I believe Housing system that allow us to build our own Houses is better than Prefab only

[Mistwraithe.3106]

I agree with the principle of what OP is saying but Anet need to take a commercial approach to things.

TBH I think trying to develop a full on building system in a year while simultaneously creating the rest of the expansion would have resulted in the housing system being bare-bones and disappointing. Given the timescale and the fact that it's just one part of this expansion I think they have a better chance of pulling off a successful decoration system as announced.

Note that if it's successful and there seems to be demand then there wouldn't be anything stopping Anet adding a system for building your own house (which you could then decorate using the Janthir Wilds decoration system) in a future expansion.

The other option would have been to make a bigger expansion over 2-3 years with housing being a big part of that expansion, but I think that would have alienated a lot of the other players who don't necessarily care about housing and would just see a big content drought while housing was being worked on.

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

6 hours ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

I agree with the principle of what OP is saying but Anet need to take a commercial approach to things.

TBH I think trying to develop a full on building system in a year while simultaneously creating the rest of the expansion would have resulted in the housing system being bare-bones and disappointing. Given the timescale and the fact that it's just one part of this expansion I think they have a better chance of pulling off a successful decoration system as announced.

Note that if it's successful and there seems to be demand then there wouldn't be anything stopping Anet adding a system for building your own house (which you could then decorate using the Janthir Wilds decoration system) in a future expansion.

The other option would have been to make a bigger expansion over 2-3 years with housing being a big part of that expansion, but I think that would have alienated a lot of the other players who don't necessarily care about housing and would just see a big content drought while housing was being worked on.

Having homesteads tied to a single expansion is easily the worst thing about this feature. Rather than a feature available to everyone that is added to with expansions.

[Bladestrom.6425]

2 hours ago, Eloc Freidon.5692 said:

Having homesteads tied to a single expansion is easily the worst thing about this feature. Rather than a feature available to everyone that is added to with expansions.

the expansion costs £20, you don't pay a sub.  maybe support the game?

[Ashen.2907]

9 hours ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

I agree with the principle of what OP is saying but Anet need to take a commercial approach to things.

TBH I think trying to develop a full on building system in a year while simultaneously creating the rest of the expansion would have resulted in the housing system being bare-bones and disappointing. Given the timescale and the fact that it's just one part of this expansion I think they have a better chance of pulling off a successful decoration system as announced.

Note that if it's successful and there seems to be demand then there wouldn't be anything stopping Anet adding a system for building your own house (which you could then decorate using the Janthir Wilds decoration system) in a future expansion.

The other option would have been to make a bigger expansion over 2-3 years with housing being a big part of that expansion, but I think that would have alienated a lot of the other players who don't necessarily care about housing and would just see a big content drought while housing was being worked on.

It is entirely possible that this feature has been in the works for years and is being released as part of Janthir because it's completion target meshed with Janthir's.

[Bladestrom.6425]

10 minutes ago, Ashen.2907 said:

It is entirely possible that this feature has been in the works for years and is being released as part of Janthir because it's completion target meshed with Janthir's.

That would be sooo good.  Tbh i thought they were tied with their engine, but if they can provide housing like ESO or wildstar then its a home run by Anet and kudos to them.

Edited June 13 by Bladestrom.6425

[Ashen.2907]

22 minutes ago, Bladestrom.6425 said:

That would be sooo good.  Tbh i thought they were tied with their engine, but if they can provide housing like ESO or wildstar then its a home run by Anet and kudos to them.

Housing in an MMO has never really appealed to me but I did fiddle around with it in Wildstar to see what all of the fuss was about and it did seem very comprehensive.

[Bladestrom.6425]

28 minutes ago, Ashen.2907 said:

Housing in an MMO has never really appealed to me but I did fiddle around with it in Wildstar to see what all of the fuss was about and it did seem very comprehensive.

It a lot of fun for those that collect (which is right at home with the GW Games)  for example my home on ESO has:

• An active target dummy section where I practice rotations.  I have a fountain next to it that instantly resets my stats etc.
• A crafting area
• A trophy room that displays trophies from final boss kills
• a hand built observatory on a raised platform
• Some Gem shop rare trees in my orchard
• A library with some rare book drops and paintings
• A couple NPC with scripted paths 
• A Stable with my favourite mounts on display
• Pets wandering about
• a lab iny my cottage kitted out with animated laboratory items in a steam punk style
• A storage area with chests that act as a secondary bank

Edited June 13 by Bladestrom.6425

[DeathPanel.8362]

I'm OK with a system similar to Guild Hideout decoration.  It would be far too complicated to code for what you're talking about and I'd rather them focus on other content with their resources and time.

