As I’ve mentioned before, perhaps the most compelling and addictive feature of World of Warcraft are its multiple paths of character progression. From gear (PvE and PvP) to mounts to Reputation grinds to non-combat pet collections, Blizzard seems keen to provide players with ample opportunities to feel like they’re making progress. But unlike many of their competitors, they have yet to add what is perhaps the most significant, non-combat progression path: player housing.
I admit that I am a long-time player of the Sims and Sims 2 games. I find building and decorating homes in that game to be incredibly rewarding. (Mr. Phae at one time lamented the time I spent in the Sims until I pointed out that I could otherwise be spending our real money on such things!) And while the aims of a game like the Sims might seem vastly different from the aims of an MMORPG like World of Warcraft, I see no reason not to incorporate the home-building aspect of what is the best-selling game franchise in history.
There are other games that have included player housing, including EverQuest II, City of Heroes, and Final Fantasy XI. Even in the single-player RPG Oblivion, a popular in-game activity is building up a personal stronghold. I believe that any implementation of player housing by Blizzard would be vastly superior to anything that’s come before it, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t necessarily borrow ideas from previous incarnations. And because it’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to over the years, I would like to share a few of my own ideas for this feature!
- Upgradeable Housing Level
Each city would have an instanced housing district with appropriate architecture. To build or purchase a home would require not only a considerable sum of gold but a certain reputation level. Each city could have several levels of house size and elaborateness at ever-increasing cost. Low-level characters could opt to “rent” an apartment which would lack many of the capabilities of a full-scale home (such as outdoor areas) but would provide a place for storage. - Upkeep
Players would need to pay a certain amount per month in upkeep costs or risk being locked out of their homes. To regain entry, they would need to pay the back rent (though no more than a month’s worth to avoid players taking a break from the game from being discouraged). - Adjustable Permissions Set
Characters could be granted access to visit and/or make changes and additions to a player home. (I am personally thrilled at the idea of sending Mr. Phae out for a new tablecloth.) Perhaps players could even make impermanent copies of their house keys to give to visitors that would expire after a certain amount of time. - Craftable Furnishings
The potential for tradeskilling to furnish one’s house are practically endless. To facilitate this, the Woodsmanship (gathering) and Carpentry (production) tradeskills could be added. The carpenter would also rely upon smithed nails and fasteners along with tailored upholstery fabrics and fillers. More elaborate fabrics could be created with the help of dyes and chemical treatments produced by alchemists. Jewelcrafters could create home furnishings such as mirrors, stained glass windows, and doorknobs.
- Droppable Furnishings
A popular inclusion in EverQuest’s player housing was the ability to collect and display important trophies and artifacts within one’s home. Imagine being able to display the Hand of Uldaman’s Ironaya after defeating her. Similar epic encounters could also yield suitable trophies for display.One way to facilitate this would be to allow each character a single “large item” inventory slot. The player could then carry with them one large piece of pilfered loot, such as a chair or small table from Karazhan. Essentially, any item flagged as “furniture” of reasonable size could be moved to your house, provided you have the room to store it.
- Tradeskill Machines
Although many tradeskills do not require the proximity of a tradeskill machine, many craftsmen would enjoy including either cosmetic or working tradeskill machines within their homes (ex. loom or spinning wheel for Tailors). These items could provide a small (+5) skill bonus to their relevant tradeskill or contribute to reducing the cooldowns on some recipes (ex. Primal Mooncloth).
- Reputation-Based Recipes
Each race has its own style of architecture and furnishings. Therefore, some recipes and patterns could be reputation-based. To learn how to create an elegant, curving bed, you might need to raise your reputation with a tradeskill guild in Darnassus. No doubt, any elaborate stonework would require trafficking with a Masonry guild in Ironforge. - Mannequins and Display Cases
Imagine if instead of having to dispose of old, class-specific armor sets (Wildheart, Cenarion, Stormrage) for the sake of bank space, you could assemble these pieces onto a mannequin for display within your home. You could then have a gallery of previous armor sets you’ve collected over the years. Completionists might even feel compelled to finish their sets after they’re well beyond the appropriate content, ensuring that this old content isn’t completely obsolete. Similarly, weapons could be displayed on the wall or in a special weapon-case. - Room Types
Some possible room types include:- Indoor Tradeskilling Areas: Sewing Room, Alchemy Laboratory, Kitchen, Jeweler’s Station
- Outdoor Tradeskilling Areas: Forge, Tannery
- Garden: Herbalists could plant small, functional gardens that could be seeded with seeds acquired while herbing. These seeds would occasionally result in a harvestable plant of the same type as the plant from which they were gathered. (I think there is something similar in FFXI.)
