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Why did housing in MMOs degenerate after SWG ?
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I'm guessing because no one gives a good Goddamn about virtual realestate?
It's better to lurk in forums and be thought a fool...than to endlessly "Quote" and remove all doubts.
Everytime you're in Dalaran do a /who and I bet you'll see the same people there, constantly, not doing anything 'constructive, exciting or challenging'. Or turn on /2 (trade) sometime and watch it, there are alot of people that just sit around chatting, climbing on fountains/mailboxes and other social stuff. WoW isn't 24/7 raiding, instancing, Arenaing. Its popular because it has enough social features that Grandma doesn't feel like she has to be killing boars 100% of the time she's playing, it doesn't force 'work' on people so they can just sit around doing non-constructive 'stuff'.
Did an apartment just come open?
It's better to lurk in forums and be thought a fool...than to endlessly "Quote" and remove all doubts.
Another option for WoW and other 'established' themepark games is to reuse old dungeons/content. Cataclysm is coming to WoW and the old world is being rebuilt. Why not turn Blackrock mountain into a high rise apartement complex or take the Outland and expand the inhabited portions. Ragnaros is moving and we've killed Illidan already, why not finish off the job and make their old dungeons and environs more habitable and inhabited? Who wouldn't want to have an apartment in the Black Temple or Blackrock Mountain? Or a house on one of the floating islands scattered around Outlands?
Because players would much rather adventure in a new dungeon than sit in a virtual room and chat.
The Armory & all the information that it tracks & makes publicly available serves as a virtual "trophy case" of what you've accomplished.
And this is a MUCH better way to show case your character than in-game housing. People can access it any time without even going inside the game.
And wowarmory has just added 3D modeling so you actually can see your toon in 3D.
People that require housing are those who sit in game and chat or hang out for long periods of time without doing anything constructive, exciting or challenging.
Lol, right.
Because storytelling and creating content for others isn't nearly as constructive, exciting, or challenging as following a yellow exclamation point to a quest turn-in, or standing in line to down a boss that's been killed by a thousand other unique snowflakes.
You go achievement boy!
...
Housing in SWG was far from a fluff feature. Housing developed community and supported player trade. It was an integral part of the game.
I know this off thread but it has to be said....
Isn't this the prob with WoW ??? Same Dungeon - Different Names ?
That's why I don't play it and why I miss SWG
Your comment is not off topic at all. In fact, I'd argue that your statement is the real meat of the thread. It's the battle between people who have at least a slight capacity for creativity versus the midless drones which infest mmos nowadays.
If you indeed played SWG back then, the you also must remember what the majority was screaming things like "we don't need housing, go play the sims if you want to decorate"
The masses simply wants a multiplayer combat experiance out of this genre. They don't see how housing fits this genre.
And yes loved my hous (es) in SWG, made allot of them, ranging from workshops like a dedicated Engineer lab, Architect lab, Shipcrafters lab, Bio-engineer lab, Droidengineer lab and casual living homes and several shops.
Thankfully there are still a few (indie) developers mostly that want to atract the more MMORPG base players instead of reaching to the masses.
Just cause he played swg doesn't mean he was active in the forum or game discussion community. Heck, I sure didn't care about that stuff back then. I just played the darn game.
The point here is don't claim that a forum community in any way is a proper sample of a game's population. You have no way of knowing if 2% of 90% of the players visit and post on the forums.
So what are you saying, that the point of mmos is to make everything as practical and efficient as possible? In that case you should have speeders that can cover the entire world in five minutes at release. After all, exploring sure doesn't add anything practical to the game. Heck, it's a lot more practical to have auction house links in every small town rather than only in major cities.
It's the unpractical things that add so much depth to mmos. It's what allows variety to what is ultimately a boring grind for gear. It's the impractical that allows player creativity to shine. I argue that it's the impractical and "fluff" that seperates a mmorpg from a morpg.
For the love of god please come back Raph Koster and make a MMO again!
I quit wow because of lack of sandbox features such as housing, and if they actually added non-instanced housing to wow I would seriously consider coming back because non-instanced housing shows dedication to the sandbox portion of a mmo. I am far from alone. I'm certainly not 11.5 million people far from alone, but I'm a very successful mmo amount of people far from alone. (did that make any sense lol?)
Of course players wouldn't quit WOW because there is no housing.....there wasn't any to begin with. The game mechanics that make housing important are not supported by the mechanics in WOW.
Players have relatively few possesions and require very little more space than what they have in thier own pack and bank.....so there is no need for additional house storage.
The Armory & all the information that it tracks & makes publicly available serves as a virtual "trophy case" of what you've accomplished.
Very little "idle" landscape makes it hard to make enough housing available to all players.
There are very deep core mechanics that make housing worthwhile and WOW doesn't really support any of them.
Correct!! People that require housing are those who sit in game and chat or hang out for long periods of time without doing anything constructive, exciting or challenging. Its mostly a social thing. UO and SWG had in depth housing because a large part of the game was just people hanging out. Now a days, the need to just hang out in a MMO isn't all that important. People want to DO things. Interacting in a virtual world was cool in UO back in the 90s. Now its about as exciting as your first toy car.
Your stereotype of people who are into housing shows your ignorance on what housing is really about. Just go back to wow, cause I doubt you've played any other mmos that can contribute anything further to this discussion. If you had, you'd know that housing in SWG was an integral part to the game and condusive to constructive, exciting, and challenging content. I knew people who half leveled their jedis in housing because it was a somewhat safe place to do so, player malls were an elaborate and time consuming activity for all involved, crafters used multiple houses, factories, and storage facilities to facilitate crafting activities.