[ShatteredStars.6548]

On 6/10/2024 at 5:10 AM, quake.9023 said:

it would be game changing if we are able to build our own house. not prefab. nothing more pointless thn everyones house looking the same

This isn't the sims4 forum.

[frazazel.7501]

Building a house from scratch would for sure be better than just buying a prefab house. But I'm not sure that the GW2 engine is the best engine to build that in, and I'm not sure that the GW2 developers are the right people to design a great house building system. If you want that level of detail, maybe you should play a house-building game on the side?

[Danikat.8537]

On 6/13/2024 at 11:05 AM, Bladestrom.6425 said:

That would be sooo good.  Tbh i thought they were tied with their engine, but if they can provide housing like ESO or wildstar then its a home run by Anet and kudos to them.

I don't understand this. How could a game engine allow players to unlock and decorate guild halls, but not houses? Wouldn't it be basically the same system but with cheaper items, so one player can afford them?

[Teknomancer.4895]

I'm kind of ambivalent about housing tbh. With the Home Portal Stone, I farm the existing Home Instance daily and will occasionally use it as a "pause button" to temporarily port to a safe place while I step away from the computer (convenient since it has the return-to-start feature like Lounge passes). It's also a handy racial-capital portal, even if it's limited to the active character's race -- turn around and take a few steps and you're in the capital (which then breaks the "return" link). Other than that I spend almost no time at "home" so I don't get the attraction because the actual game happens elsewhere. Is it really just the old Sheldon line about how "if outside is so good, why has mankind spent thousands of years trying to perfect inside?"

GW2 has always been very much an Open World centered game, and having a robust housing system goes in the exact opposite direction. If we assume that SotO represents the template for their new expansion format (new weapon, one Big New Feature, a handful of maps), we can probably look forward to a vague bit of half-baked story that only proceeds by forced meta event progression, a bunch of collecting/crafting new mastery-locked stuff (most of which probably won't be depositable to materials storage) to obtain and develop the Big New Feature which will appeal to some while being completely uninteresting to others, and...that's probably about it.

I don't hate the idea of player housing, I just don't get it. 🤷‍♂️

[Danikat.8537]

I don't get it either, but I think it might make a bit more sense after Anet give us more info on how exactly it will work because there's a lot of variations of what 'player housing' means in games, even within MMORPGs. One thing the discussions about adding it to GW2 have always highlighted for me is that different people have very different ideas about what 'housing' means, which unfortunately means some people are going to be disappointed because whatever they're imagining isn't what we're going to get.

GW2 already has all the practical functions I've seen for playing housing in RPGs, just in a different format. We've got the bank to store items you want to keep but don't want to carry, the existing home instances let you build up a personal collection of nodes to farm, and also act as an initial story hub and private space for role-playing or socialising with your party, and guild halls serve the same purpose for bigger groups. Because we can fast travel to cities from anywhere (free if you go via the Heart of the Mists) they act as a 'home base' with all the services, and we've also got lounges and story hubs like Arborstone and the Wizard's Tower providing the same thing (including free fast travel) rather than needing to attract merchants and allies to our base to unlock their services like you do in some games.

One thing we don't have is a space (within the home instance) which is explicitly our character's personal home where they'd go to sleep and keep their belongings. That's most noticable for humans who presumably live in one of the houses in the Salma District, but we never see it and are never told which one (it would likely be different depending on which background you pick). Norn and charr tend to live more communally but would probably have at least a designated bed within their home instance, and sylvari would probably be given one of the pods to sleep in. Asura technically do have a home because the whole instance is your Krewe's lab, and I don't think they worry about private spaces beyond that, but again it's all very open.

The other thing we don't have (which I suspect is more important to the majority of players) is a space we can decorate and personalise, like guild halls but for individiual players. So that's what I'm expecting we'll get with homesteads. Something like Elder Scrolls Online where your home is a space (which could be an inn room, a house, a castle, a cave, a ruin, a farmstead, or even a pocket dimension) which you can decorate with furniture and friendly NPCs and invite your friends and guild mates to visit, either just to look round or to socialise somewhere you won't be disturbed. ESO's housing is popular with players, but it is also mostly a novelty (and additional, free, fast travel points) with not much practical use.

What I'm not sure about is if GW2 will just do that or if they'll mix in some of the functionality which we've already got but which could make housing less 'pointless' for people who don't like decorating, or once they're done with decorating it. That would be duplicating existing systems but that doesn't mean it can't happen, after all having cities and ways to get to them for free didn't stop Anet selling (or players buying) lounge passes.

[zeyeti.8347]

i don't remember were i heard that anet said this housing system is gonna be one the best of any mmo (i may be mistaken , but i kind of remind that , or it was a dream... ).