- Fishable Pond: Similar to the garden, these ponds could be seeded with fresh fish caught from other areas of the world. Occasionally, these ponds would yield a pool that could be fished for that type of fish. Only one type of fish pool could be active at a time.
- Bedroom: For earning rest or cyber XP.
- Stables: Provide a happy home and display place for the mounts you have outgrown. Could also replace or supplement the limited stable slots allowed to Hunters.
- Vault: Personal, upgradeable storage outside the standard bank. Also useful for Scrooge McDuckin’ through enormous piles of gold.
- Library: When a player encounters a book in game (such as those on the floor of Scarlet Monastery), allow her to take a copy to be stored for later reading. Who really has time to read all of those books during a 5-man instance run?
- Bind Point
A player could set his hearthstone by interacting with the mantle of his hearth. - Mailbox
Same as the standard mailbox but with the additional option to request that items from your bank be mailed to you for a small fee. - Pets
Just as in EverQuest 2, players could allow 1-2 non-combat pets to roam their house. - Collections
Various collections of items could be added to the game. Each item in the set would indicate which set it belongs to and might not necessarily provide any in-game benefit. Examples of these collections could be rare flowers or catchable insects. Once complete, a collection could be displayed. This would encourage exploration, particularly of older content. 
Seasonal Decorations
Purchasable, craftable, and questable seasonal decorations. These could include the items used to decorate major cities during the Holidays.
I know that many players find the idea of player housing to be silly, but it’s an aspect that would greatly increase the enjoyment of a large percentage of the player base. If nothing else, the additional character storage would provide everyone a tangible benefit to having a home. And really, who wouldn’t want an Onyxia-hide throw pillow?
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Those little guys are pretty awesome. I haven’t had any Crocolisks turn up in my bags yet, though I did have quite a lucky fishing streak recently, catching not one, but two Mr. Pinchies. So I’m still hoping for a Magical Crawdad. Unfortunately, so far, I’ve only gotten two Furious Mr. Pinchies (”No, Mr. Pinchy, don’t do it! AHHH!! MY EYE!!!!”) and two potion gift packs. I still have two more tries though, so everyone think...
Might have to keep a Mage around for an emergency Cone of Cold! 
May 1st, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Win Phae, win.
Seriously, when is Blizz going to hire you as a Druid dev and master of interior design?
My only addition: to the fishing pool, a stream I can fish in bear form
May 1st, 2008 at 9:53 pm
I love that idea!
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:14 am
FWIW you’ve got my vote too. I wonder if the Activizzardians are listening?
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:37 am
Yup, I’m all for something like this. I’m particularly found of the library idea, but in general, please yes - just where do we live, anyway? All cramped up in the inn?
FFXI does have a gardening system, yes. You can make crystals, which are used in every recipe in the game. Not only that, how successful you are at gardening is affected by what element your house has. Each piece of furniture has an element tied to it, so if you’ve got lots of water furniture, it’ll be easier to make water crystals and harder to do fire. I think that’s how it works - I don’t have lots of experience there, and I blame the broken economy for making stuff cost way too much :p
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:42 am
Well, you realize that for carpentry you need wood. Wood comes from trees. And trees… *stares at Phae*.
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:51 am
Wow.. Seriously, I listened to “The Instance” podcast earlier today.. and they said player housing was on of their list of “most wanted upgrades for WoTLK” and I didn’t understand why. Now that you describe the reasons, I get it.. and I want one.
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:31 am
They’ve been saying for years that it’s on their “to-do” list but there’s never been any sign of it. LotRO recently implemented player/guild housing and in some ways it was poorly done. I love my house but I can’t help thinking “Blizzard would have done it better”. I would be ecstatic if they did implement it but I don’t really expect them to.
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:25 am
Yashima buys house from Phae
Nice write-up! Now I want housing even more than before!
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:49 am
I wholeheartedly agree with each and every point in this post
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:11 am
Absolutely agreed!
One of my favourite things in SWG was gathering interesting items for my houses and decorating them. There are some amazing pictures of what people assembled using the tools avaliable, like a pod racer made out of looted items.
If we had player housing in WoW, it’d give it a whole new lease of life.
I’d also like to point out that it would be a nice place to RP. Not for “cybers” although I’m sure some people would use it that way, but just somewhere to go where you could talk IC without having somebody run up and go “lolrp”. While there are places in the world that are not very well frequented, there is nowhere apart from instances that you can guarentee there’s nobody watching.
