The fact that Blizzard has refused to implement some form of player housing in WoW remains one of the most bizarre and perplexing decisions in the short history of MMOs and virtual worlds. Player housing long desired by a significant number of WoW players and even Blizzard devs has been a feature that has been successfully implemented in other popular MMOs such as Dark Age of Camelot, EverQuest 2 and Lord of the Rings Online — MMOs that had a tiny fraction of the development budget and incoming revenue that WoW has.
So what possibly could be the reason for player housing not being implemented yet?
Player housing has been on the minds of Blizzard for many years now — it was originally intended to be a part of WoW for it’s release. Some folks at Blizzard really want player housing to be a part of WoW yet it never seems to make the final cut. Then Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan made the following statement back in 2007 to MTV:
Jeff Kaplan: I think housing can take World of Warcraft to the next level.
Despite initial promises to include player housing in WoW, after five and a half years later it’s *still* on the back burner at Blizzard. We found this out via Lead Designer Tom Chilton’s recent interview with WoW Insider’s Lesley Smith this week. Here’s what Tom had to say about player housing:
Lesley Smith: Is there a feature in another MMO that you admire and would like to see in WoW?
Tom Chilton: Sure! Right now, for example, we don’t have a housing system. Other MMOs have it and it’s a system that we’ve talked about since before the launch of the original WoW. We’ve talked about housing and how we’d do it and how it might work for at least five years.Lesley Smith: Is it something you’re actively working on?
Tom Chilton: No, we’re not working on right now, but it’s incredibly complex to do right and we’re not sure yet if it’s going to be the right thing for WoW in the long run. It has major implications for the game itself and again I wouldn’t go out of my way and say never but it’s not on the immediately of things to do.
Five years is an eternity in the MMO world. Here we have the leading MMO company in the world, a company that has taken in approximately $500-600 to million in profits each year has not found the wherewithal and the resources to implement player housing. Unbelievable.
Where is the money being spent? It’s a good bet that not much of it is actually being reinvested back into WoW. I’m sure that first dibs go to the Activision/Blizzard shareholders and then to the development of Diablo 3, Starcraft 2 and their upcoming console MMO.
Let’s take a look at some arguments against player housing in WoW:
The Complexity Argument
Surely a company like Blizzard should have some kind of research & development division that is working on exploring cutting edge technologies for virtual worlds? I just do not buy the excuse from Tom that player housing is “complex”. Putting a man on the moon is complex. Comparatively speaking player housing should be child’s play considering Blizzard already has instancing technology at their disposal. Besides, Blizzard could easily recruit the top programming and design talent in the world and solve the predicament of player housing.
As we know Blizzard is great at taking other people’s ideas and polishing them, so why not look to see what other companies have done? Turbine implemented player housing within a year of the release of Lord of the Rings Online; compared to Blizzard they are a tiny company with a fraction of the development resources and subscribers. Yet somehow they managed to implement an elegant player housing solution without waffling and falling back on lame excuses.
The Scarce Resources Argument
One of the most popular arguments against implementing player housing is that it would take scarce resources away from legitimate development (more outdoor and instanced “combat” content). I would counter this argument by saying that instanced content has a very short shelf-life compared to a feature like player housing that would be never be obsolete.
Tom Chilton leaves us with an absurd and astounding point when he says that “we’re not sure yet if it’s going to be the right thing for WoW in the long run. It has major implications for the game itself…” Yet Blizzard thinks nothing of spending millions of dollars of resources creating white elephants like the original Naxxramas and the Sunwell (to name just a few) — expensive content experienced by a infinitesimal minority of the players — only to see them ignored and discarded by the player base as the next patch or expansion is unveiled.
Player housing is a wise investment and something that would be used by players for the rest of WoW’s lifespan.
The Players Don’t Want It Argument
Often Blizzard claims that the desire for player housing isn’t universal. But let me ask this: since when does Blizzard listen to the players? The answer: only when it’s convenient and when it supports their inaction to update their MMO.