Blah, you're just a waste of my time. You don't get it at all.
Yeah that's why virtual real estate sells in second life for more than you make in a decade.
Perhaps,
Housing degenerated because of what happened to SWG, if they have housing similar to SWG people may associate the game with SWG. In an ideal world with unlimited resources, then housing should be at stake.
I am in my first week of SWG and i was in awe of how nice people's houses were but i did realize that there are a bunch of generic houses just laying around. Perhaps, the reason i feel it's laying aorund is that the population is low, i assume in its glory days, you'd see tons of people up and about in a city.
I did play RoM with isntanced housing and it was retarded, it was just a 3D bank basically. But i do get the point that player cities just do take people away from NPC cities and can disperse the community which was something i never thought of.
Nonetheless, housing is fun for certain people, but i think the majority probably don't care about housing. But then again, i wonder if you had WoW and then could run a parallel universe and create SWG-style housing in WoW what it could do to subs.
I also think they should make SWG 2 and do it right with all their knowledge that they have and make one server
.
Cryomatrix
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
Simple answer >>COST of development.Those 1-5 million dolalr projects now carry a price tag of 40+ million.Then on top of that the larger developers that can afford it also have HUGE overhead,so we are getting a ton of poor efforts in game design right now.
IMO we are going to go through a long period where developers will weigh their options.They will have to decide on what to keep and what to eliminate,they will be looking to cut corners,for every good idea,they will follow with a cheap low cost idea to even it out.
I have already seen tons of this in Square's new FFXIV.They know and talk about housing,but it pretty much sounds like an after thought,they will implement it after the money rolls in.They also talked about creating an entire Eco system a true living world,but again maybe later when the money rolls in.The problem with after thoughts is that when a game is released,the majority of the staff gets moved to other ventures or expansion packs,they are not going to leave much of a staff dedicated to adding in free content.
Just following FFXIV as much as i have,it is lear to see that our developers know full well what people want in our games,but they are not willing to absorb the cost and time to give us all the content we want,instead deliver a fast product ,then sell us xpacs.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
the question of the decade: why did all the great swg community features degenerate after swg.
Housing in SWG was far from a fluff feature. Housing developed community and supported player trade. It was an integral part of the game.
SWG wasn't really a game, it was more of a social simulator. It became a game after the NGE, but we all know how that turned out. Because it was a social simulator, I'd imagine housing was certainly an integral part of it. But we have mostly MMORPGames nowadays, which would easily answer the OP's question.
Non-sense everquest 2 is good mmorpg and does housing with perfection. lord of the rings took EQ2 idea and took it up a notch. it can be done it's matter of choice. star wars galaxies mistake was housing was put out on the landscape ruining planets like tantooine. if star wars galaxies had instanced housing like eq2 which anakin's house in episode 1 shows housing in the city then the landscape would been far more enjoyable. if devs are looking at swg as example then they need to wake up and look at eq2 and lotro.
Of course players wouldn't quit WOW because there is no housing.....there wasn't any to begin with. The game mechanics that make housing important are not supported by the mechanics in WOW.
Players have relatively few possesions and require very little more space than what they have in thier own pack and bank.....so there is no need for additional house storage.
The Armory & all the information that it tracks & makes publicly available serves as a virtual "trophy case" of what you've accomplished.
Very little "idle" landscape makes it hard to make enough housing available to all players.
There are very deep core mechanics that make housing worthwhile and WOW doesn't really support any of them.
Correct!! People that require housing are those who sit in game and chat or hang out for long periods of time without doing anything constructive, exciting or challenging. Its mostly a social thing. UO and SWG had in depth housing because a large part of the game was just people hanging out. Now a days, the need to just hang out in a MMO isn't all that important. People want to DO things. Interacting in a virtual world was cool in UO back in the 90s. Now its about as exciting as your first toy car.
Your stereotype of people who are into housing shows your ignorance on what housing is really about. Just go back to wow, cause I doubt you've played any other mmos that can contribute anything further to this discussion. If you had, you'd know that housing in SWG was an integral part to the game and condusive to constructive, exciting, and challenging content. I knew people who half leveled their jedis in housing because it was a somewhat safe place to do so, player malls were an elaborate and time consuming activity for all involved, crafters used multiple houses, factories, and storage facilities to facilitate crafting activities.
Blah, you're just a waste of my time. You don't get it at all.
Sorry, my bad, leveling your character in a house sounds so damn exciting. No wonder SWG did so well...Ooops, no it didn't=)
SWG in the form you remember was unsustainable, which was why it was changed. THATs why housing degenerated. It doesn't appeal to enough people to make it a major feature in a MMO. Thats life.
The fact that SWG housing wasnt a house of mirrors is what made it so awesome. People being able to add to the world is what an MMO should be about.
Would you rather have a housing system... or...
Siegeable cities, every faction city a Wintergrasp?
A new playable race?
A new playable class?
More content like a new raid dungeon?
A new zepplin mount?
and so on
Most could care less about housing, imo.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Yes to all + housing
A Tale In the Desert has great housing...idk what you all are talking about.
Why does everything have to be based on SWG? When are people just going to let it die?
Check out the MUD I'm making!
Ultima Online had the best player housing in MMO history.
I'm talking before Age of Shadows came out and ruined it. There was a player run real estate market, in which a shrewd player could actually amass a fortune buying and selling housing, and owning a house was something you had to work for.