Originally posted by JaedorI like the idea of using a city façade to create entrances to various spaces that are instanced. Perhaps a mouseover sign could show which guilds had their halls in that "building", much like mailbox/buzzers in city apartment buildings.This could blend the feeling of "my condo" in a busy city with social interactions and running into your neighbors when you enter, and really expand the possibilities of what players have access to. Being able to enter someone else's place could present challenges but with instancing, there's a lot more workability than leaving it all open world.
EQ2 already has this exact housing system.
Yes, I was thinking of something a bit more sophisticated though, and more immersive. As I recall the EQ2 housing was in a separate area away from the actual town area. I'd like to see a system where multiple entryways are right in the middle of town, so you could actually run into your neighbor as you are zoning in. I think it would be pretty cool to see an apartment building in TSW's London or WoW's Stormwind or AA's Marianople that offered alternatives to having your own housing plot or nothing at all.
Depends on the zone. In Halas, for example, the houses and guild halls are in the same area as the crafting stations, bank, and auction house. So you would almost always see other people around when you went to your house.
Markets do not mind read. the product has to actually exist for there to be any data on its demand.
Of course they do. It is called focus group, and marketing research. You don't think the japanese companies just came into the US selling cars without doing research, do you?
focus groups are woefully inadequate.
nobody saw Japanese cars until they got here. Why? because its a little hard to create a focus group on something you dont know even is possible!
Galaxy Note also caught everyone off guard, nobody wants a 5" screen that is crazy...turns out...not so crazy.
My favorite though is a pharaphased quote from Ford 'we do not understand why the new Mustangs are selling so well while the old ones are not'
they were refering to the design of the 90s vs the current one.
they had no idea that people really did like the old mustang look
Originally posted by JaedorI like the idea of using a city façade to create entrances to various spaces that are instanced. Perhaps a mouseover sign could show which guilds had their halls in that "building", much like mailbox/buzzers in city apartment buildings.This could blend the feeling of "my condo" in a busy city with social interactions and running into your neighbors when you enter, and really expand the possibilities of what players have access to. Being able to enter someone else's place could present challenges but with instancing, there's a lot more workability than leaving it all open world.
EQ2 already has this exact housing system.
Yes, I was thinking of something a bit more sophisticated though, and more immersive. As I recall the EQ2 housing was in a separate area away from the actual town area. I'd like to see a system where multiple entryways are right in the middle of town, so you could actually run into your neighbor as you are zoning in. I think it would be pretty cool to see an apartment building in TSW's London or WoW's Stormwind or AA's Marianople that offered alternatives to having your own housing plot or nothing at all.
In NeverWinter 1 I build a city in which every single door led to a room I also made a sewer system connecting many of the homes. Its completely possible and not hard, its just a lot of work.
In NeverWinter 1 I build a city in which every single door led to a room I also made a sewer system connecting many of the homes. Its completely possible and not hard, its just a lot of work.
None of this software stuff is hard if you have enough money. The question is why would people care enough to try.
In NeverWinter 1 I build a city in which every single door led to a room I also made a sewer system connecting many of the homes. Its completely possible and not hard, its just a lot of work.
None of this software stuff is hard if you have enough money. The question is why would people care enough to try.
because they dont know that people actually like the old ford mustang look because they never asked people that quesiton in a focus group.
funny thing about focus groups. if you dont ask the question you dont get the answer, hard to think of every question possible
None of this software stuff is hard if you have enough money. The question is why would people care enough to try.
because they dont know that people actually like the old ford mustang look because they never asked people that quesiton in a focus group.
funny thing about focus groups. if you dont ask the question you dont get the answer, hard to think of every question possible
And why do you think they don't mock up the old Mustang with drawings and ask people?
In terms of the city stuff, how do you know they haven't asked anyone? Housing is a pretty old thing .. it is not like they don't know about it.
In fact, given that housing is not that important or fun (UO ghettos anyone?), i bet they have done the research and decide to put money in other more desirable things.
Your argument may have merits if we are talking about something totally new ... but housing .. which exists back to UO .. .not a chance.
It's a good Idea mate. And if done properly could hold some potential. However that "some potential" is the issue I believe.
Lots of people say "its about the tech, bandwidth, server capacity/power etc" that limits these things. There is truth to this, but when you think of something like a housing system inside of a city what you really need to think of is the complexity of the data.
Who owns the house. Who can enter the house. What is the auction system of the house. What is in the house. All of these things would require new data models, new tables, new controllers etc. These structures wouldn't scale to hundreds of thousands/millions of players, they would only apply to the people who have the house in the city (thousands maybe? Is there a 1000 un-used houses in Stormwind? Now I am really curious, we should find out sometime!) This is why housing is so frequantly zoned, so a players UID can be linked easily to a global housing table of your personal house data. However this data is all generic with the foreign key of you.