Let’s also be clear that although Blizzard has a polling feature on it’s forums they rarely if ever use it to get feedback on current and future design decisions. So how can we even know for a fact that Blizzard knows what players want and don’t want when there is no open and independent way to verify the opinions of players?
Features We Never Asked for that Blizzard Gave Us
So if we are to believe that players don’t want player housing is a legitimate rationale for failing to implement it then how then did the following features make it into WoW?
- Voice communication – Was that universally demanded by the players? No it was not.
- Arena PVP – Another feature that was never demanded by the players but somehow magically made it into WoW.
- Achievements – Yet another dubious feature that was never asked for by the majority of players.
I’m not buying the excuse that players don’t want player housing. The fact that players haven’t expressed an overwhelming desire for a feature never stopped Blizzard from implementing features that their own lead designers personally wanted. Just think how many incarnations that PVP has gone through at the behest of Tom Chilton and consider the resulting waste of resources that have been expended all for naught. Tom should put his own experimental ideas under the same level of scrutiny as he does player housing.
Here are some arguments for player housing:
Making Professions Meaningful Again
Professions in WoW are currently in decline. Lately they’ve been relegated to the sidelines and are generally seen by Blizzard as a token MMO feature. With player housing suddenly professions and crafters would be useful again as they could be used to create furnishings and objects that players could purchase to adorn their homes.
What better time to introduce some new professions such as forester which gathers wood and woodworker which fashions wood?
Broadening the Player Base
Some feminists will hate me for saying this but I know from personal experience that many females love to shop for items to decorate their homes in the real world. Features like player housing would also help to broaden the playerbase and hopefully bring in more females which is a good thing to break up the male dominance of virtual worlds.
Recently I’ve been enjoying SOE’s new MMO Free Realms and to be honest it’s been a pleasant and refreshing surprise with its gender inclusive content. So why not bring in more features that help broaden the playerbase which makes for a more interesting and varied world?
Supporting Immersion and Role-playing
Currently players don’t really *live* anywhere in Azeroth. The result is that we have a nation of 12 million homeless avatars who fall asleep in alleyways, alongside mailboxes and in pubs each night. Yet we have ample amounts of real estate within major cities that are boarded up and unused.
Player housing would really help with increasing the level of immersion of Azeroth. As well as having the option to bind in an inn, players could bind to their own home which is entirely feasible. Player housing along with guild halls (which I’m certain could be implemented at the same time) would be a great place for people to role-play and host events, activities and gatherings.
WoW could certainly use more features conducive to role-playing. Creating more mechanics that enable players to role-play makes sense as it’s an economical way to let them create their own content by entertaining themselves. Who knows, that could be a terrifying prospect for Blizzard — actually allowing players to create their own fun without being led around like cattle by questgivers.
Giving Players a Sense of Ownership
I think the best argument for implementing player housing in WoW is that it would give players a sense of true ownership in their virtual world — a world where players have no real and appreciable effect on Azeroth with the exception of their own avatars. One of the great failings of modern MMOs is that things never change. At least with player housing players would have some place to call their own and be able leave their own mark on the world.
Concluding Thoughts
Something seems amiss at Blizzard. It’s almost as if they are victims of their own success and with that comes a suffocating inertia and stodginess. It makes no sense that despite both Lead WoW Designers being supportive of player housing it is still on the proverbial back burner. Perhaps Blizzard has gotten so big that decision making has become bogged down in the kind of stifling bureaucracy that all too often afflicts larger corporations.
As players we shouldn’t have to care about that. All we know is that after five years of experiencing essentially the same gameplay mechanics WoW has become a diet of boring, routine and predictable fare. Players like myself have become fatigued with an aging, non-dynamic Azeroth operated by an increasingly obtuse and risk averse Blizzard.
Of course WoW could easily survive another expansion without the inclusion of player housing but the time for Blizzard to act is now — not when the ship is sinking. Eventually dissatisfaction with WoW will start to hit critical mass and people will leave but by then it will be too late. If Blizzard was wise they would immediately commence thawing their infamous glacial development process and start interjecting new features that expand the palette of play experiences available to players.