May 2nd, 2008 at 6:42 am
I agree that player housing would be a great addition to WoW! I also had a great time collecting items and decorating my homes and shops in Star Wars: Galaxies. You could display suits of armor, hang pictures on walls, etc. It made for something to do other than the “daily grind”.
Drink
May 2nd, 2008 at 7:26 am
Genius. Pure Genius!
I love the mannequin rack for old armor sets. I died a little each time I had to sell off my Cenarian stuff.
Furniture and other “fluff” stuff could easily be done without revamping the tradeskill section. Engineers and blacksmiths could build furniture, tailors could make drapes & tablecloths, jewelcrafters could make silverware and nicknacks, etc. etc.
And wandering mini-pets? Great idea.
May 2nd, 2008 at 7:53 am
Agreed. The player housing was my favorite part of FFXI and this makes it even more incredible. I’d love a Silvermoon-style house full of bric-a-brac lifted from Magister’s Terrace and various weapons/armor I think look cool. Blade of the Basilisk and Gizlock’s Buckler would get center stage. I also like the boss trophy idea. I’m a big fan of the workshops and the fishing pond. I’d love to see something like this implemented.
Agreed on the wandering mini-pets. “This house protected by Mini-Diablo.”
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:08 am
Not to show my age, but many of the aforementioned features were present in Ultima Online. In fact, well before I was a Game Master on one of the more popular free Ultima Online servers, I made my fortune as Veras, TAR Sphere’s Number One Interior Decorator™. I would literally be given thousands — if not over a million — gold, the key to someone’s house, and all of the permissions needed to bind items. I would then spend about a week overhauling the entire house in my spare time, often crafting the items myself (Veras was a true townie, having mastered every crafting skill). I found it a lot of fun and enjoyed using items to get around some of the constraints inherent in the game (for example, if you stacked items you often got the effect that it looked like the top items were floating, which would allow me to use wooden benches to look like shelves on the wall).
Ultima Online featured armor racks, the ability to tame pets (and then have them in your homes), a myriad of trade skills (tailoring, carpentry, tinkering, blacksmithing, alchemy and so on) a variety of homestyles and later the ability to create custom homes, dye tubs, customizable furniture, pictures, and so on. You could also give other people the key to your home and set permissions on a global or individual basis. Plus chests allowed for more storage space, which was a godsend when you ran out of space in the bank. I also liked having a message board outside of my home so that people could leave messages.
My only complaint with how housing was done in Ultima Online was that homes were not instanced. And while seeing large communities crop up around the globe was always very fascinating (we tended to be polarized by country of birth or native language), people that had a lot of crap inside their homes often resulted in lagsinks that slowed down the game of anyone who came even remotely near those homes — and this became a huge problem when you had any number of houses in the general vicinity who had the same packrat mentality. I spent a lot of time as a GM deleting items from people’s homes and then explaining to them why this was done.
As an aside, instanced player housing was something initially intended for World of Warcraft. In Stormwind you can see a portal by the Trade District which was originally intended for when they implemented player housing. I have always lamented the fact that this feature wasn’t pursued.
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:48 am
I would love this! Though my guildies might be concerned that I’d stay in doing housy stuff all the time vs going out into the wow world to heal them…
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:12 am
While this would be interesting I would be more likely to push for a guild hall.
A place for the guild to set as their home that has ports to the major cities. Where they can access their banks and the guild bank. where the necessary items for their trades would be stored as well (mana loom, alchemist table, anvil, forge, the like) so that they have a central place to go to create the things they need without having to deal with the hassles of being in a major city and listening to the (ugh) /2 chat.
Of course they would have to make all these items purchasable much like the gb tabs but I think this would be a little more viable and give a central point for people to commune at.
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:19 pm
While I don’t have a desire for in game housing myself, I can understand others might.
My fear is that…
1) In some odd way for some classes/specs it will be “required” in order to obtain some weird buff for PvP or PvE (clean home buff gives 30MP5). Sort of like how Feral Druids almost have to do Arenas/PvP to get good gear for a couple of slots when they reach higher levels of PvE progression. That just doesn’t make sense.
2) Selfish Reason #2: It will lessen the pool of available players for other aspects of the game. I already see a noticeable impact on the number of players running casual 5-mans (both in guild and pug) due to the SSO dailies. How frustrating would it be to need a healer for a run only to find out they are busy “painting the family room”?