The complexity of maintaining an error free system of player housing inside of a big city would be very difficult because of the uniqueness of each plot and it's permissions. Its possible, but now we are back to that "some potential" bit.
Personally I would love this. But as a developer, I would hate to maintain this haha.
Well, you do need a large enough game to have enough housing for everyone on the server, that is true. Many games have too small cities but far from all.
You could also besides rent add that certain houses needs enough faction that need to be kept up, a noble title, military rank or something else to keep. Or achivement points for that matter.
That some people live in crappy apartments seems realistic to me at least, particularly low level characters with little money and no title.
Realistic may be ... but it does not sound fun to me. What can you do with a small room? If i want to play the decorator, SIMS is a much better choice.
Plus, most MMOs are combat focus anyway. Giving me a room that i have to jump through hoops to get to does not sound compelling to me.
Well, EQ2 did have pretty good player housing besides being instanced and many players never cared at all about it but then again many did so you wouldn't exactly loose anything if you skipped the part. Optional stuff that makes a large part of the players happy is good, and player owned stores and taverns do help to bring the community closer.
As for small shacks and apartments that really should be how you start in a MMO, getting a nicer placeis something players work for, just like getting better gear, titles and for that matter: levels. The difference is that this is one of the things that affect the gamebalance very little. Successful store owners could earn a lot of money though.
And yes, MMOs are indeed combat focused but none combat stuff like crafting and similar do add some variation to the games. Not to mention guild owned guildhalls in the open world (or castles), they do add a lot.
But stuff like this needs to be optional, except maybe player owned stores. The rest is something you really should be able to avoid without it impacting the game for you.
None of this software stuff is hard if you have enough money. The question is why would people care enough to try.
because they dont know that people actually like the old ford mustang look because they never asked people that quesiton in a focus group.
funny thing about focus groups. if you dont ask the question you dont get the answer, hard to think of every question possible
And why do you think they don't mock up the old Mustang with drawings and ask people?
In terms of the city stuff, how do you know they haven't asked anyone? Housing is a pretty old thing .. it is not like they don't know about it.
In fact, given that housing is not that important or fun (UO ghettos anyone?), i bet they have done the research and decide to put money in other more desirable things.
Your argument may have merits if we are talking about something totally new ... but housing .. which exists back to UO .. .not a chance.
again..read very very carefully.
-The Ford Motor company did not understand why bringing back the old Mustang body shape was selling so well.
-If you dont ask the question you will not get an answer ITS NOT POSSIBLE TO THINK OF EVERY QUESTION TO ASK A FOCUS GROUP.
painful reality in the Ford story was that once the old designers (from the 90s) quit the young designers said lets bring back the style of the 60's like we have been asking you guys to do...then...BAM...sold like hot cakes
-If you dont ask the question you will not get an answer ITS NOT POSSIBLE TO THINK OF EVERY QUESTION TO ASK A FOCUS GROUP.
And how is this relevant to housing?
It is a known thing and the question is asked here everyday ... and the answer (based on all the trials dating back to UO housing ghetto) is .... don't think many cares.
Originally posted by Hariken I never really got into housing but i have owned them in games. The only one i really thought did it well was EQ2. You have outskirts of cities where housing was or if rich enough bigger choices. But you could add extra rooms to your one room house. I had a pretty nice one in EQ2.
I kept hearing EQ2 housing was sweet. In fact it is most player's selling point when trying to recruit new players. I bit the bullet and installed it and tried playing. Too bad everything else about the game was far less fun for me. Sony has an amazing record of taking games that were fun and making them less fun in later iterations.
The original plan here was to only let players use pre-build houses in town. This would make them very expensive as there would only be few compared to the demand. I think they have later changed it so they have added areas where new houses can be build.
I only PvP and grind mobs or raid. Why have a house? I play MMOs like a giant call of duty or battlefield match...pvp pvp pvp. The raids are when my friends "force" me to join them (I'm last man chosen for that, they know I only pvp). And grind mobs for sweet sweet loot.
MMOs don't need any housing. SWG and their cities really ruined it, when they could have made PvP a lot better. And EQ2 focuses so much on housing, PvP is the worst. The more an MMO focuses on housing, the worse the game and pvp get.
That is just my 2 cents though.
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
Originally posted by Essedarius But as a developer, I would hate to maintain this haha.
I know what you mean and yes it might need some extra code but as long as you have some other housing it wouldn't be that much of a problem. You'd have to maintain some form of ownership and special rules that come with housing anyway so adding a bit of code and another 1-2 tables shouldnt be a problem that cant be solved. If you choose the easy way and just use empty houses then set it as a normal player house and add something that makes it worthwhile. But if you'd like to make it unique, at this moment to my knowledge, and allow players to buy npc shops then it might get a bit tricky.
