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Original post by dietepiet So, even though you might not understand why players want such a useless and expensive house, they still do!

If they only added that feature because money was worthless to high level characters that doesn't mean much.

A year ago I was playing a game called Wonderland Online (or something like that). Essentially the whole thing seemed centered around crafting stuff for your house (tent). You would walk into random people's houses, see what all they got for stuff, and think to yourself, "Oooh I gotta get me one of those," and of course inevitibly you'd ask how to get the stuff you need for it. That little bit of keeping up with the Jones' encourages you to keep playing dispite the irritating amount of mundane things that you need to do. And suprisingly, each house seems a bit different, particularily when you can start building walls within it. I stopped playing when I could no longer craft new stuff nor progress in the story without a significant amount of socializing.

Personally, I like having a house to decorate a bit or even just put stuff in and know that it's safe. I am more likely to put something in "my house" than into a bank that I can access world wide. I don't mind being forced to come back to a static location to access my house particularily if something new is happening at or near that location. Chalk it all up to pride, jealousy, a primitive territorial nature, or a nesting instinct or what have you... but it drives people. It is not something that should be added into a game that already exists and has never considered a housing option, but I do think it should be given as much consideration in a new game as the incusion of any story arc.

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That game I mentioned, it was absolute crap. Playing it I couldn't help but thing some noob from around here found some stupid "MMO in a box" dev tool and threw something together. But I was compelled. I couldn't stop playing. Whatmore on occasion I was even tempted to send them money. It makes me think... Ikea may have a lot of cookie cutter crap but they are not hurting for business.

One MMO that I feel did housing right is Tibia (2D MMO). Here are the key points I can remmeber:

Gold sink:
* Auction against other players to buy a house.
* Rent to keep house: Rent price based on house size, rent money taken from your bank automatically and if you fail to pay rent 3 times, the house goes up for auction again, and all your stuff goes into your bank account.

Tie player to game world:
* Houses are spread out across the world in towns: Each town has a set number of houses that are visible as you enter the town and run around to go to shops and the bank, or just going through the town to get to zones.
* House ownership is what every newbie dreams of (game progression and goal).
* Show your items off (for show or to sell).
* Houses shared between friends: Great meeting place other than depot, to plan attacks against other guilds/players, or plan quests in private.

Each house is unique and some houses are better than other/more affordable/desireable etc.

The house system was really great at tying you to the community and a great way to organize your loot in different chests/barrels/bags etc - This offered quick access to tools, spell casting stuff and weaponry, as well as being able to designate a barrel of "stuff I found that may be usefull for other friends".

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Original post by rethan One MMO that I feel did housing right is Tibia (2D MMO). Here are the key points I can remmeber: Gold sink: * Auction against other players to buy a house. * Rent to keep house: Rent price based on house size, rent money taken from your bank automatically and if you fail to pay rent 3 times, the house goes up for auction again, and all your stuff goes into your bank account. Tie player to game world: * Houses are spread out across the world in towns: Each town has a set number of houses that are visible as you enter the town and run around to go to shops and the bank, or just going through the town to get to zones. [snip] Each house is unique and some houses are better than other/more affordable/desirable etc.

o.O That sounds similar to what houses in Dofus were like, and I hated those.

To answer your question check out our game project here.

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=522625

Land will be freehold with no recuring monthly fees or upkeep with options to expand as far as the individual player wishes providing they do not cross onto another players claim or claim exclusion zone.

Happy Reading
Funblocker

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You want to pay a monthly fee so you can stand around in town all the time and just make endless amounts of items, or decorate a house, instead of experiencing the game as it was meant to be played? You basically want to play as an NPC?

Staying away from dungeon crawls is not "playing as an NPC". The best MMOG times I had were spent playing Ultima Online in it's beginnings, trading horses and other mounts. For me that meant countless hours standing in front of the city bank, selling animals, the only breaks being those when I went to the forest to tame more animals. But it also meant interacting with players, chatting, being a hunter and a merchant. Rest assured, it was plenty of fun - otherwise I would've stopped playing it.

As far as housing is concerned: Of course, each and every house owner had the same items available (some were rare and very hard to get, though), and most of the houses had NPC merchants placed on their front porch, but that didn't mean they weren't unique in one way or the other...people actually invested quite some time decorating them, and they served as a place for crafting, guild events etc. You could actually go over to some friends place and find them doing work, preparing for visiting a dungeon or just having some friends over, chatting.

One fella even made his house a public tavern and had regular customers visiting every evening, me among those. This went so far that Origins community managers let us do server wide events for players - now imagine that doing in todays MMOGs...

