Why don't more MMOs allow for housing?

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Jon55

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WoW and all the other generic "WoW-killers" (take your pick, honestly they're all the same) out there do the same thing and act as though you get all this customization, but you really don't. One of the coolest thing about Ultima Online (UO) was being able to build and customize a house, even going so far as to have hidden doors and patios and building on the roof, etc. It just added so damn much, and no other game really allows for this any more.

Why? Is it just a lot more difficult to do based on a graphical standpoint? I know UO is an old game with ancient graphics, but still. Is it because the land would have to be expanded greatly? UO was very popular in its' day, and still managed to have plenty of room. One the very coolest things about housing in UO was the different sized plots of land. The smallest plots allowed for bungalows and other small houses, and the largest plots allowed for castles. The castles were rare but so amazing, and anyone could buy/sell their plots of land or in-game money. Any while castles were expensive, just about any normal player could afford at least a small to medium sized plot of land.

I really wish newer MMOs would include the housing aspect.
 
Even though it's something I haven't taken full advantage of in all the MMOs I've played since the heyday of Ultima Online, it's still a feature I like to see in games. I'm talking proper housing, not this throw-away instanced bullcrap. There is something very cool about having your own little piece of the game world.
 
I think if you had housing in the real world (not instanced) that you would need to have a upkeep cost that is quite high. That space will be very valuable and you can't have players buying up houses, leaving them unattended, and not leaving room for other players. With the upkeep, eventually properties will be released when players quit. When the houses are removed from the game world you could have them saved on the server, then when you are next able to afford to purchase land, have the house come back in the state you left it. This would be useful for players who took a break from playing.

To find property, you could have an in game waiting list and give players 3-7 days to respond when a property in their area becomes available. Players could choose a specific area or just select anywhere. They would then be added to a queue and notified when their turn comes up.

It could be done with the right planning.
 
i was talking about this with some friends one day, but only pertaining to WoW. the way the land is set up in WoW, there is really no way for people to have a plot of land, out in the open where every one can see it.. it just wouldn't work.. and having "your" house instanced would be lame as well.. might as well go play farmville. but what i thought would work pretty well would be per guild instanced subdivisions. there would be 1 larger structure that is guild base (be it a castle, manner, mansion... etc.) and guild members can buy their house in this area. guild members buy the land from the guild master, but not with money he can outright spend, more like credits, part of this goes to the land its self and is outright lost, (let say 10,000g for land, and 25,000g for a house) the guild leader would get 2,500 and 5,000 respectively. however, the credits he receives can only be used for his guild. be it on the guild house, streets, decoration. etc. the guild house is not the leaders house, he would have his own house as well and money he puts towards his house, goes towards the guilds house.

we went so far as to discuss how you would keep guild housing original. the easiest way i could come up with would be to use and engine like that of Second Life. its your code. its your textures. adding areas costs credits. adding objects cost credits. etc. but these are not credits you can buy with real world money (not legally per TOS any way). you gold grind, use your gold to purchase reagents, a reagent of area_rug_white will cost you 10g. placing it in your house gives the guild house 2.5gc, changing the area rugs color to blue costs 1g and gives the guild 25sc. you get 10 guildies buying area rugs and changing the color, now the guild can get an area rug and change its color. the larger the guild, the better off the guild house will be.

guild outsiders can visit your guilds house by public invite (guild master sets a flag that allows it to show on a public bulletin board in faction major citys, any visitor can leave messages (be it guildie or outsider) on your guild house bulletin board (say for recruitment/feedback etc.) guildies can flag thier messages as public or private, private means only guildies can read them, threaded like forums. and the PM system would just send an in-game mail.

it went even deeper.. but still.. this is what we came up with, and was the only way i could figure it to work.
 
The space issue seems like an important one in a game. Maybe they could have several places with dedicated housing throughout the world and assign ridiculous sums as prices. That way they can only be purchased by major guilds or extremely successful players and would make excellent money sinks. Each house purchased could contain a number of smaller rooms which could be customized and built up (alchemy lab, reagent vendors, trainers, or BoP items that could only be purchased in those houses).

Then they could allow players to sell them, but the server gets a 30% cut (money is destroyed) with each sale. Just an idea.