Let's see , they said the mounts were gonna be one of the best in any mmo , and they didn't lie , mounts in gw 2 are fantastic , so hope the same would be applied to housing , cause let's be real some mmo have nailed housing.

just hope it's not just skins and will not be 100% gemstored

[Linken.6345]

5 hours ago, zeyeti.8347 said:

they said the mounts were gonna be one of the best in any mmo

They did not say that

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

6 hours ago, zeyeti.8347 said:

i don't remember were i heard that anet said this housing system is gonna be one the best of any mmo (i may be mistaken , but i kind of remind that , or it was a dream... ).

It was a dream; ArenaNet said no such thing.

[Bladestrom.6425]

On 6/15/2024 at 5:23 PM, Danikat.8537 said:

I don't understand this. How could a game engine allow players to unlock and decorate guild halls, but not houses? Wouldn't it be basically the same system but with cheaper items, so one player can afford them?

There used to be a limit of 20 items within 500 units which is crippling if you are fabricating anything even remotely complex (unless that's changed?, its been a while).  For e.g building a library:

4 walls, maybe an inner divider, a couple rugs, a roof, a couple tables, 6 chairs, 4 lighting items.  Pop you have hit your limit, but I still have bookshelves, books, scrolls, paintings on the wall, other furniture, items to go on the furniture, cushions,  an NPC Librarian etc etc.

[Trejgon.9367]

8 hours ago, zeyeti.8347 said:

i don't remember were i heard that anet said this housing system is gonna be one the best of any mmo (i may be mistaken , but i kind of remind that , or it was a dream... ).

The article that initiated wave of oopsie leaks by going public couple hours early, claimed that devs describe it as the most player friendly housing system in any mmo, so I think if you were on certain discords you could see someone posting google translate of that. But outside of that we have no AN quote claiming so, just this one PCGamer article.

8 hours ago, zeyeti.8347 said:

Let's see , they said the mounts were gonna be one of the best in any mmo

That is inaccurate. As a matter of fact during PoF marketing phase, AN have got a number of eyebrows raised, by claiming that their mounts are going to be unique on MMO scene by the merit of being purely mobility tools. It raised some eyebrows, because mounts in pretty much every WoW copy ever are purely mobility tools, in particular in alot of games they are mechanically just a flat movement speed buff that get's turned off when getting hit.

8 hours ago, zeyeti.8347 said:

mounts in gw 2 are fantastic

Going by current track record:

mounts - AN spin was the most immersive mounts on MMO scene,

fishing - basically stardew valley minigame, nothing ground breaking mixed reactions from playerbase.

I think housing can still go both ways.

49 minutes ago, Bladestrom.6425 said:

There used to be a limit of 20 items within 500 units which is crippling if you are fabricating anything even remotely complex (unless that's changed?, its been a while).

To my knowledge there have been some improvements, but the limit of furniture pieces within proximity to each other is still there.

[Bladestrom.6425]

1 hour ago, Trejgon.9367 said:

To my knowledge there have been some improvements, but the limit of furniture pieces within proximity to each other is still there.

I don't think people who have only played Guild Halls in GW2 appreciate how bad and limiting this is and how it cripples housing as a long term concept, its way below the standards set in other MMORPG. Really hope this is addressed. For example in ESO its 700 in proximity compared to GW2s 20 or so (i.e no restriction beyond the overall instance limit) , and even then people are constantly complaining and asking for more.

Edited June 17 by Bladestrom.6425

[frazazel.7501]

If the reason to limit the number of items you can place is because of performance concerns, then I think with private player housing, there's no problem with allowing players to place more items than in guild halls. After all, it will only be affecting them and the players that they specifically invite to their homestead. If a player wants to place twice as many items and make it take twice as long for the map to load, it's only hurting them, so let them do it.

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

On 6/13/2024 at 2:42 AM, Bladestrom.6425 said:

the expansion costs £20, you don't pay a sub.  maybe support the game?

Maybe you're right. They should have the homestead entirely tied to one expansion then abandoned in the future. Instead of make it a core feature that gets enhanced with each expansion purchase. One purchase instead of a unique esthetic feature for each expansion to provide that makes people want to buy every expansion regardless of the content. 20 now is so much better than 20 every year. Who cares about the future?

[zeyeti.8347]

11 hours ago, Trejgon.9367 said:

The article that initiated wave of oopsie leaks by going public couple hours early, claimed that devs describe it as the most player friendly housing system in any mmo, so I think if you were on certain discords you could see someone posting google translate of that. But outside of that we have no AN quote claiming so, just this one PCGamer article.