Do we really need another formulaic expansion that saddles subscribers with more planned obsolescent content? I say no. What we really need is a virtual stimulus program that refurbishes and revitalizes the aging infrastructure within Azeroth. Player housing is one such feature among many that would go a long way in making WoW a more interesting, richer and viable world.
-Wolfshead
Update: I just wanted to acknowledge an excellent article entitled: Why Have Player Housing? recently penned by Morninglark. Anyone who doubts how important and meaningful player housing can be to MMO players should read her article!
Damn you, it’s hard to answer to this post in my usual Devil’s Advocate mode! 😉
In any case, there is a simple reason why Blizzard won’t implement player housing: They see WoW as their cash cow, financing their other projects (including a MMO using the WoW engine as a prototype). As long as the players are content enough to not quit, WoW will stay exactly as it is now.
Even if the developers wanted to implement player housing into WoW instead of in any of the other projects, the business side would see it as an enormous risk. They saw what happened to Star Wars Galaxies. They will not have a WoW New Game Experience unless absolutely necessary. And like with SWG, that point may be the moment when WoW finally jumps the shark and starts hemorrhaging customers. If Blizzard has their next-gen projects out at that time, they probably won’t mind that much and let WoW fade. Otherwise it’s going to be a quite interesting show.
I think if you look at the history of MMOs it’s fairly evident that the vast majority of them add features over time along with adding the typical new content such as new lands, mobs, gear, etc.
The trick is to implement features that don’t detract from the main gameplay/MMO mechanics and that provide new and interesting things for players to do. New features need to be well thought out and elegantly implemented.
I think at some point in time they are going to need an equivalent expansion to EverQuest’s Lost Dungeons of Norrath in order to revitalize the original lands of Azeroth. Whether that is in the form of new quests, new NPCs, new mobs that have “invaded” Azeroth or the repurposing of existing content from the Deadmines to Molten Core I predict it will almost certainly happen.
Player housing and even guild halls seems like a no-brainer to me and it would be a sure fire way to stimulate interest in WoW again via tradeskills and even hunting/gathering for raw materials.
I wonder what new features Blizzard will be announcing at this year’s Blizzcon that would be of the magnitude of player housing? Quite honestly Blizzard is going to have to seriously up their game if they hope to keep dominating the MMO field.
Hirvox – I really can’t see what the SWG NGE has to do with player owned housing in WoW. NGE remade the whole game, housing would just add another layer of gameplay – just like achievements and arena PvP (as mentioned in the article).
Great post, Wolfshead. I very much agree – the fact that they haven’t introduced housing yet is…mindblowing. WoW is a great, polished MMO, but at the same time it is also a very primitive. At end-game, you got rep-grinds, heroics or raids – that’s it. Unless you RP, of course. Housing would add a breath of fresh air into a rather stale game.
At the same time, we’d probably just be rep-grinding for furniture/furniture plans anyway…
Sorry for the late reply, I’m not getting any subscription notifications for some reason.
The NGE was a huge overhaul of the game, and while implementing housing in WoW would be small from the player’s point of view (an extra instance portal), it would require a huge overhaul of the underlying engine.
Under the hood, WoW is composed of four things: Terrain (a simple set of x,y and height coordinates), world map objects (caves, buildings, outcroppings, bridges), doodads (braziers, doors, furniture) and mobs (that includes players). Currently, changing the first three requires a client-side patch. Implementing player housing would require making two (WMOs and doodads) of those stored and modifiable on the server and transmitted to the players when needed. That is simply a massive architectural change, and thus would require extensive testing, which is both time-consuming and expensive because it has the potential to break almost all existing content. If players are content enough to pay for subscriptions and expansions that can be implemented without such major changes. player housing will simply not be implemented.
…which comes back around to the simple notion that people are far too content to just go with the flow in WoW. When the playerbase at large just keeps sending in their toll, what impetus is there to change the game?