It would be an excellent money sink in the game and would allow for some interesting PVP interactions, if they enticed guilds to risk structural damage for some kind of in-game reward.
 
A great aspect of player housing would be having to build the house piece by piece instead of going up to a vendor and plopping down a large sum of whatever currency, dropping a blueprint of that model in your bag and then you just pick where to plop it down.

Putting more thought into building the house, maybe even like minecraft would be glorious and players might put more thought into their housing. You also need a method of crafting that isnt boring as hell.

Decay is a good idea so you dont end up with ghost towns.

So many good ideas floating around that just have to be implemented.
 
The excuse Blizzard used was that they wanted the capital cities to remain active. If everyone had their own house and were able to buy crafting tables, a mailbox, and an ah vendor you'd never have to leave your house and the cities would become ghost towns.

I played Dark Age of Camelot for a couple years and they had an excellent housing system. They had 4 tiers of housing, ranging from a quaint hut to giant guild houses. You could decorate the outside and inside with all sorts of neat items. On top of that they had trophies spread all over the world, some of them rare spawns. So for example there might be a rare spawn bear that you could kill and bring him back to your home to display in full size.

The housing in DAOC was like giant instanced neighborhoods. Guilds would choose a zone and build a guild house there and all their members could buy up plots around it and build their own homes. The neighborhoods were large enough to hold many large guilds.

I honestly had just as much fun collecting items and upgrading my house as actually playing the game. I think Blizzard is missing out on a big hook to keep players playing. If they built an elaborate housing system that was just as fun to upgrade as farming heroics players would never leave.
 
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fattypants said:
The space issue seems like an important one in a game. Maybe they could have several places with dedicated housing throughout the world and assign ridiculous sums as prices. That way they can only be purchased by major guilds or extremely successful players and would make excellent money sinks. Each house purchased could contain a number of smaller rooms which could be customized and built up (alchemy lab, reagent vendors, trainers, or BoP items that could only be purchased in those houses).

Then they could allow players to sell them, but the server gets a 30% cut (money is destroyed) with each sale. Just an idea.

It would be an excellent money sink in the game and would allow for some interesting PVP interactions, if they enticed guilds to risk structural damage for some kind of in-game reward.
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that's not a bad idea, a couple of them scattered per server so only top guilds could access it. but it goes against' wow catering to casuals.

edit: i like how you put smaller rooms in there, so maybe other players can/could purchase a room there for either protection, hearth, location, etc.....
 
SWG - My house is on fire! You don't use water to hose it down, you just spray credits on it and hope for the best.
 
Thor said:
we went so far as to discuss how you would keep guild housing original. the easiest way i could come up with would be to use and engine like that of Second Life. its your code. its your textures. adding areas costs credits. adding objects cost credits. etc. but these are not credits you can buy with real world money (not legally per TOS any way). you gold grind, use your gold to purchase reagents, a reagent of area_rug_white will cost you 10g. placing it in your house gives the guild house 2.5gc, changing the area rugs color to blue costs 1g and gives the guild 25sc. you get 10 guildies buying area rugs and changing the color, now the guild can get an area rug and change its color. the larger the guild, the better off the guild house will be.
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Isn't the world in second life not stored on the HDD like normal games, but streamed from the server. Which would mean higher loading times and much more bandwidth. This isn't so much of an issue in SL because it's not really a game, more an "online creation" kind of thing. But in WoW it might affect the core gameplay. Having people supply their own textures would mean they would have no control over what was in the game world. People would upload pornography pretty quickly. Some of it might even be illegal imagery or offensive. Which mean that other players would be affected, and probably leave.
 
I liked the housing system in daoc alot. It really just served the purpose of extra storage and something like an auction house, and it cost quite a bit, but it was still cool. I spent a good amount of time customizing my house and made my friends buy a tier 3 house for our guild, and those didn't come cheap. I loved seeing little villages of houses all with the same guild banners.

I guess the one complaint I had with it was that housing is completely separated from the rest of the world. I don't know if it would be feasible to integrate housing into the main world because the housing zones themselves were giant zones, just filled with houses. The best I think they could do is have a couple houses set aside in a main city and only let high level guilds or something own them, probably with large weekly fees. I'm sure there would be a ton of people that wouldn't benefit from that though, and it would piss them off.
 
