Little House on the Internet: What You Want from MMO Housing
I have no idea why this feature is being ignored by the current crop of MMORPGs, but I am going to talk about it anyway because I think it is an important and extremely fun feature. Housing presents one of the best opportunities for players to express their own imagination and it gives them a “piece of the world” to call their own. Further, it provides the developer with many opportunities to make content more exciting if it involves a way for players to bring home a trophy they can display, or some other type of house oriented loot – carpets, furniture, cool artifacts, etc. I am going to focus this post on questions, rather than opinions, so the readers can give their own take on player owned housing without any bias or prompting.
What Player Owned Housing Features Do You Like?
I am going to create some basic categories of housing features, and you can pick and choose the ones you like – or add your own. I encourage you to be specific!
1) Ownership Options – What levels of ownership and permissions are needed? Generally, one person is the absolute owner of the property, and can then give various permissions to other people. Sometimes the highest permission is almost equal to ownership, without the ability to sell the property.
2) Preset rooms configuration, or player determined. Threshold’s housing system lets you lay out your rooms however you want. Everquest 2 and Dark Age of Camelot’s system sold houses where the rooms were already laid out, and you decorated them. Graphical games tend to require preset, whereas text games can be more flexible.
3) Furnishings.
4) Trophies.
5) Functional features – storage vaults, crafting tables, mirrors that teleport you places, fireplaces, swimming pools, and more.
6) Functional rooms – kitchens, gardens that grow, offices, lookout towers, and whatever else you can come up with!
7) …
So, let your mind run wild here. Tell me what you’d like to see in a robust housing system. Some of the above? All of the above? Specifically what types of things from the above categories?
Housing is possibly the most underutilized feature in modern MMOs. I continue to boggle at how it is utterly ignored by WoW and others.
I’ve been browsing here for the last few days and suddenly your format changed and all the posts are gone (except the one here) is it just me?
But anyway, I have a problem with player housing. I don’t feel like it fits into most MMOGs. I am all for submersing yourself in a virtual universe for fun, but I feel like leading a virtual life is taking it a step too far. Housing in LOTRO is, in my mind, the kind of thing that is useless. It’s “instanced neighborhoods” set a short ride away from the main town for each race. This doesn’t seem so bad, but it is really a very frustrating jog to get there without a mount. Think about how many people will ever see my house though? The homes are out of the way and there’s easily 20 instances of homes all right on top of each other so if someone goes into an instance at random they have less than a 5% chance of being in the same place as my house, let alone walking past it on the street since i’m in a back corner.
I spend 99.9% of my time playing LOTRO outside of my home, and when I AM in it it’s only because I used my teleport-to-house ability because my normal teleport to the main city was on cooldown.
I think about player housing this way. What significant things do I do in my home in real life? Eat, sleep, entertain guests, watch tv, browse the net, and play video games (among a few other relatively mundane activities such as reading) and I don’t really see a need for doing any of those things in an MMO world. But before I get ahead of myself I do like particular kinds of player housing. Player housing with purpose!
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It’s my opinion that player housing needs to have realistic in-game functionality to be legitimately implemented in an MMOG.
Components of well-developed housing in descending importance:
1. Accessibility is Essential – Your house needs to have some kind of traffic, or else no one will ever appreciate what you’ve done with the place, and it will be a pain for you to go to and from its location.
2. Functionality is Fantastic – Crafting stations (I read that on someones previous post here) is a great idea! It would let you do something in your house that you couldn’t necessarily do anywhere else, BUT the limitation here is that if the major city’s forge is always closer to you than your homes’ then why would you ever bother heading home to use it?
3. Aesthetics are Adjustable – Being able to customize your home’s appearance be it via lawn ornaments or altering the patterns on the roof and walls on the outside, and wallpaper and furniture on the inside, is one of the best things about home ownership, but without your house having any real use you will seldom go there, and without it being accessible no one will.
These are fairly simple rules that make sense to me. If a developer wanted to create housing that people would use then this is how I would reccomend they do it. My way may not be the best way. I’m interested in what everyone else thinks. The path to enlightenment is not paved with ignorance.