I severely disagree that adding player housing to WoW and even the addition of subsequent supporting tradeskill classes would be considered an NGE for WoW.
SW:G’s NGE changed the way the game was played. Hell EQ2’s LU13 was almost an NGE in that it completely revamped everything we knew about the combat system. SW:G’s actually took out 2 classes! The only way WoW could have an NGE with player housing would be if they decided Druids and Paladins weren’t worth it anymore and removed them as well.
Player housing would add another level to WoW and give people reason to go exploring and actually craft things that meant more than a leg up on a particular boss fight. It would add depth to a pretty shallow game … but STILL wouldn’t be enough to bring me back to it 😛
Just grinding gets so old after a while. You can only do it so long. Decent housing and a decent crafting system would add another dimension to Wow to give us all a break. That is the reason me, my son, and a friend left WOW. We loved the game but it got sickening to grind for armor as the only pull to be on the game. The crafting was useless, why work crafting if what you craft isn’t valuable or worth the time you put into it. Lots of holes in the game, people argue to go play the sims, sheesh. Why can’t the game we play have something for everyone, a little mystery and surprises, housing, grinding. Oh well I am not playing WOW any longer at this time. The search for a game who has it all, is still on. Peace and take care all.
Runes of Magic has Instanced Housing. Nobody can see the outside of your house, and you all talk to the same NPC to enter your House (or use your Hearthstone). Oh, now maybe WoW has implemented this already, but Runes of Magic also allows you to hold down Shift and despite an NPC being surrounded & obscured by dozens & dozens of avatars, your cursor will now only activate the NPC. Every single player avatar around the NPC is ignored by your cursor if you hold down Shift.
Wouldn’t that be a great idea for WoW? Is a Tauren on a Kodo or Spacegoat on a Heffalump obscuring the Battlemaster? Hold down Shift and while his big fat arse is still there, your cursor ignores him.
Anyway, RoM Housing. You get in by telling the NPC you want to enter your house, but, if you have the ID Code for another player’s house you can enter it, too. My House is very bare. I have the Chest you start with plonked down by my sexy French Maid (you talk to her to leave the House, open your House Bank, buy & place Furniture, etc) and that’s it.
But Saylah’s house (of Mystic Worlds: http://notadiary.typepad.com/mysticworlds/ ). WOAH! Absolutely fricking AMAZING!!! Saylah took part in an in-game competition and scored a 2-tier layout for her house. Whereas my house is nothing more than a single rectangle, Saylah now has stairs in her house leading up to a half-sized floor above the main floor.
And she’s decorated the whole thing, but it’s not just fluff, it’s functional.
Just like in WoW where to use your Blacksmithing Skill your need to be near an Anvil, or to cook you need to be near a fire, RoM has Crafting Stations that can be found near different vendors throughout its cities & towns, BUT, players can also buy these Crafting Stations to be installed in their house, which Saylah did. But the way she has her house decorated it’s not like “Oh, there’s an Anvil in the middle of the room.” All of her items coexist with each other in a very cohesive fashion. She really needs to throw up some screenshots of the interior of her house.
And the fact that she has all the Crafting Stations in her house means instead of running all over the city to make your items, you can talk to the House NPC, enter Saylah’s House Code, go to her House and make everything you need, even if she’s not online. She actually said she’s logged in one time and there were 3-4 Guildies in her house doing their Crafting and just hanging out.
Sorry for the Wall of Text, but I totally agree. Blizzard can list all the reasons under the sun why they haven’t implemented Player Housing, but when several smaller MMOs already have Player Housing, and have done a fething good job with it, Blizzard are just blowing smoke out their arse.
For years I wanted player housing in WOW to help take my game more horizontal at end-game. Housing and a better crafting system would support a meta-game opportunity for players who want something more than raid or PVP until the next expansion. I hoped. I blogged. It never came.
Capn John, thanks for the abundance of enthusiasm for my crafting workshop in Runes of Magic. It became an early meta game for me and continues to bring me pleasure. Subsequent posts about my house on Massively keeps players visiting long after its creation. Just this week I logged in to find in-game mail from players who’d stopped by to see it. Many roll a character on that server just to see it then leave.
