Plots everywhere demolished and open!

[Packetdancer]

IMO, Wildstar's housing should have been considered barely adequate instead of the Gold Standard MMO housing enthusiasts seem to consider it. Like many things in WS the community was able to work around some of the worst shortcomings of the interface thanks to their add-on API. Think of this: It was barely better than Bioware's NWN toolset and that was 10+ years old by the time WS released.

I would argue that comparing the Aurora Engine to an MMO housing system is sort of like comparing a sports car to a freight train; they both have wheels, yes, but they're sort of different categories, even if you can say "the train is better because it can pull more weight". And comparing a modern sports car to a train from the 1950's does not change the fact that you're comparing a car and a train.

If you're going to do that, then you might as well go "I can make more impressive stuff in the Unreal Engine than I could in WildStar housing" which, yes, is true. Because one is a game engine, and one is an MMO housing system.

I will definitely give you the fact that the default interface for editing housing in WildStar left something to be desired. But what you could build with that interface still seemed pretty powerful, and I've personally not encountered an MMO with more flexibility in what the end results of the housing system could be.

While it was completely instanced I've had significant better social interactions in both quality and quantity in WS than XIV's ward system. That's more the fault of XIV's awful chat interface and the lack of addons that allowed the RP community to replace WS's stock chat with one more suitable for RP.

Trust me, I'm well aware of the benefits of an addon system like that; I'm the one who wrote the original RP-aware chat log replacement during the WildStar closed beta—along with quite a few other things—and nearly took a job with the company as a result of that addon work. I'm already firmly sold on the "addons can be very beneficial" stance.