Imho it would be a great thing to have this op. I'm thinking about player stocked merchants selling the stuff the owner crafted or special resting places if the player put down some beds for others to sleep in while offline. It would open up so many new ways of playing or creating content. I wouldnt worry about the ressources used for this because in many cases you have a loading screen before big cities which would give you enough time to download the updated player houses and if they change while you are in it you can handle it as a dropped item. Sure it is some extra work but what this could add to a game outweights the cost imho.
Originally posted by Hariken I never really got into housing but i have owned them in games. The only one i really thought did it well was EQ2. You have outskirts of cities where housing was or if rich enough bigger choices. But you could add extra rooms to your one room house. I had a pretty nice one in EQ2.
I kept hearing EQ2 housing was sweet. In fact it is most player's selling point when trying to recruit new players. I bit the bullet and installed it and tried playing. Too bad everything else about the game was far less fun for me. Sony has an amazing record of taking games that were fun and making them less fun in later iterations.
I had brought that up earlier.. EQ2 type of housing would be perfect use of all the unused city space.. I hate instanced content like raiding and dungeons.. but for housing, it's perfect.. As a dev you never have to worry about "merging" servers and what problems housing causes.. People can come and go and NOT lose their land so to speak.. It could possibly open the opportunity for players to own more then ONE house as well.. /shrug..
Yes, as much as I thought EQ2 housing was great, the rest of the game couldn't hold my interest..
I like the idea of using a city façade to create entrances to various spaces that are instanced. Perhaps a mouseover sign could show which guilds had their halls in that "building", much like mailbox/buzzers in city apartment buildings.
This could blend the feeling of "my condo" in a busy city with social interactions and running into your neighbors when you enter, and really expand the possibilities of what players have access to. Being able to enter someone else's place could present challenges but with instancing, there's a lot more workability than leaving it all open world.
That's probably the best bet.
I thought DCUO did a very good job with this type of system.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. -- Herman Melville
As the two posters above have pointed out - what would be the point?
The last thing I'd want to do is waste time to find my house in game in the middle of a large city - I already do that in RL.
For what purpose would I want to do this in game?
IMO the best housing systems are the ones that have *some purpose* in actual game - example ArcheAge where housing actually has gameplay purpose.
Also what MMO designers always want to avoid is situations where you have a large number of players in one small area - which is what a large city full of players would be.
Yes, unfortunately in Archeage owning land is pretty much a requirement if you want to accomplish anything. Too bad there is only enough for 20% of the population to ever own any and most of that is owned by 10% of the population using hacks to claim land from anywhere in the world the millisecond it gets demolished.
I'd rather have land that doesn't do anything important than not have land in a game where having land is the difference between being viable or being worthless.
Comments
Depends on the zone. In Halas, for example, the houses and guild halls are in the same area as the crafting stations, bank, and auction house. So you would almost always see other people around when you went to your house.
focus groups are woefully inadequate.
nobody saw Japanese cars until they got here. Why? because its a little hard to create a focus group on something you dont know even is possible!
Galaxy Note also caught everyone off guard, nobody wants a 5" screen that is crazy...turns out...not so crazy.
My favorite though is a pharaphased quote from Ford 'we do not understand why the new Mustangs are selling so well while the old ones are not'
they were refering to the design of the 90s vs the current one.
they had no idea that people really did like the old mustang look
In NeverWinter 1 I build a city in which every single door led to a room I also made a sewer system connecting many of the homes. Its completely possible and not hard, its just a lot of work.
You didn't see it .. or you don't know anyone who saw it .. does not mean no one did.
None of this software stuff is hard if you have enough money. The question is why would people care enough to try.
because they dont know that people actually like the old ford mustang look because they never asked people that quesiton in a focus group.
funny thing about focus groups. if you dont ask the question you dont get the answer, hard to think of every question possible
And why do you think they don't mock up the old Mustang with drawings and ask people?
In terms of the city stuff, how do you know they haven't asked anyone? Housing is a pretty old thing .. it is not like they don't know about it.
In fact, given that housing is not that important or fun (UO ghettos anyone?), i bet they have done the research and decide to put money in other more desirable things.
Your argument may have merits if we are talking about something totally new ... but housing .. which exists back to UO .. .not a chance.
It's a good Idea mate. And if done properly could hold some potential. However that "some potential" is the issue I believe.
Lots of people say "its about the tech, bandwidth, server capacity/power etc" that limits these things. There is truth to this, but when you think of something like a housing system inside of a city what you really need to think of is the complexity of the data.
