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Housing in Mmorpgs
ShadowBit
Member Posts: 1
Do you like/want Housing (being able to own a house) in the mmorpgs you play? And mostly, how would you like it implemented?
This post probably belongs more to a forum about game design, but I told myself, let's see what people who actually plays Mmorpgs think about it, so here are my ideas 
Let's assume a server population of 5000 players, with 500 (10%) dedicated players and 4500 more or less occasional players; also assume that every (most) player wants a house, should the server make room for 500 or 5000 houses?
Especially if we want the houses to be inside the towns, 500 sounds more resonable, hence the houses should be expensive.
Maybe you think that cheap houses for everyone would be nice, but where do you put them? Yes, you could make a portal and have the house separated from the rest of the game world, but I don't really like that, plus it encourages separation of players instead of congregating them in towns.
Now, how do you get a house? I'd like it to be done like this: go to the town hall and buy the deed for a piece of land in that town, then design the inside of your house (or choose from a set of predefined designs), then bring there the materials needed (wood and stone) and finally hire some builders (or build it yourself). The house shouldn't use all the land available, it will leave space for some accessory areas, like a forge if you plan to be a blacksmith, a garden if you want to be an alchemist that uses herbs to make potions, etc...
And now let's talk about taxes Yes, because after building your own house, you'll have to pay regularly taxes to the town where you built your house (can build only inside a town, remember?). Many could think "omg! taxes are unfair!!", but they actually give a nice mechanic: if a player goes inactive and stops playing, he won't pay the taxes, so the town has the right to confiscate the house, put all the contents in a warehouse (the player will be able to have them back if/when is back) and auction/demolish the house. Basicly we are making room for new players instead of giving all the houses to the first players.
I mentioned the town auctioning the house of an inactive player, and in the same way a player should be able to sell its own house (maybe he wants to build a house in another town, or... whatever reason he has).
And finally, let's think of all the players who can't afford a house, are they left with nothing?
In my opinion they just need access to some minor form of house, like:
- flat, which can be rented but not bought, is smaller and doesn't have the accessory areas mentioned above
- room at the inn, even smaller than the flat (but cheaper of course)
- hut, can be built about everywhere, but only outside the towns, it's cheap, small (1 room only) and gets quickly damaged over time; ideally someone who wants to spend some days hunting in the wilderness could use a hut as a little storage for his loot, but better not counting on finding all his stuff still there if he goes away for a couple of days
I could go on with several more features which could be interesting to have (houses getting damaged, locks and traps to keep the player items safe from robbers, players renting their own house to other players, etc...), but first I'd like to hear any comment or ideas about this from people who have played Mmorpgs with housing, or have just dreamt about this feature
Comments
UO and SWG did it perfectly.
Not much else to say
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I don't really care if it's there or not. Unless it was a personal bank or storage space I probably wouldn't ever use it but I won't rally against it either.
Best textbook on in-game player housing is Star Wars Galaxies. I've personally never since it done better before or after SWG. Must admit though they could have used the in-game hotels for apartment housing, but they didn't. As far as the houses though, they came in all different sizes and could be used to form whole cities. If a patch of land that had a city hall on it and if it was registered as a city. Plus cities and houses could be decorated with all kinds of things. Which made it feel personalized and made it your own. I think that's one thing SWG did right and no other game has matched it or surpassed it.
When we get back from where we are going, we will return to where we were. I know people there!
Yes I do. I want said houses to occupy actual space in the game world and not be too easy to acquire.
I second this nomination. Housing in Asheron's Call was ok as well. I'd go SWG, UO and AC. A good marriage of SWG's customization and AC's responsible overland deployment of houses is the perfect spot for me.
Housing in every other MMO I've played, which is no small list, if it was even in was an afterthought at best.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
The one thing that I cannot stand about housing implementations in MMOs is that the houses are dropped onto the landscape by the players and then they sit there empty and lifeless. On top of that, there are no roads, parks or town squares to hold a group of houses together.
I'd really like to see games take the houses of active players and lay them out into villages, towns and cities according to who is online and has something going on in their house. That might mean a house that is providing some kind of NPC service so that NPCs are going to and from the house. A bunch of boxes that simply sit in place and do absolutely nothing to entertain players should not be part of a game world.
I'd also like to see housing made into something useful. If I have a house, then it should be used for something. It should be part of a Town Game where my house is something like another character for my account. It ties into the Town Game in some way such that I might stock it with provisions that go into maintaining the town and I in return gain access to services and goods that the town NPCs produce.
That, instead of a box that I can decorate and dump my stuff into.
Yeah what he said!
You captured my feeling on the issue exactly. This is what was missing for me in how housing was done in SWG. I just do not go for the 'Barbie's Dreamhouse' aspect of player housing so for me housing has to be practical. I loved how different city buildings in SWG grew your city but my own personal house was just one big storage closet. If I could 'grow' my own house to be an intristic part of an evolving player town I would jump into it without a second thought. Just fluffing it up so I can show off of to people has zero appeal to me.
MMORPG housing = good. Not instance style though.
UO housing = Perfection.
Housing isn't a bad concept, but can go wrong if done badly. I like the idea of a place to sit back and relax, but I'm also more likely to pick a spot overlooking scenery as opposed to 4 walls.
So far, the only real housing I ever had was in SWG. In Asheron's Call, I had an instanced apartment in town. In Lord of the Rings Online, I had a house in an instanced neighborhood. SWG was the best because it occupied real space in the world, helped contribute to a player city (if you wanted to plant it in a city), and I could equip it with crafting stations or vendors. Yes, it was fun to decorate, but I used it for practical storage. I spent more time decorating our guild house and my Doctor's Clinic.
There were times when I wished it could serve more practical purposes. When I was playing, there was required open space around the houses. However, I saw an all-jedi guild city (PreCU) that was built when it was possible to butt the houses together. The jedi arranged the town in a maze to prevent bounty hunters from kiting the jedi. In other words, they linked the individual houses in such a way as to make a melee trap for the range-fighting hunters. In our town, however, we could not link houses, regardless of style, so the devs must have changed that feature.
If you had a spare housing lot allocation and you were templating your Jedi, which starts out as a very weak character, you could find a grinding spot, drop a house, and build jedi combat xp. If a bounty hunter approached, he showed up in your radar and you could run into the house, log into your alt (Jedi, as the elite class were the only ones with an alt in SWG) and keep on playing. Later on, you could log back to the jedi and the bounty hunter invariably gave up his chase when he realized you were not coming out of your house (I'll Huff, and I'll Puff, and I'll BLOW your house IN! LOL). Later on, when your jedi was fully template, you could do away with the "emergency shelter" if you wanted to fight the bounty hunter off.
Some player towns were statigically located close to important spawn sites. For example, on my server, we had a town with many player services close to the Krayt Dragon spawning grounds. The dragon's dropped pearls, which were needed to build lightsabers. This town was a great asset because it had a shuttleport and eased access to the hunting grounds.
For sure, nothing seemed more pointless than driving into a player city that was abandoned, offered no player services, and was not stratigically located near a Point of Interest.
In contrast, my instanced house in the Lord of the Rings, while pretty, was just a storage unit for transferring items to my alts. I agree with the other posters, instanced housing is not very interesting.