside world. Passive RP, so to say. Not being much of a decorator myself(just a little bit to make the inside actually look like a house), I loved seeing all of the different ways people found use for different items to decorate their houses in Star Wars Galaxies. It was a really awesome feature.
I can remember meeting in our guild hall every Saturday night for a guild meeting. We had a podium set up at the front like a stage, and rows of chairs for the other members. Sure, it didn't serve any actual benefit to go to the guild hall for the meeting since we were mostly talking on team speak anyway, but it really made the guild feel closer and tight knit.
I can remember a few of our guild wars with rival guilds that had very large and important battles take place right in our city, or right on our guild hall steps. It gave us a sense of reason to fight. This was our city. This was our territory. They weren't going to take it from us. And in my favorite battle where we were out numbered 2 to 1, we gave them hell and drove them out of our town.
I loved how when I asked guildies for resources or parts, I didn't just meet them anywhere in the entire world and have them give the items to me. No, it went more along the lines of "Oh yeah, I have that in one of my storage buildings. Meet me in town and we can go get them out of there". That is immersion.
I guess that was kind of long. In short, I love player cities and housing because it is one of the biggest factors in making an MMORPG feel like a world, not just a game. There are many single player and multi-player games out there. I play MMORPG's to play in a World.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic
Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW
Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike
Loved: Star Wars Galaxies
Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
What problems has housing caused for SWG?
The biggest one is that it makes server merges more complicated. You have to deconflict real estate claims when merging servers. One group of players will not be happy with whatever solution the developers come up with.
I think player housing is a huge plus, but it does complicate management of the world. There's still a great deal of clutter in SWG caused by player structures, even after modification of resource extraction structures and one housing cleanup.
So there are tradeoffs to be contemplated.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
What problems has housing caused for SWG?
The biggest one is that it makes server merges more complicated. You have to deconflict real estate claims when merging servers. One group of players will not be happy with whatever solution the developers come up with.
I think player housing is a huge plus, but it does complicate management of the world. There's still a great deal of clutter in SWG caused by player structures, even after modification of resource extraction structures and one housing cleanup.
So there are tradeoffs to be contemplated.
True, but if you didn't completely destroy the game with changes and "Upgrades" to run the player base off, there would be no need for server merges in the first place now would there?
I think with enough preventive measures, player housing could pose little to no complications. For instance, make the game worlds big enough to where a player city does seem like an oasis in the middle of no where, making it take a lot lot more players to clutter the ground. SOE had a good thought in making house pack up. Simply make it so that if your account goes in-active for 30, or 60 days, your house and all of your other buildings get packed up. You will still have your house and items, but they won't clutter the ground any more. This way, only people playing will have buildings down. Worried about people that will pay there subscription without playing and clutter things up, make it so that they have to pay maintenance on the house, but limit the money they can deposit to a one month time period. If their maintenance runs out, they have 3 days to put more money in or the house gets packed up.
There are many simple solutions to prevent the problems of player housing that anyone could implement.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic
Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW
Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike
Loved: Star Wars Galaxies
Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
Sorry, can't decorate my house with krayt skulls in SIms Onlilne. Furthermore, cannot decorate my house with a stuffed peko peko. Or a Xris Acid Sword. Or an Endorian landscape painting.
Housing in SWG allows you to put YOUR mark on the world. People can enter my house in a player city east of Keren on Naboo and see some of the things I managed to accomplish in SWG.
In WoW, instead of selling rare weapons to a vendor, or disenchanting them, to free up bank space after you've outgrown them by leveling, you could display them so that your fleeting accomplishment of getting Cookie's Tenderizer on a Dead Mines run isn't so fleeting. You could put it in your kitchen as a trophy!
It's the RP in MMORPG that so many players of this game shy from like Dracula avoids garlic or the cross.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
To make Housing work you really need a sandbox. Housing in Linear theme park = FAIL
Housing is great in open worlds like UO / EVE because it gives Guilds a place to live together and you can grind on mobs around your community. You dont have to travel 2/3 hours away to some far off place to grind mobs.
I find it ironic I see some posters that frequent EVE's forums that claim they dont like housing. WTH do you think you live in 0.0!!! Player owned structures (aka forcefielded deathstar) you setup in space is a 'house' of a sort. you dock there, craft, refine, defend, attack, etc.
Housing is cool because you have a private place to hold guild meetings and so forth w/o having to worry bout noobs coming in there disrupting everything
I like Housing becomes it allows players to impact the world. what is point in $15 a month just to watch your character grow I can do that in a single player RPG. but wait a sec- even the SP RPGs allow me to own a house (like Fable, etC)
True, but if you didn't completely destroy the game with changes and "Upgrades" to run the player base off, there would be no need for server merges in the first place now would there?
I think with enough preventive measures, player housing could pose little to no complications. For instance, make the game worlds big enough to where a player city does seem like an oasis in the middle of no where, making it take a lot lot more players to clutter the ground. SOE had a good thought in making house pack up. Simply make it so that if your account goes in-active for 30, or 60 days, your house and all of your other buildings get packed up. You will still have your house and items, but they won't clutter the ground any more. This way, only people playing will have buildings down. Worried about people that will pay there subscription without playing and clutter things up, make it so that they have to pay maintenance on the house, but limit the money they can deposit to a one month time period. If their maintenance runs out, they have 3 days to put more money in or the house gets packed up.
There are many simple solutions to prevent the problems of player housing that anyone could implement.
You're right, server merges wouldn't be an issue if the devs hadn't put months of work into depopulating the servers via the CU and NGE.
One of the reasons that SWG hasn't been more aggressive in cleaning up "abandoned" player housing is that the last thing they want to do is provide any new players with "empty" worlds. Never mind the lack of avatars in say Coronet or Mos Espa might clue them in...that can be dismissed as "they're not online right now", while the illusion of player cities with dozens of structures creates the appearance of a "lived in world" that is important from both a PR and a lore standpoint.
It used to be that if you ran out of maintenanc in a strucutre, in a matter of days it would "poof" and disappear from the landscape. But then for some inexpliable reason they changed that, and I know of buildings that still are "condemmed by the Empire" on Ahazi that didn't get flagged "abandoned" for last year's TIE bomber runs.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
I dig housing, it helps create that in the world and living in it feel, some games dont need it i guess, but i definatly prefer it, the games off the top of my head that i can think of that i liked with player housing is swg, eq2, lotro, and vanguard, some of the games i mentioned ahve quests where the rewards are things you can put in your house that give you a buff to yourself that last an x amount of time before you go out adventuring, also a place to do buisiness from as well, like haveing brokers in yer house with salseman crates to throw yer loot up on the market, and the same with swg market wise,
playing eq2 and two worlds
IMO, player housing is only of value when:
1) It is persistent, meaning not hidden in some intance.
2) Provides in-game benefits such as experience bonus from resting, or a place to store items (replacing bank slots, essentially).
But instanced worthless player housing, as appears in many games, is an annoyance. As I say, if another player cannot see it, it ain't there.
100% agree, instanced player housing is just as bad as no housing at all.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic
Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW
Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike
Loved: Star Wars Galaxies
Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
We have a similar relationship in EVE. Researchers can build a lab and enjoy access to being able to research blueprints. Other people rent out slots from the researcher. There are some NPC slots but those are hard to find. so the player run research laboratories are a really huge perk t
So that idea you wrote is excellent