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).

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.

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.

• gives players a reason to visit and congregate in capital cities as players visit their “homes”
creates cohesion with professions by making them more meaningful as crafters would be able to craft items for players to place in their homes
• rare objects d’art such as paintings, statues, etc. could be found as rare house “vanity” items in instances which creates more cohesion
• acts as a money sink
• gives players a sense of ownership in the world

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.

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.

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.