What they need to do is have proper player built cities, start with a basic hub of vendors and a few buildings and allow plots of land to be sold for large sums of cash, that would give the game a bit more of a money sink and encourage people to play past the end game content and save up.

Ideally they need to be extremely expensive so only guilds can gang together to earn them or individuals who are incredibly wealthy.

Alas despite being relatively easy to achieve no one has really done it before, there's certainly no technical reason why it can't be done.
 
Player housing in SWG turned all cities into ghost towns. And turned a planet into unorganized waste lands.
 
Gott said:
Player housing in SWG turned all cities into ghost towns. And turned a planet into unorganized waste lands.
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False, Theed and Coronet were always bustling with people on Radiant. The out of the way cities were always slow.
 
CryingGod said:
False, Theed and Coronet were always bustling with people on Radiant. The out of the way cities were always slow.
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All the player built cities on naboo seemed pretty well populated, but I dont remember what server I was on.
 
If you are worried about housing in your MMO... maybe it's time to get outside and have some fun IRL.
 
Funny you mention UO. I run a server (Age of Valor) as well as a top site list (UO Gateway) and it's suprisingly still popular today!

There is lot of stuff in that game that is really nice like the housing.
 
Johnked6 said:
The excuse Blizzard used was that they wanted the capital cities to remain active. If everyone had their own house and were able to buy crafting tables, a mailbox, and an ah vendor you'd never have to leave your house and the cities would become ghost towns.
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That's why you instance it in the cities and limit what you can do in them. Then you still have to go to the cities.

Blizzard built a housing instance in stormwind and it was in the game even before the game launched. And you could still see the portal to it up until cata launched. It was just gated off.

And if you ever ran a private server you could reach areas of the game like developer island and see the various player housing models they created. So blizzard certainly put a lot of effort into that even way back then and flirted with opening it up over the years.
 
I loved player cities back in the hey-day of SWG. Some of them even enhanced the population of game cities because they were still used as portal hubs. It increased traffic.

The thing with housing, it added increased storage space as well as liability (maybe there should be digital home owners insurance?). Anyway, there have been lots of times when "stuff" would go missing in houses due to one thing or another, and it can become a GM nightmare. Either it was a actual "bug" in the game or the owner of the house had something robbed by another player who had access, and the the owner was all like, "It was a bug!" and send in a ticket. Things like that.

On SWG, whenever they did a major update, the forums would be full of "I'm missing this, and I'm missing that in my house".
 
DeathPrincess said:
Isn't the world in second life not stored on the HDD like normal games, but streamed from the server. Which would mean higher loading times and much more bandwidth. This isn't so much of an issue in SL because it's not really a game, more an "online creation" kind of thing. But in WoW it might affect the core gameplay. Having people supply their own textures would mean they would have no control over what was in the game world. People would upload pornography pretty quickly. Some of it might even be illegal imagery or offensive. Which mean that other players would be affected, and probably leave.
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Yup, very true. They would have to open up the mpq's so that you build with game parts that are already built. But allow free placement. Dwarf_stairs vs NE_stairs on troll_hut_1 at 32.25x25.25@190x5 this gives placement, type, exact location,lateral and vertical roataion. No downloading needed as the parts are part of the game, and would stream right off the HD. Maybe a small cache file generated by the server with a version number attached if the version number is the same, it loads the parts per the script. If it differs, it down loads a new script and loads via that. Scripts can be encrypted and only read by the client to prevent cheating.
 
Star Wars Galaxies had the best housing of any MMO, period. Even if you hated the game, the housing was fucking great. If you wanted to start a player run city, you could. If you wanted to have your own place out on a sand dune far out from any city, you could. You had multiple typs of houses to choose from, you had decorations out the wazzoo. In SWG, you could place your house/city anywhere on a planet as long as it wasn't within a NPC city limits (aka having a house right on the edge of Mos Eisley for instance). It was pretty cool tbh, nothing like it.