Who owns the house. Who can enter the house. What is the auction system of the house. What is in the house. All of these things would require new data models, new tables, new controllers etc. These structures wouldn't scale to hundreds of thousands/millions of players, they would only apply to the people who have the house in the city (thousands maybe? Is there a 1000 un-used houses in Stormwind? Now I am really curious, we should find out sometime!) This is why housing is so frequantly zoned, so a players UID can be linked easily to a global housing table of your personal house data. However this data is all generic with the foreign key of you.
The complexity of maintaining an error free system of player housing inside of a big city would be very difficult because of the uniqueness of each plot and it's permissions. Its possible, but now we are back to that "some potential" bit.
Personally I would love this. But as a developer, I would hate to maintain this haha.
Well, EQ2 did have pretty good player housing besides being instanced and many players never cared at all about it but then again many did so you wouldn't exactly loose anything if you skipped the part. Optional stuff that makes a large part of the players happy is good, and player owned stores and taverns do help to bring the community closer.
As for small shacks and apartments that really should be how you start in a MMO, getting a nicer placeis something players work for, just like getting better gear, titles and for that matter: levels. The difference is that this is one of the things that affect the gamebalance very little. Successful store owners could earn a lot of money though.
And yes, MMOs are indeed combat focused but none combat stuff like crafting and similar do add some variation to the games. Not to mention guild owned guildhalls in the open world (or castles), they do add a lot.
But stuff like this needs to be optional, except maybe player owned stores. The rest is something you really should be able to avoid without it impacting the game for you.
again..read very very carefully.
-The Ford Motor company did not understand why bringing back the old Mustang body shape was selling so well.
-If you dont ask the question you will not get an answer ITS NOT POSSIBLE TO THINK OF EVERY QUESTION TO ASK A FOCUS GROUP.
painful reality in the Ford story was that once the old designers (from the 90s) quit the young designers said lets bring back the style of the 60's like we have been asking you guys to do...then...BAM...sold like hot cakes
And how is this relevant to housing?
It is a known thing and the question is asked here everyday ... and the answer (based on all the trials dating back to UO housing ghetto) is .... don't think many cares.
I kept hearing EQ2 housing was sweet. In fact it is most player's selling point when trying to recruit new players. I bit the bullet and installed it and tried playing. Too bad everything else about the game was far less fun for me. Sony has an amazing record of taking games that were fun and making them less fun in later iterations.
You stay sassy!
I think the OP wants something like the housing in Black Desert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyn5xgcOE7I
The original plan here was to only let players use pre-build houses in town. This would make them very expensive as there would only be few compared to the demand. I think they have later changed it so they have added areas where new houses can be build.
I only PvP and grind mobs or raid. Why have a house? I play MMOs like a giant call of duty or battlefield match...pvp pvp pvp. The raids are when my friends "force" me to join them (I'm last man chosen for that, they know I only pvp). And grind mobs for sweet sweet loot.
MMOs don't need any housing. SWG and their cities really ruined it, when they could have made PvP a lot better. And EQ2 focuses so much on housing, PvP is the worst. The more an MMO focuses on housing, the worse the game and pvp get.
That is just my 2 cents though.
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
I know what you mean and yes it might need some extra code but as long as you have some other housing it wouldn't be that much of a problem. You'd have to maintain some form of ownership and special rules that come with housing anyway so adding a bit of code and another 1-2 tables shouldnt be a problem that cant be solved. If you choose the easy way and just use empty houses then set it as a normal player house and add something that makes it worthwhile. But if you'd like to make it unique, at this moment to my knowledge, and allow players to buy npc shops then it might get a bit tricky.
Imho it would be a great thing to have this op. I'm thinking about player stocked merchants selling the stuff the owner crafted or special resting places if the player put down some beds for others to sleep in while offline. It would open up so many new ways of playing or creating content. I wouldnt worry about the ressources used for this because in many cases you have a loading screen before big cities which would give you enough time to download the updated player houses and if they change while you are in it you can handle it as a dropped item. Sure it is some extra work but what this could add to a game outweights the cost imho.
I had brought that up earlier.. EQ2 type of housing would be perfect use of all the unused city space.. I hate instanced content like raiding and dungeons.. but for housing, it's perfect.. As a dev you never have to worry about "merging" servers and what problems housing causes.. People can come and go and NOT lose their land so to speak.. It could possibly open the opportunity for players to own more then ONE house as well.. /shrug..
Yes, as much as I thought EQ2 housing was great, the rest of the game couldn't hold my interest..
That's probably the best bet.
I thought DCUO did a very good job with this type of system.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
Yes, unfortunately in Archeage owning land is pretty much a requirement if you want to accomplish anything. Too bad there is only enough for 20% of the population to ever own any and most of that is owned by 10% of the population using hacks to claim land from anywhere in the world the millisecond it gets demolished.
I'd rather have land that doesn't do anything important than not have land in a game where having land is the difference between being viable or being worthless.