Why do you want a House?

[Dyvid]

It depends on ideas the player has that they want to create. Not everyone wants the same thing. I can always place a small bedroom in a Mansion but I can't place a huge ballroom in an apartment. Not everyone is trying to create a home with their housing. There are players making night clubs, taverns, boutiques, etc. Someone trying to create an Opera House might be able to pull it off in a mansion (would still be difficult) but they'd never be able to do it in a small or medium.

I would love for housing to be more of a sandbox in general, like it was in Wildstar, like it is in RIFT and ESO. than a choice of static crackerboxes like it is here. What if I had an idea where I want to stack small rooms vertically instead of placing them side by side horizontally? I could do that if my medium was just one big huge open space to work in instead of 3 pre-defined floors with pre-defined stairwells that can't be changed.

As for outdoor space, there's nothing that says outdoors can't be part of housing instance (again we see this with Wildstart, RIFT and ESO housing). Give the player an instanced grassy meadow or beachfront. Give them a choice of house-shaped items to place on that beach front or partitions/floors/roofs to create a house in the layout they want (the current crackerboxes are boring).

Well obviously you'll have limits due to size, but I'm still an advocate of upgrading Apartments to a larger, empty box with tools for players to build their how two or three story space or not to build that space. A place dedicated to where player can place outdoor items. I know Yoshi-P said they don't want to do this but I feel that is a mistake. We should focus on providing an adequate space for the average player to experience the system.