The only MMO I have seen that gets near this is Entropia Universe (I play it off and on but its expensive to play it hardcore), but the cities/houses cost PED, and I mean a LOT of it. And PED costs $10 for 100 PED, and these estates go from anywhere around 5000PED to 300,000 PED. Yes, you read that right.
 
Because who wants to log in and sit in their mom's basement while sitting in their mom's basement? ;)
 
Red Squirrel said:
Funny you mention UO. I run a server (Age of Valor) as well as a top site list (UO Gateway) and it's suprisingly still popular today!

There is lot of stuff in that game that is really nice like the housing.
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My favorite part of UO was taming. One of my favorite memories is when I finally got my taming high enough to get my first pure white wyrm and pure black nightmare. I miss the game sometimes :(.
 
Buxaroo said:
Star Wars Galaxies had the best housing of any MMO, period. Even if you hated the game, the housing was fucking great. If you wanted to start a player run city, you could. If you wanted to have your own place out on a sand dune far out from any city, you could. You had multiple typs of houses to choose from, you had decorations out the wazzoo. In SWG, you could place your house/city anywhere on a planet as long as it wasn't within a NPC city limits (aka having a house right on the edge of Mos Eisley for instance). It was pretty cool tbh, nothing like it.
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For the most part I too was content with the SWG housing system. In addition to having a personal house for storage and socializing you could also run your own store, which was pretty cool and many players ran thriving weapon shops, etc.
 
LOTRO has housing...they have these neighborhood instances set up with about 20 houses per in each of the major land areas in Eriador. It's nice having the extra storage and a place to show your boss trophies, but that's about all it's useful for. The neighborhoods themselves are dead all the time, but you do get a nice discount from neighborhood food and potions vendors.

It's not the best system....it's pretty limited actually...but the storage is nice.
 
After DAOC adding housing it definitely killed a lot of the social interaction in the game. Used to be most crafters would work in the capital cities, so those cities were a hub of activity with players meeting up, selling, trading, and buying stuff from people working there.

Then came the housing with the NPC merchants players could buy. No longer did players have to interact with each other anymore. And all the crafters went to their homes and were able to privately just macro up all their skills without fear of being reported. The capital cities turned into ghost towns.

I think DAOC would have been better off just adding an auction hall and not adding housing to the game. It did more harm than good in my opinion. Not to mention their implementation of it had a variety of other screw ups too.
 
Just make it so you can't craft or purchase stuff from your home. Or like EQ2 did where you can sell stuff from your home and allow guests to come in and buy stuff. That way you can show off your house at the same time.
 
They just haven't sorted out the microtransaction fees yet.


Good god I'm getting cynical.
 
I remember after Trammel was opened but before housing was allowed to be placed I spent days looking for a good tower spot with the house placement tool. There was a spot outside of Cove, where you could see the walls of the town, that would take a tower but the servers were so laggy when housing opened that other people filled it up with small and medium houses before I could place it.

I didn't play too much longer after that because there was a lot less fear of being randomly PKed in the open, having items stolen from your backpack, etc. UO:R ruined that game for me. :(
 
I played after Trammel came out, I just spent my time in Feluccia with the rest of the cool people :D. So many nights spent camping a crumbling house with 15-20 other people all on edge waiting to slap up a house in it's place. The best was when there were a couple groups of guildmates/friends and you never knew if the other guys were gonna try to kill you as you waited to get rid of the competition.

I didn't play SWG enough so can't comment on the housing in that one. Wasn't a fan of instanced eq2 housing.
 
I like housing because of the feeling of "ownership" in a game world that's full of other real people. I personally wouldn't invest the time to do anything to a "house" in a single player game.

I really like Eve Online's system.

Even though POSes are not houses you can go into, it still satisfies my need for a house. I do wish they were more like outposts tho ;)
 
dnottis said:
If you are worried about housing in your MMO... maybe it's time to get outside and have some fun IRL.
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I guess I'm in the minority with you here. Frankly, I never gave a flying f- about housing in games. Why would I want to decorate or spend time in a house in a virtual world? I'd rather be out questing or killing stuff. If I want to play house, I'll play house and do something around my house. If I want to play a game, I'll log on. I will not play house in game. That's just super silly to me.

Just sayin!

EDIT: I'm not a packrat either so I have no use for extra storage.
 
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