[Suggestion] Solving the "Housing Problem"

[Besame]

I have played about 1 yr and have a lovely medium house all decorated. I spend time there and enjoy it and share with my husband who recently started playing also.

I have the usual job alts from the Bard but recently made a lone char to play when I want to see and enjoy all the old content again. While doing the housing tours, I was thinking of buying another house. Then I thought, no, let others have a shot at them that do not even have 1 and I just use my FC. If they would allow separate chars on the same acct/server to log to the house this would help stop people that have chars on the same server from buying yet another and help with the housing crunch.

I have experienced and enjoyed housing in other MMOs but this is the first that is poorly thought out and implemented. Bad housing is bad hehe. Start over and instance each at minimum then make it better along the way.

[Berret_Snowbear]

I have experienced and enjoyed housing in other MMOs but this is the first that is poorly thought out and implemented. Bad housing is bad hehe. Start over and instance each at minimum then make it better along the way.

Yeah, I haven't seen another MMO with housing that's this bad. Even in LOTRO which has the same style of housing (Neighborhoods which you can freely walk around) doesn't have this problem since people are limited to one house per account and as soon as a neighborhood is filled a GM comes to open a new one.

But this form of housing is just bad. I see Wards that are owned by two or three people with the houses just downright empty. While I REALLY want a house in the new housing district I'm going to have to get really lucky.

[P4X0R10N]

I don't like the idea of instanced housing. Kinda breaks the immersion. It's nice that a bunch of people can occupy the same space.

Make private housing 1 per account. Improve apartments. Maybe add a community garden area where apartment users can garden together?

[Naunet]

I don't like the idea of instanced housing. Kinda breaks the immersion.

Oh yes, I feel no immersion upon entering these housing plots...









Nope, not immersed at all!

[Penthea]

Nope, not immersed at all!

Not sure if sarcasm but for some players a small instanced outdoors area will not feel immersive to them at all. Which is understandable. My Garrison in WoW sure as hell didn't make me feel immersed for that very reason. It really felt like an outdoors indoors.

[Berret_Snowbear]

Not sure if sarcasm but for some players a small instanced outdoors area will not feel immersive to them at all. Which is understandable. My Garrison in WoW sure as hell didn't make me feel immersed for that very reason. It really felt like an outdoors indoors.

I find half of the Ward being taken by the same two people who just have their houses and yards empty while they wait to flip the houses for 3x their original price to be more unimmersive. I'll gladly take instance housing over that any day. :P

[Naunet]

Not sure if sarcasm but for some players a small instanced outdoors area will not feel immersive to them at all. Which is understandable. My Garrison in WoW sure as hell didn't make me feel immersed for that very reason. It really felt like an outdoors indoors.

It's not particularly small. It's impossible to capture the sheer massive size of the housing plots in WildStar, to be honest, especially after the masters of visual manipulation have worked their magic.

The point to take away from those screenshots is that they started from a completely bare, flat, huge plain and were able to build up through their own artistic expression incredible environment designs. You can build a house custom using your own ingenuity. You can use one of the premade houses and decorate simply. You can design your own little world if you so choose. You can even populate it with NPCs or creatures or turn it into a large community hub that players visit regularly for rp. And honestly those screenshots were just the first few examples I saw poking through the "wildstar housing" tag on tumblr. To me, the benefits of instanced housing are clear beyond question.

[Penthea]

I find half of the Ward being taken by the same two people who just have their houses and yards empty while they wait to flip the houses for 3x their original price to be more unimmersive. I'll gladly take instance housing over that any day. :P

You're missing the point. The thing with garrisons in WoW was no one could visit your one unless you were in the same party. Unless you did that you only ever saw npcs so the area quickly felt like anything but alive. In FFXIV you can see other players in the residential district without needing to even know them at all. I know players who made friends with their neighbours and even joined their fc. That being said you don't usually see many players because most of the time they're elsewhere in the game doing dungeons, etc.

As for wards being half empty because of house flippers, my impression is that most realms aren't quite as bad as this. Moogle certainly is not. There is a housing problem across all servers but it can manifest differently due to things like population, how old the server is, server economy and what region it is intended for.

The point to take away from those screenshots is that they started from a completely bare, flat, huge plain and were able to build up through their own artistic expression incredible environment designs. You can build a house custom using your own ingenuity. You can use one of the premade houses and decorate simply. You can design your own little world if you so choose. You can even populate it with NPCs or creatures or turn it into a large community hub that players visit regularly for rp. And honestly those screenshots were just the first few examples I saw poking through the "wildstar housing" tag on tumblr. To me, the benefits of instanced housing are clear beyond question.

Yea all that is seriously cool but my experience in WoW has very much coloured my view on instanced housing. I don't mean like apartments, I mean when the outside and inside are both instanced. I can most certainly see the great deal of advantages it can provide, but there are some downsides as well.

Garrisons in WoW greatly isolated people from the game to the point that major hubs looked more noticeably empty than before. Part of this was due to the role they played in the game itself but another big part was the fact that they were instanced (actually phased, which is similar to instancing). It was ironic that a huge amount of players were all in the same location in the game but never saw each other because they were in different instances. It was such a huge disaster that garrisons got a massive amount of hate and an enormous amount of players are entirely against any sort of housing to be brought into the game again.

I'm not saying I don't want to see any instanced housing similar to Wildstar or WoW, but I have seen it go horribly wrong so I would be very concerned if SE considered doing similar.

[Besame]

I don't like the idea of instanced housing. Kinda breaks the immersion. It's nice that a bunch of people can occupy the same space.

Make private housing 1 per account. Improve apartments. Maybe add a community garden area where apartment users can garden together?

In swtor and wildstar, you have instanced housing you can set as private OR public and allow anyone to come, visit, do activities with you. Not hard to do when you care about the game you make. Plenty of immersion if you wish, private if not.