I started to talk about StarWarsGalaxies in that last post, at the end, and then I realized that I was going to have the same logical jump that most of my musings about MMORPGs have. It’s all in the game design!
The problem is not just the actual design of a player housing system- it’s in the entire game design too. Take for instance these two examples, and how they treat and COULD treat player housing…
1. StarWarsGalaxies: I loved their player housing at launch. It was functional, you could build little (or big) player cities and set up merchants in your home and it was a grand old time! Now you have a landscape plagued with so much player housing that it chokes the life out of trying to get your randomly generated missions done. Every time you get close to the mission way point it has to give you a new one because it couldn’t spawn the units inside a player home!
How could they fix it? I really don’t know that they could. With XXXXX numbers of people playing everyone deserves to be able to build their own home, but it just became too excessive. I also noticed recently that a majority of the houses on the galaxy I played on have run out of rent money and so are “closed” but they aren’t destroying the buildings, they’re just becoming giant rocks clogging up the landscape even more.
Could they restrict where people could build? I would think so, but they didn’t. It’s all a little unclear to me what they did to that game when they gave it the traditional class-system so I just assume they’re insane now ;D
2. WorldOfWarcraft could not have any kind of concievable housing system unless it’s like EQ2’s where you have rooms in an inn where everyone rents their little apartment and can go into their own room by clicking on the same door that leads to everyones apartment too.
I say that’s the only way because the world is so SO tiny! That’s one thing that got on my nerves a bit playing WoW. After being in a constant state of awe at how realisticly huge EQ felt and even SWG felt appropriately large to me, I went to WoW and my world became oh so very small. There’s no room for player housing! If 5% of the server built their own small home then the world would suddenly become incredibly cramped. It’s just not in the cards for the game because of how small everything is.
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So i’m left wondering, what type of game would accessible housing like SWG fit into while still retaining a typical MMO environment like EQ/WoW/GuildWars not the big blank square map of the world like SWG had.
I think the sheer numbers on any MMORPG server would keep them from a SWG-like setup without clogging the world and that instancing would be the only answer. But then your house gets tucked away in a little pocket of space and time that only you and the people that share that “neighborhood” would be able to access.
A lot of housing i’ve seen also has housing storage, but a tab for an extra bank vault screen could easily replace the value a house brings for storage purposes. (running between the house and bank to access all of your storage can’t be fun).
So i’m still at a crossroads here. WoW’s ultra-accessible design would force them to instance housing severely because i’m not even sure neighborhoods would work, they’d just end up like LOTRO where no one sees your house EVER, while SWG’s play-style of randomly generated quests and huge blank landscape would probably bore a lot of people to death even if they saw it in a different game. I’m not sure there’s any way to make it work well without instancing except by making the game world huge, but then the devil’s advocate inside of me says that then travel speeds would have to be huge to help people covere distance quickly and then they wont notice your house because it’s just a blur as they pass by.
This is all, of course, me applying the player housing idea to the entire MMORPG population, not just the few people who would engage lots of time in the current systems.
JediOfTheShire says, “There is no easy answer to this dilemma”
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I’ll tell you this as an afterthought though, I would LOVE to see a realisticly scaled (maybe extremely overscaled) world with player-built castles and epic castle sieges with realistic siege weaponry. Oh! I’m daydreaming again sorry.
Oh look i’m triple posting again! Sorry… but I just realized that the post at the top here is February 12th not January 12th oops. So you did just wipe all the comments away with the UI swap.
Hey Jedi. Great insights. I also agree with you that housing should be integrated into the game world. Running away from town to get to a “housing district” stinks. It makes housing seem like a chore. If there is not enough room inside a city, then use the EQ2 system. At least then it feels like people own property inside the town.
The reason for the comment wipe and post date change is I have moved my blog to a new location. It is now 100% self hosted. I am going to write a post about that shortly.
The integration of housing into the game world is for sure the BEST implementation.
But there are problems with that. Ultima Online players managed to plaster the WHOLE of Britannia with houses! There was no wilderness anymore at all. The areas of the expansions packs usually had no housing zones or had dedicated housing zones that resulted in city like megapolises and immense lagfests in that particular area.