That is inaccurate. As a matter of fact during PoF marketing phase, AN have got a number of eyebrows raised, by claiming that their mounts are going to be unique on MMO scene by the merit of being purely mobility tools. It raised some eyebrows, because mounts in pretty much every WoW copy ever are purely mobility tools, in particular in alot of games they are mechanically just a flat movement speed buff that get's turned off when getting hit.

Going by current track record:

mounts - AN spin was the most immersive mounts on MMO scene,

fishing - basically stardew valley minigame, nothing ground breaking mixed reactions from playerbase.

I think housing can still go both ways.

To my knowledge there have been some improvements, but the limit of furniture pieces within proximity to each other is still there.

ty for the info.

[Trejgon.9367]

10 hours ago, Bladestrom.6425 said:

I don't think people who have only played Guild Halls in GW2 appreciate how bad and limiting this is

Personally I can't say I fully appreciate how limiting it is because I didn't played with guild hall too much in GW2, because I am too broke to actually get one done by myself :)

but in ESO, while there is no proximity limit, it has some rather severe global caps, so alot of people complain in bigger houses that they only managed to get one room done properly and run out of slots. I didn't get to play much with any other housing like system, unless we count warframe dojo's or orbiter decorations in, which would be equivalent of guild hall and one prefab instance to decorate respectively, which iirc both have per room limits of decorations to be inserted, but I was never able to actually hit that cap yet in neither.

24 minutes ago, zeyeti.8347 said:

ty for the info.

no problem :)

[myrtthe.3149]

I think (hope I'm wrong) many people will be disappointed with housing. As far as i've understood the house is account-bound, not per character. For me that's where the issues begin (and I think role-players as well). The shown house (trailer) will be the same for everyone (unless they change it), in the same environment. So the house looks like build for norn. But if u rather would have liked a house in let's say Cantha, that won't happen (not the style or environment it's in). Just the interior will be upgradable like guild hall. Luckily without having to level scribe. What they could do I guess and probably will happen unfortunately, is gemstore purchases.  Maybe somehow they can reuse assets from some of the environments of the passes/guild halls?

On the positive side someone who worked at Sims 4 is working on this, so hopefully the least they could do is give us changeable interior wall decoration panels aka if u want f.e. a jadepunk house  or make it look more canthan or regal (silk wallpaper with nice dyable patterns like in DR or stone wall instead of that wood cabin look) is a thing. But the house should be per character and be able to pick a style kind of (but I doubt that will change). Dyable options/furniture are nice as well, that gets their dye-packs and dyes sold as well then, so would be a win-win. Would make things a little bit more 'unique'. That might happen, but everything looked a bit colorless in the trailer, but maybe they don't want to show off everything and keep things as a surprise.

My hopes were also over the top: outside of the house I'ld rather have a pool/pond to swim in, or hot springs like that place in Wayfahrer Foothills. But nah, better not to get hopes up. Or maybe for 5000 gems (not going to purchase then I'm afraid).

edit: I'm afraid I won't spend much time in the house once it's build if I have to go there everytime and waypoint out, because, what's there to do? I don't visit my personal instance right now either. They'll probably make a pass for it though. But still, maybe xp/rest boost as a hub like arborstone?

Edited June 19 by myrtthe.3149

[Linken.6345]

25 minutes ago, myrtthe.3149 said:

I think (hope I'm wrong) many people will be disappointed with housing. As far as i've understood the house is account-bound, not per character. For me that's where the issues begin (and I think role-players as well). The shown house (trailer) will be the same for everyone (unless they change it), in the same environment. So the house looks like build for norn. But if u rather would have liked a house in let's say Cantha, that won't happen (not the style or environment it's in). Just the interior will be upgradable like guild hall. Luckily without having to level scribe. What they could do I guess and probably will happen unfortunately, is gemstore purchases.  Maybe somehow they can reuse assets from some of the environments of the passes/guild halls?

On the positive side someone who worked at Sims 4 is working on this, so hopefully the least they could do is give us changeable interior wall decoration panels aka if u want f.e. a jadepunk house  or make it look more canthan or regal (silk wallpaper with nice dyable patterns like in DR or stone wall instead of that wood cabin look) is a thing. But the house should be per character and be able to pick a style kind of (but I doubt that will change). Dyable options/furniture are nice as well, that gets their dye-packs and dyes sold as well then, so would be a win-win. Would make things a little bit more 'unique'. That might happen, but everything looked a bit colorless in the trailer, but maybe they don't want to show off everything and keep things as a surprise.

My hopes were also over the top: outside of the house I'ld rather have a pool/pond to swim in, or hot springs like that place in Wayfahrer Foothills. But nah, better not to get hopes up. Or maybe for 5000 gems (not going to purchase then I'm afraid).

More then likey its not norn but one of the kodan bears old homes we will get.