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Original post by Hyrcan Quote: You want to pay a monthly fee so you can stand around in town all the time and just make endless amounts of items, or decorate a house, instead of experiencing the game as it was meant to be played? You basically want to play as an NPC? Staying away from dungeon crawls is not "playing as an NPC". The best MMOG times I had were spent playing Ultima Online in it's beginnings, trading horses and other mounts. For me that meant countless hours standing in front of the city bank, selling animals, the only breaks being those when I went to the forest to tame more animals. But it also meant interacting with players, chatting, being a hunter and a merchant. Rest assured, it was plenty of fun - otherwise I would've stopped playing it. As far as housing is concerned: Of course, each and every house owner had the same items available (some were rare and very hard to get, though), and most of the houses had NPC merchants placed on their front porch, but that didn't mean they weren't unique in one way or the other...people actually invested quite some time decorating them, and they served as a place for crafting, guild events etc. You could actually go over to some friends place and find them doing work, preparing for visiting a dungeon or just having some friends over, chatting. One fella even made his house a public tavern and had regular customers visiting every evening, me among those. This went so far that Origins community managers let us do server wide events for players - now imagine that doing in todays MMOGs...

I remember the good ole days in UO where they did pretty good housing but it took 5 years before they did the building block house system that really increased the customizability 2 magnitudes. You could be amazed by what some creative players did with various items (remember the fishtanks...).

I did the horses too and had fun selling them to players (white ones were popular...)

Ive played Lord of the Rings Online recently and the houses are pathetic by comparison -- too few interchangable items in too few slots with too little usefulness other than the place being a recall point and place to interchange items between a players 5/7 characters (and kinship stuff I suppose). I have yet to actually see any other players in the 'housing' area -- there just isnt that much reason to stick around there.

I also miss this feature, I loved it in Ultima Online, and I can answer straight away why it was so great.

Who cares about finding some special rare item if it's going to sit in a box or be sold immediately?

Ultima Online gave me something special in the ability to collect souvenirs from my greatest journeys and display them in my home for passers by to see.
My house in gave me a place to show off the fruits of my adventures! Something I could be proud of!

To me it granted greater sense of purpose, a greater sense of accomplishment.
I quite literally had something to show for my efforts, and that is an experience that no other MMO has really given to me.

(And the lack of that experience is one of the reasons I can't get interested in MMO's anymore. All of the recent ones seem to have been bleached clean of all the little things I so enjoyed from the earlier games.)

Not allowing player owned housing goes hand in hand with the overall priorities of many developers these days: a sterile world that players cannot change one iota, or utilize or inhabit in any fashion that is not *expressly* intended and planned for by the developer. IMO, the fundamental attitude behind these priorities is that it's better that everyone have a bland game than to take the risk that someone might dislike it while delighting most.

People communicate by many, many means other than standing face to face and talking one sentence at a time. Gluing an advertisement poster on a public fence, choosing a specific kind of rose to plant in your garden for others to see, carrying your family coat of arms on your shield with honor, and so on. You need this kind of interaction with others, and getting to see physical manifestations of your ideas in the world, if you want to create a sense of a living world. You need ownership that goes beyond a couple of chest plates, tame horses and kittens in your backpack.

You'll note that WoW, by design, allows for exactly none of these. For some of these things, you could argue it's a technical issue and would take away from the streamlined dungeon-crawling experience by adding unnecessary stuff into the game world. Fine. But take note how you cannot even put text in an Auction House sale. That would allow you to better inform the buyer about the item, offer discounts or trades, and distinguish yourself from others. Common sense on any auction site on the web, right? That they do not allow this to happen is not a technical issue. It's that even allowing a player-created *string of text* to be visible to AH-browsing players for 48 hours is too much individuality to be tolerated in this teflon coated world.

Don't even get me started about the entire section 9C of WoW Terms of Service. They don't even bother to *code* their bland teflon world into a waterproof one, which would make sense from maintenance point of view, instead choosing to use soft rules. How weird and destructive this is, was originally brought to my attention by Sirlin:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060222/sirlin_01.shtml

While I rarely find myself agreeing with Sirlin.
In fact, in my nicest terms, I would not consider myself a fan of his at all.

None the less, that is a fascinating observation he has made.

I only tried WoW for about a month, at the behest of my friends, before abandoning it ... feeling largely disinterested. "Bland" is exactly what I would call it actually.

I never really played long enough to notice that it was actually designed this way. Fascinating.

(One can't help but ponder how this could have contributed to it's success.)