Workshop: http://notadiary.typepad.com/mysticworlds/2009/03/runes-of-magic-visit-my-crafting-workshop.html
Guildies use it as their one-stop crafting place: http://notadiary.typepad.com/mysticworlds/2009/03/guildies-visit-crafting-workshop.html
I’ve entered my home to find some strange goings on like a naked person chillin’ by the fireplace: http://www.massively.com/2009/03/19/one-shots-theres-a-naked-person-in-my-house/
Just the other night I was one for the first time in a long time. When I entered my house someone was in there and it scared the crap out of me! I almost jumped out of my chair before having a good laugh.
Too many games have done a nice job at housing for Blizzard to have any excuse. And as you’ve pointed out, they’ve released several features that no one was clamoring for but not something for this one feature many players have wanted and took considerable time discussing on the forums.
Meaningful player housing ala EQ2 or ROM and I’d have to consider going back to WOW. I left because I level to max and then what? I didn’t want to raid anymore and the same ole freakin’ BGs for years was just ludicrous to continue doing in my eyes. Housing that supports crafting and storefront features like EQ2 is end game material that I’d have to sample Blizzard style if they’d get off the stick and do it.
I’m wondering if they deliberately don’t want to do it /because/ of the permanence. It might mess up their careful channeling of players to whichever new city hub the next expansion requires.
I’m feeling that my character seems less and less permanent with each expansion. Or at least the things you do will last until the next expansion only, but no more. I figure that has to be deliberate.
Interesting! They seem to want players to congregate in expansion cities these days so that may explain it. Also due to Blizzard’s “control” design philosophy I wouldn’t put it past them to be thinking like this.
But there is something to be said for keeping the original cities thriving which explains why they will not put class trainers and the auction houses in the new cities — at least they realize that much.
I would not be opposed to allowing players to buy homes in any city if that’s what they wish. Of course dwarves would get a discount in Ironforge 🙂
In ROM, you can enter your house from within any major city. Unlike EQ2 you don’t travel back to a certain area. What’s unique and pleasing about this method is you feel like you moved. You got a new career or something – questing in new area, and so it made sense to move your home there too. I think it’s perfect. It’s part of the appeal of ROM that you’re always questing out of little player communities and not just hubs sprouted out in the middle of nowhere. EQ2 does that and I hate it! Like why the heck do I care what’s going on out here in the middle of nowhere??? These mobs are bothering anybody. With the ROM motif, they keep your homes/communities near the action which leans to the motivation for all the slaying. 🙂
That’s a very cool idea! It’s something that enhances the notion of community and gives the player meaningful context with the town near where all the action is.
Except that it would at least be a grind for something other than gear. They way WOW is right now the end game is gear or nothing. All roads of the end game point to gear. So you get players like me who only feel the need decent gear and there’s nothing worth my while at the end game, hence the slow unsubscribing of our whole household.
Some possible reasons for the extreme reluctance to add housing:
1.) They have other ideas and visions about the game and not much love for housing. This is contradicting a bit Kaplan and Chilton. So I guess it is more:
2.) Especially Chilton (Kalgan) made very bad experiences with housing in Ultima Online. It eats up the landscape. Malas, UO’s “housing” facet was a giant meadow packed full with houses and only little explorable areas, as the old continents were already overcrowded with housing. Ilshenar was intentionally made a non-housing facet, as were the Lost Lands. Still, they could explore instanced versions of housing and so on.
3.) It would point out how little interaction with the environment is actually possible in WoW. I guess this is still Chilton thinking about housing in UO who is concerned about that. UO has a better crafting and item decay system, you can craft decorations and other things for your house. WoW would have to change a lot on a very fundamental level if they want to come close to that.
4.) They want people to populate the cities, visible for everyone. Not people hiding in their guild hall or houses.
Another benefit to player housing is that it would serve as a good money sink. There’s a phenomenal amount of gold flooding the WoW economy each day. Right now with the exception of a few mounts there’s really not that much you can buy with your gold.
