Island Sanctuary as a housing solution ?

[Jojoya]

I want a non-instanced house with neighbors, period. They need to dynamically add housing wards; if one ward fills, another gets added and so on. Island Sanctuaries would just split the community even more between the "haves" and "have-nots".

And you could still have a non-instanced house with neighbors even if they improve the instanced system. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Wards could remain the "elite" housing for those who want to fight for the prestige factor while instanced housing would be for those who want a space to decorate and don't care about neighbors.

[Kaiproberts]

And you could still have a non-instanced house with neighbors even if they improve the instanced system. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Wards could remain the "elite" housing for those who want to fight for the prestige factor while instanced housing would be for those who want a space to decorate and don't care about neighbors.

Doesn't sit well with me because it gives them a reason to focus less on adding more wards. The problem is the divide in the community.

[Jojoya]

Doesn't sit well with me because it gives them a reason to focus less on adding more wards. The problem is the divide in the community.

More wards just perpetuates the problem of people not being able to get a house. The cost of running sufficient ward servers so every player and FC could have a house would be prohibitive, especially if the player base takes another jump in size next expansion. There will never be enough wards.

What they need to be doing is giving players an incentive to move out of the wards so more plots are available for those who want to be in the wards. Lack of demolition is one such incentive but clearly not enough when most players seem to value space and larger item limits over other features. Good instanced housing would be that incentive.

I don't understand your objection to instanced housing when all house interiors are instanced and other MMOs use instanced housing quite successfully. Have you seen videos of what players have done with the housing in games like ESO, Wildstar and RIFT? When I was playing RIFT, I literally built a small town in a single Dimension. It had 6 houses, 4 public buildings (school/library, restaurant, town hall, workshop), a central square, a small park with a pond large enough for small boats, an underground sewer area that housed a refugee camp, and a trader's dock for seagoing ships. Then there was another Dimension where I rebuilt the Stormwind Park District (from WoW, this was before Blizzard rebuilt it for Legion). I had another where I built a massive treehouse on the limbs of one of the tree furnishings I increased to maximum size.

Would I give up my ward house here if it meant having access to something that size with that versatility again? Heck yeah. The rest of RIFT was bad to mediocre at best (why I stopped playing it) but the housing was fantastic fun. Give me good instanced housing where I can really stretch my creativity. You can then have my medium plot in Mist.

[Kaiproberts]

More wards just perpetuates the problem of people not being able to get a house. The cost of running sufficient ward servers so every player and FC could have a house would be prohibitive, especially if the player base takes another jump in size next expansion. There will never be enough wards.

What they need to be doing is giving players an incentive to move out of the wards so more plots are available for those who want to be in the wards. Lack of demolition is one such incentive but clearly not enough when most players seem to value space and larger item limits over other features. Good instanced housing would be that incentive.

I don't understand your objection to instanced housing when all house interiors are instanced and other MMOs use instanced housing quite successfully. Have you seen videos of what players have done with the housing in games like ESO, Wildstar and RIFT? When I was playing RIFT, I literally built a small town in a single Dimension. It had 6 houses, 4 public buildings (school/library, restaurant, town hall, workshop), a central square, a small park with a pond large enough for small boats, an underground sewer area that housed a refugee camp, and a trader's dock for seagoing ships. Then there was another Dimension where I rebuilt the Stormwind Park District (from WoW, this was before Blizzard rebuilt it for Legion). I had another where I built a massive treehouse on the limbs of one of the tree furnishings I increased to maximum size.

Would I give up my ward house here if it meant having access to something that size with that versatility again? Heck yeah. The rest of RIFT was bad to mediocre at best (why I stopped playing it) but the housing was fantastic fun. Give me good instanced housing where I can really stretch my creativity. You can then have my medium plot in Mist.

I want a fair and equal housing community. Period. Either let everyone have a 'real' plot or get rid of all the 'real' plots in favor of instanced housing for everyone. My whole point is that everyone should be on equal ground when it comes to housing in a video game. Real life is already so skewed. People play a game to escape some part of real life. Housing problems and inequalities in a video game are completely dumb and go against the entire point of the game to begin with.

[Jojoya]

I want a fair and equal housing community. Period. Either let everyone have a 'real' plot or get rid of all the 'real' plots in favor of instanced housing for everyone. My whole point is that everyone should be on equal ground when it comes to housing in a video game. Real life is already so skewed. People play a game to escape some part of real life. Housing problems and inequalities in a video game are completely dumb and go against the entire point of the game to begin with.

Don't assume everyone else's motivations and desires are the same as yours. People play games for a multitude of reasons, including so they can do real life things they are unable to do in real life for whatever reason.

The fastest way to kill a theme park MMO is to put everything on rails so every players gets the exact same thing. Not everyone wants the same thing.

There is room in this game for both ward and instanced housing. It does not have to be one or the other.

If you really want to escape reality, playing a MMO is not the way to go. When you've got to deal with other real people instead of NPCs, reality is going to intrude.