PvP in WoW wasn’t a failure until Arenas, and the consequent balancing based on them started. Arenas are a failure, World PvP and BGs aren’t.

With the introduction of rated BGs, I hope that they kill Arenas as a whole as they killed the most broken bracket, 2v2, by eliminating the PvP rewards from it.

To the subject:

Player housing is just a thing that is too much hassle for what is worth. They typical WoW server just cannot handle thousands of different player houses without a significant -and costly- upgrade. They are doing fine without it, so why bother?

The new expansion underlines this, take for example the new class combinations they are allowing, Night elves will get mages even though lore wise that makes no sense at all, the reason was because they thought it would be “pretty cool”.

If they cared about role playing I’d expect at least a lame reason for this in lore.

As for the LFG tool, it is great on one hand, but the long term effects I believe still will be to destroy community. I did resubscribe for a month thanks to prodding from friends, and after a couple of weeks I can say that I cannot remember one person I grouped with. In fact it was rare to get someone on my own server, before the LFG tool every person I met was a potential new person to socialise with. In comparison in EQ2 my friends list expands, although it is much harder work to get groups together.

Longterm I’m not sure how that will work, but I do think it is very dangerous since the social ties are the biggest draws to playing the game longterm. If the new gameplay is not creating new ties then longterm they could well be killing their own userbases social interactions off.

One last thing, that Chilton seems to be responsible for a lot of bad designing, I used to like Alterac valley, but even that was reduced to a maximum of 15 minutes (from about 40 minutes, and previously it used to be hours/days maximum) to support the badge grinding playstyle, way to go guys

That was the final nail in the coffin for my PVP enjoyment there, its always been totally unbalanced (the addition of resilience pvp gear added too boring a grind for me and killed everything apart from Alterac Valley, and there only because it combined PVP and PVE).

Overall I think this was a really big factor in me losing interest in the game, I believe PVP was really useful there as something I could jump into to take a break from the PVE when I became bored. Without it the bordom became burnout very fast, one reason I’m hoping battlegrounds in EQ2 will be done right.

This sort of thing might not sort out in a simplistic Excel spreadsheet on Chilton’s desk, but ultimately, when you do right by people, they have a tendency to reciprocate. Piss people off, though, and you have to work even harder to get them back than you would have needed to work to retain them or keep them on a reputation plateau.

Let’s suppose they decided to add a content patch before Cataclysm. Asking around for a feature one designer suggests player housing, one suggests a pretty cool idea for a new 5 man or complex of 5 mans.

Player housing would be a complex system that in addition to requiring extra hardware would probably cause quite a lot of bugs. It might also need some retro-fitting, eg going through texts of quests and changing some text and/or items to make them support the new game mechanic.

A new 5 man would put no extra load on the instance servers (other than the “oo, it’s new!” rush) and be unlikely to cause bugs.

On the other hand Blizzard has a history of taking customer-oriented generous decisions.

The decision to offer free battlenet support for ever for its RTS games.

The decision not to charge for content patches when the dominant models (EQ, EQ2 and UO) required purchase of about 2 packs per year. (This worked out great for them and was a factor in beating EQ2 which dropped its Adventure Packs system once it realised how disastrous they were).

So Wolfshead is, in the final analysis, right. Blizzard should do the generous thing. Not because its Capitalism 101, in fact most businesses are not especially generous to their customers.

They should do it because they are Blizzard and past generosity is a large part of how Blizzard won the MMO Game.

http://johnliu.net/games/2009/7/6/wow-wtb-a-guild-airship.html

There is plenty of air-space.
Hence I’m not particularly keen about approaching player housing with instance-server.

I’m also calling him out because his reply was unsatisfactory and as someone who is the Game Director of a MMO that earns $600 million in profit a year and controls the leisure experience of 11 million people should be more articulate and thoughtful in his responses.

As to your second point, yes I agree that housing should be done right. That still does not excuse Blizzard for not developing it. They have more resources and talent at their disposal than any other company in video game history. There is no excuse that they have not “taken WoW to the next level” as Jeff Kaplan noted.

Again Tom Chilton needs to rise above his own personal biases and experiences which may be housing in Ultima Online which apparently was not done right.

As to your comment about ripping off game features…where do I start? Almost every component facet of WoW has been lock, stock and barrel been stolen, copied or swiped from another game or MMO.

Look at the WoW Achievement system. It was shamelessly ripped of from XBox Live and done so with very little finesse. Therefore I do not buy this argument at all.

Clearly, Blizzard which is the most profitable video game in history has the resources to investigate and implement player housing. I suspect it’s a question of will.

Every time they come up with a new expansion somehow player housing keeps getting put on the back burner.

The reason I brought up PVP is because it’s a prime example that Blizzard is ready and willing to “experiment” and spend millions of dollars in resources on dubious game mechanics only when it suits their personal preferences. The connection between Tom Chilton who is the prime architect of PVP and PVP in WoW is indisputable.

And for the record, I’m getting a little sick and tired of developers that are largely unaccountable to their millions of customers. As evidenced by Tom Chilton, they can’t even answer a simple question and provide some semblance of intelligent elaboration.

Even at BlizzCon the arrogance and pomposity exhibited by some members of the Blizzard panel was frankly outrageous as they would continually dismiss player questions out of hand.

I agree the real truth as to why player housing has not been implemented in WoW may never be known as all we get our platitudes and corporate-speak from Blizzard.

My prediction and analysis have been more right then wrong in the 5 years that I’ve run this blog. I’m just calling them as I see ‘em.