Monthly rent for player housing and of course all of the furniture, decorations, art and trophies would give players a chance to spend their gold.
Also the ability to purchase finer homes and apartments in various parts of town would serve as status symbol.
Longasc, I’ve always imagined WoW housing to be instanced. Raids are instanced and I’ve never seen someone complain that it’s not realistic as a result. (Or that it’s silly that the bosses therein can regenerate in a week or whatever it is. Farming the Big Bads is far sillier than having magically instanced housing.) If they wanted housing, worrying about the impact on the landscape is extremely easy to dodge.
I suspect that any arguments for why they aren’t doing housing are just excuses. They want a game, not a world, and they find ways to make that happen.
It seems to me that Blizzard thinks they can get away with milking the WoW cash cow with another predictable expansion complete with 10 more levels, new continent, new instances, throw in another profession and add a new hero class to the equation. That’s been the formula for the past 2 expansions.
I don’t think subscribers are going to sit back and accept it without a major infusion of new features. As every day passes the novelty of WoW is wearing off. Time is not on their side.
If I had to guess why Blizzard hasn’t added housing to the game is because they haven’t figured out how it would enhance the current game design. Housing is a side game that would distract people from their directed content.
Voice chat was an attempt to bring in game something people were doing already.
Arenas were a straightforward extension of the PvP mechanism.
Achievements promote use of existing content.
Housing, as far as I know, does none of those things.
Housing done properly could enhance existing content. Here are a few more reasons and some I’ve already mentioned:
creates cohesion with professions by making them more meaningful as crafters would be able to craft items for players to place in their homes
I do concede your point that maybe this is a problem that Blizzard is afraid to relinquish control of their heavily “directed” gameplay model toward the player would would be free to own and decorate their house. That’s a problem that Blizzard really needs to get over. But there are significant parts of the total WoW experience that aren’t heavily controlled by Blizzard.
Look at guilds for example, it’s an activity that largely is left to the player base to work out as Blizzard has a laissez-faire attitude. Blizzard provides players with a very minimal set of features for guilds.
I think the real problem may be that the people in charge Blizzard have a limited virtual world vocabulary with which to work from. Player housing may be something that they are not personally interested in. We’ve seen in the past how the WoW design philosophy has been predicated on the raiding-centric proclivities of their main designers such as Kaplan and Afrasiasbi. It took them 5 years to finally admit they were wrong.
They are saving it for WoW 2.
This is a great point. I was actually thinking about this a few days ago. My bet is that they will continue to milk WoW for as long as possible by putting the bare minimum of effort for the maximum gain.
Features like player housing and guild halls would make WoW2 more desirable and more of an evolution from a business standpoint. The key to figuring out how Blizzard thinks is this: follow the money.
Saylah/Capn John: You wrote everything about RoM housing that I wanted to write, woo 🙂
The only thing you didn’t mention is the mannequins. In Runes of Magic, characters have two classes, and it gets really tiresome to lug around two sets of specialized equipment. So you just place the currently unused one on a mannequin in your house. Of course you can get multiple mannequins and fill them with equip sets, so you only have to go to your house, click one thing and you’re ready for the next raid.
RoM is shaping up nicely, they may be taking a lot of features from other MMOs and slotting them into their game, but they also have a good set of their own innovations.
You sparked an interesting debate, as usual! I enjoyed reading all of the comments. Most were very well written.
I think implementing player housing in WoW would be an awesome idea. I never played the game, but I would think about trying it if they added housing. Also I believe that if WoW had housing it would help the game to keep a greater population of people playing because instead of grinding you can decorate your house giving you options. It doesn’t have to be as advanced as eq2 where you can build anything you can imagine and actually go into the code and alter any house item anyway you want whether tilt it turn it upside down, rotate, move it up and down, and left and right. I know having player housing is what has kept me interested in playing for years or i probably would have quit a long time ago, and IMO opinion good player housing makes the difference between a good MMO and a great MMO.