I do like the guild hall concept as a simple in-game calendar and bulletin board would be excellent additions.
May 3rd, 2008 at 2:00 pm
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of player housing. And this completely convinced me.
May 4th, 2008 at 9:54 am
@Everyone: I’m glad this idea was well-received. I can say that Player Housing in WoW would probably increase my enjoyment of the game 200%. But I’m weird like that. =)
@Aiuriun: I love the idea of Bear- or Cat-fishing. The dynamic is actually already built into the game as the Draenei have a starting area quest where they swim into pools and activate a net to catch fish. Why can’t I activate my bear mouth to do the same thing? =)
@Nilianil: Well, my thought was that homes would be instanced, perhaps behind some walled courtyard (thus giving the opportunity for an exterior to the home). A more humble dwelling would be an apartment that you could access from the city where you live’s major inn.
FFXI sounds like a really grind-oriented game, which I imagine appeals to Asian audiences more than American. It does sound like they included some pretty cool features, though (like the elemental-based crystal harvesting).
@Matticus: WTS Coatrack for Purplez
@Alyviel: Wow at the pod racer. And I agree; player housing would give WoW a new lease on life for many players, particularly non-raiders. I know my guild would have to pry me out of my house to go to SSC. ^_^ And yes, it would be a great place for RP to occur. People could feel a lot less subconscious than hanging out in the Park in Stormwind.
@Barona: I expect that if player housing were introduced, it would be added via an expansion, and expansions generally include a new tradeskill. Enchanting, Jewelcrafting, and Inscription all sound rather similar in their practical effects. Carpentry/Woodsmithing would be a refreshing change and more like some of the tradeskills that have come before them.
@Ninjasuperspy: You should totally be able to get displayable signs like “BEWARE OF THE WORG”!
@Cynra: Wow, that’s really cool. Ultima Online was before my stint in MMOs, though Mr. Phae did play it for a while. And the message board would be amazing.
@Skarrde: I’d be surprised if they didn’t simultaneously introduce guild housing. I do like the idea of logging into and out of the game in your guild house and having a place to gather outside of 10- and 25-man raids. But I still want my house! =)
@NotAnIssue: I don’t think that housing would need to provide an in-game, combat-based benefit (outside of additional storage, of course). There are lots of items like this, including all of the ones from the Trading Card Game. And if they opted to include housing-based rewards in instances, I think it would actually encourage participation.
May 5th, 2008 at 8:29 am
I thought the way Star Wars Galaxies did player housing was superb. The interiors of the homes themselves incorporated just about every item on your wish list. Player architects designed your furniture, player tailors designed your tapestries and soft furnishings, etc. There was a VAST range of purely decorational loot drops that existed for no other reason than to decorate your home. Rugs in particular went for obscene prices. Your unused armour could just be dropped into place and would display by itself. There was a massive trade in interior decorating, I used to specialise in building a roaring fireplace out of scrap loot items, and I’ve seen someone who built a jacuzzi in their basement.
SWG’s biggest strength and weakness was in placing of player housing. You could pretty much drop a building anywhere you liked that wasn’t inside a city radius. Tatooine in particular was badly cluttered with “junk housing”. Anything like this would just ruin Azeroth, but the idea of an instanced housing zone such as is used in LotRo would work just fine. I think it’s important, as you suggested in your post, that as many of the existing professions as possible be given new designs to complement player housing.
May 6th, 2008 at 7:47 am
Personally I would -love- to see housing added. According to most I collect a lot of ‘useless’ things (a matter of opinion of those people of course). That being minipets, old(er) armor sets, interesting items…and a host of other things that right now don’t serve much purpose besides taking up bank space (not that I’m complaining, I love the stuff).
So a house would free up bank space, as well as give me more stuff to collect and complete. If we want to spin that into blizzards favor, it means I’d probably play WoW a lot longer since I’d be kept busy. That and with my completionist OCD if they added in any sort of house sets guess who would be trying to get them all? Though it does seem blizzard has been against player housing from some comments I’ve seen, or at least not in a hurry to add it….but I have my fingers crossed for WOTLK at worse, maybe earlier if I pray hard enough!
By the way, I just found this site last night and I love it!
May 11th, 2008 at 11:10 am
These are all really good, interesting ideas. I’d love to see what Blizzard could do with this sort of thing.
Then again, let’s just hope they wouldn’t model it *too* closely after The Sims… or else your Alt, who’s just starting to level cooking, will wind up burning your house down!!
Might have to keep a Mage around for an emergency Cone of Cold! 