WoW's player housing will have no FOMO and private housing wards

[Misutoraru]

Yeah, try WoW but will never return, not something I like.
There are many things I like FFXIV more than WoW, but housing really is a very poor implementation. Owned one as some point and eventually give it up. Not worth the sub just to keep the house. In many wards there are no neighbours.
If FC room or apartment have the same function of house, like planting, most of the complain will be gone.
SE prove they could do it just choose not to, hope WoW housing will have some impact and wake up SE

[YumieYumiki]

but there are many systems that current WoW just does better than ffxiv like world

Wow's world pvp is fubar for a variety of reasons, so what world content? World quests aren't any better than fates.

But yes, there are things wow do better, like battlegrounds, or class design in general. Then there are things that are downright laughable such as character appearance and transmogs (like yes, the transmog system is great, but the visuals are crap), or everything regarding storytelling.

That's why i said blizzard is as incompetent as cbu3, just in a different way. A game combining the strong points of both wow and ffxiv would be amazing.

[Jojoya]

From what I took away from their post is as such.

Public Neighborhoods, which the game servers are responsible for creating as needed and maintaining.
- Made by blizzard, probably nice and pretty and serving whatever function blizzard wants (Think RL Golf Estate Housing minus the resident exclusivity, pretty, has features etc... but you cant change it), probably end up as social hubs.

Private Neighborhoods created by groups of friends or guilds to inhabit, progress, and customize together
- Whatever Chaos players want to create

It looks like they've basically looked at all FF players complaints about housing, since they directly reference the big ones.

--------
Blizzard, considering you are most likely reading this thread.
Please let housing zones feel alive and not be ghost towns that this game has, give a reason to actually use them and your game needs a social hub.
See you at end of year or sooner.

Thanks


--------

The pointed jabs at the housing system here doesn't mean that Blizzard has come up with solutions that will create a better overall experience or avoid some of the problems that still plague housing here.

I see 2 positive things from their article that I'm fairly certain they can deliver on: Warband sharing (in other words, alts will automatically be tenants of any house owned on the same account) and every player will be able to have at least one house.

Everything else is vague at best, especially considering they want the entire system to be deeply social yet some of the stated features will destroy any meaningful social aspect over time.

There are mentions of both "your house" and "your houses" so it's uncertain if players will be able to have multiple houses. "Your" could be referring to "you, the individual player" or "you, the collective player base".

Dynamic neighborhoods could be based on their sharding technology, which may end up no better than standard instanced housing (other houses you see around yours may just be generic backdrop filler) or which might mean you have a different set of neighbors every time you go to your house based on who is currently online (oh the irony of your house suddenly ending up next to one belonging to someone you hate).

Decoration may be interior only and not exterior. They only shared concept art for interiors and one of the neighborhoods, with the neighborhood showing the same art for every house location.

We know the cash shop will be involved but not to what degree. What if we're promised a starting item limit of 75 items but you have to go through the cash shop to increase it to 150 or 500? Someone mentioned RIFT's housing system earlier (which I think was one of the best housing systems ever) but the cash shop did have a heavy hand in a player's ability to upgrade their housing. There was a game currency option for upgrades to certain levels (excellent gold sink, btw) but the highest upgrade level could only be obtained through cash shop tokens.

"No high purchase costs" is going to vary in value depending on player status and WoW has seen some serious inflation during the 6 years I wasn't playing. Seeing "No purchase cost" would have been much more reassuring.

In the long run, I suspect what WoW does with their housing system is going to have little impact on what we see here. A large percentage of players have made their choice based on brand/franchise loyalty (or hatred) and housing comparison isn't likely to sway them from changing which game they want to play.

[Hanayumi]

Mentioned this before but WoW will prolly turn out better in the long run. Its a very rough transition with Blizzard/Activision/Microsoft but now they can basically throw all sorts of money and developers at it...

[Reinha]

To me, a good MMO housing system has four components:

1. It allows the player to be creative with few or no limitations.

Being able to place things wherever you want and having a vast number of decorative options is crucial for this. However, in FFXIV, the plugin which allows free placement of items is against the terms of service and the ability to choose a floor layout and house size are restricted by housing availability. The only layout that is accessible to all is the apartments which can't be customized.

2. It's a way to show your achievements.

Designs that you can only earn by achieving things in game should be included in housing. Sadly almost every furniture that drops in content is tradeable and as a result, meaningless.

3. There is an incentive to spend time at the house.

Being able to show off your creativity and trophies is pointless if nobody visits your house. There is nothing at the house you can't also access somewhere else, and also there are crucial things you can't access at the house. World travel, glamour dresser and grand company turn-ins frequently draw people away from their house and into major cities but there are no reasons to return to the house. When visiting other people's houses you can't interact with anything unless you've been granted access.