I would like to have my own tower/mansion near a lake, river or in the mountains. But it loses a lot of appeal if 1000 other players make the housing zone look like a parking lot.
We have a real lack of virtual space issue here if we keep player housing in the persistant world. What can be done to prevent overcrowding?
I love housing and yes, it’s under utilized. You do need to look any further than EQ2 and SWG to understand that housing is important to many players AND that it can be tied directly into the game as value-add. In EQ2, your house can be used as a storefront. C’mon can it get much better than that for adding RP in MMORPGs. I don’t understand players these days that don’t consider the RP side and value of certain non-combat features. It’s like if it doesn’t enforce grouping or contribute to leveling, it’s not worthy.
Minus the RMT, Runes of Magic has released the housing I prayed that Blizzard would have put by now into WOW. I would still be playing and paying for WOW if they had done it. I can craft in my house, to inventory management from inside my house and I have access to gear set swapping objects. Beyond all that, they’ve included rest bonus gains, crafting bonus gains, etc that can only be acquired from within your house. In Runes case of course it involves purchasing RMT items. However, Blizzard could have implemented quest rewards and rare drops for the same thing. Who wouldn’t want a small spike in crafting XP earned to lessen the freakin’ grind of that stuff. What about raid drop rewards for guild halls that add stat bonuses for 30 minus like we used to get server wide for certain boss kills. Infinite opportunities exist to create housing that is pleasing for the RP element of the game, as well as adding character, group and raid progression.
Excellent housing has been in EQ2 for ages. They now have Guild Halls which provided tangible benefits. There is no excuse at this point for it never having been done in WOW.
Great points, Saylah, about how WoW style games can have rare drops and such for house items. Basically, your house becomes another entity to “gear up” and trick out. That just extends the lifespan of the whole gear grind model.
Housing is actually a pretty good area for direct from the developer RMT. This is particularly true in cases where the housing can have a significant impact as far as changing the game world. It has a permanence that lends itself pretty well to RMT type transactions. Of course, I am talking about RMT in non-subscription games. Charging subscriptions AND having RMT is lame. But that is an issue for another topic.
Longasc: Ultima basically proved you cannot simply let people build a house anywhere they want. That’s a shame, because it is a great idea in concept. But you would need a world so huge that getting around would be a pain.
@Muck – Yes, I think having WOW housing be an extension of your e-peen is perfect for WOW. I mean c’mon, how many mounts do people really need that move at the same speed, yet they are the rage in WOW. WOW housing as an extension of your identity and way to showcase your accomplishments is perfect content for WOW. If not at the player level, I think it would be welcomed at the Guild level. It’s just much to easy to find little perks that can be given based on house/hall items earned via quests, world drops, reputation, raid content, etc. If done at the guild level, it would have been an opportunity to encourage solo players and loners to at least band together in guilds for these small non-game breaking benefits.
Back to the social norm idea, I’m considering for the first time ever in any MMO of creating a guild. Now I’m a die-hard solo player. I socialize but I enjoy leveling by my damn self.
I’m fine with never being in a guild. However, with the RMT perks from housing, I’d just as soon share them with gaming friends as not. So I want to save the gold to form a guild so that other blogger buddies that make their way into the game – casually, rare drop-in, regular player, etc., can share in these benefits because it doesn’t cost me anymore to do so. I have never considered doing that in another game. SWG, EQ2 and ROM are all win in the player/guild housing area. Hopefully, WOW will get there. It’s much too late for me but it would have kept me there if they’d done it.
That’s a really great point you make with the mount comparison. There is even a mount (or at least an achievement) you earn from having all the mounts in the game. Its insane. Some people have like 50+ mounts. It is amazing the ends people go to in order to “collect” stuff in WoW even with so little developer support. This is one reason why Primordiax has an extremely robust collection system (which I just finished this weekend actually). People LOVE to collect stuff. And if they run out of things to collect for their character, collecting for a house opens up a zillion new opportunities for hoarding and pack ratting.
I really need to make a blog post about collecting.
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