4. No predatory practices.

From requiring players to gamble to access housing, to destroying earned player furnishings in demolished houses after a time and selling them on the cash shop instead of keeping them available in-game, and having a FOMO chokehold on players who reluctantly subscribe monthly because they don't want to compete for housing again, it's clear that dev convenience and profits are prioritized over the enjoyment of players.

If WoW's housing can manage to hit those points it will be the thing that tips the scales and gets me to give that game another try. They have already improved other features of WoW (while this game downgraded) to the point where I honestly can't tell what FFXIV does better anymore.

Even though Square Enix has long since stopped caring about feedback, it's obvious from the blog post that somebody at Blizzard is reading this forum and paying attention. This post is aimed at them.

[YumieYumiki]

Mentioned this before but WoW will prolly turn out better in the long run. Its a very rough transition with Blizzard/Activision/Microsoft but now they can basically throw all sorts of money and developers at it...

Wow have many problems that are not the result of a lack of developers. And as long as it generates a positive cash flow I don't see Microsoft investing a lot in wow. They're more likely to use warcraft ip for other games.

[Johners]

Wow have many problems that are not the result of a lack of developers. And as long as it generates a positive cash flow I don't see Microsoft investing a lot in wow. They're more likely to decline the warcraft ip into other games.

Except they're spending more on WoW's development than ever with the dev team being the largest it's ever been. Not to mention there's several versions of WoW Classic which are all fully funded alongside the modern game, all of which is made available to players under one subscription fee.

[YumieYumiki]

Except they're spending more on WoW's development than ever with the dev team being the largest it's ever been. Not to mention there's several versions of WoW Classic which are all fully funded alongside the modern game, all of which is made available to players under one subscription fee.

I stand corrected. Nonetheless wow’s narration for example was not awful because of a lack of budget, so I remain unconvinced.

[Shougun]

I stand corrected. Nonetheless wow’s narration for example was not awful because of a lack of budget, so I remain unconvinced.

On average I would say FFXIV does better with story; however, I do feel their more recent stuff has improved story telling a lot from ancient memories (if that is what you basing it off like I was), definitely more story and sometimes told in a way that is better (quest design is better, or the cutscene is higher polished). It doesn't rise to the challenge as often as FFXIV though, we have way way way way more MSQ quests (sometimes too much, but many of those are telling the story better).


I would say I prefer WoW's gravitas style of voice acting. I don't hate the voice actors here, many do very well, and id say none I want to mute (like I wanted to mute vanille in FFXIII), but I seldom feel gravitas (insert other synonymous words here) that I feel from WoW, or many other works (like Fromsoft, or even FFXVI). I imagine some of that is how the actors are directed / audio is mixed at the end and not even the actors control, having done very low skill variant of that myself (finding I can get my voice light and young to deep and boomy with relative ease, both sounding unedited.. but totally were lol).

[Buttobi]

Wow's world pvp is fubar for a variety of reasons, so what world content? World quests aren't any better than fates.

But yes, there are things wow do better, like battlegrounds, or class design in general. Then there are things that are downright laughable such as character appearance and transmogs (like yes, the transmog system is great, but the visuals are crap), or everything regarding storytelling.

That's why i said blizzard is as incompetent as cbu3, just in a different way. A game combining the strong points of both wow and ffxiv would be amazing.

I will mostly be speaking about Dragonflight here, but that expansion had tons of interesting world content. It did not just have standard world quests, there were dynamic events like Fyrakk burning up different zones, dynamically changing them and having you clear out the surrounding zones of primalists. There were also the event quests that would have you do more than just talk to npcs for 15 minutes to collect your emote. I recall a couple where you had to create a giant soup with the community, or one where you had to lead a giant treant through the forest to safety while fending off waves of enemies.These are just a few examples but DF was filled with world content that was more than just world quests. I could go into the collectibles (similair to sightseeing logs from ffxiv which I like) or dragonriding content like racing and collecting essences for raid levels of gear. You get the idea. WoW just does more interesting things with its open world than ffxiv does at the moment. If it was not for field operations, all we have are hunts and fates. These are not bad content but it's just not varied enough and they only get updated in the .0 patch.

I will give you that the story is a bit boring, decent at best. But I just can not agree that the visuals are crap. Not that these previous two things matter too much to me cause the rest of the game I find enjoyable. Of course there are certain things that ffxiv does better, but at the moment I think the tables have turned into the favor of WoW on a lot of the game design. This housing system just being one other example. Granted, it gets implemented the way they are describing it.