solution is to give space in or near cities to build non-instanced houses.
Asheron's Call did that long ago and did it well. Back in the day it was nice. Non-instanced, convenient, etc. People still went to town to buy/sell, though that did die off eventually. Housing doesnt kill the towns. The lack of any real reason to go to them is what kills them. Some imagination & creativity by devs is what is needed to fix the problem, not fewer choices for players, imo.
The housing in Daoc was nice. Except that you could craft there and put up NPCs that sold crafting materials. This emptied out the capital cities. And in Daoc, houses that did not pay rent went away. But imagine in WOW if you could have an auctioneer in your house along with crafting tables and a banker.
Pretty sure I heard this a couple times from a WoW dev before. They don't want to draw people out of major hubs, leaving them feel dead. It really does make sense.
Non-instanced housing isn't the most eloquent of solutions as it would require a lot of space and eventually instancing of the area itself as populations grew, then we'd see problems when player A's house is in a different instance to the rest of his/her guild due to population caps.
Guild Halls worked well in GW but that's because each city is a mission/quest hub and the lack of an AH makes the cities the only place to trade. I can see why Anet are holding off until post release to be doing guild halls and personal housing. IN GW2's case the cities have been built with social interactions through minigames in mind, whether that will be enough remains to be seen. That's another way of looking at it though - what can devs do to make the cities somewhere we want to hang out in ?
Rental property in NPC Cities. There, next unsolvable complicated problem please.
Lineage 2 does this quite well, the problem with this is it becomes very elitist big clans will keep their guild halls forever and there is no chance for the common player to experience it. I still say do it that way, make it so every house prop in big cities to become someones house.
Also add conquerable guild/player houses where you need to fight for it.
if Hartsman was worried about making the cities feel alive, the "cities" wouldn't be nothing but flat landscapes with NPCs standing around in gazeebos...
Secondly, prior to the release of guild halls, I can't honestly say that the cities in EQ2 were all that active to begin with -- at least not compared to the hundreds that would be packed into Iron Forge or Stormwind during that time period in WoW. Some MMORPGs just don't have a central social hub, and EQ2 was always one of them.
I firmly believe there are three main reasons why players are drawn back to their starting cities. The biggest reason is the auction house. If you limit auction houses to one zone per faction, that'll net you your largest influx of players. The last two reasons are far less important, but reason number 2 is to train. When you get new or upgraded abilities every three levels or so, you are periodically forced to return to your capital city to visit your skill trainer. Thirdly, there is the bank/guild bank. Players will return here often to store unneeded items clogging up their inventory space.
I liked Guild Halls in Everquest II even though I freely admit that they had a bit too many amenities, and I think Hartsman is making a mistake if he never includes them or gives us a barebones housing model similar to something in LotRO. The customization features for EQ2's Guild Halls were a huge reason why a lot of people even play the game. You don't need an auction house in guild housing, but I would like to see them use for tradeskilling purposes, guild banks, and as a central travel hub.
Personally, I think the solution is fairly simple. Make your Guild Housing so that it has a "Guild Bank" terminal (or Player Housing with a "Personal Bank" terminal), but pretty much nothing else except cosmetics. Also allow players to bring other players in so you can show it off.
Agreed.
EQ used to have a vendor in our guild lobbies that offered a merchant selling some portal stuff, and you could unload your items, but for things you wanted to buy you had to hit the bazaar.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
Instanced housing sucks. It turns into a personal storage vault, and little more. Few people want to go out of their way to visit someone else's place. There's also no real drive to explore houses either. The advent of the Auction House took item sales and centralized/depersonalized it into a WalMart-like experience.
Put houss in the real world and give people a reason to visit them, and people will take time to make them something special. I do not believe in-game housing is a problem. We learned from mistakes like Star Wars Galaxies that caused tons of empty homes to litter the land. Surely a design can be made that will work in today's games. Perhaps then we would start getting a sense of community back.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
solution is to give space in or near cities to build non-instanced houses.
It leads to another problem .. the ghetto in UO.
Plus, it won't solve the problem. Everyone will still be inside their guild housing. You won't be in another instance with them, but you still cannot see them, unless there is no WALLS in the guild housing.
solution is to give space in or near cities to build non-instanced houses.
It leads to another problem .. the ghetto in UO.
Which was resolved ten years ago.
Plus, it won't solve the problem. Everyone will still be inside their guild housing. You won't be in another instance with them, but you still cannot see them, unless there is no WALLS in the guild housing.
During what years or expansions was that an issue in UO, Puzzle Pirates or any other MMO where housing is in close proximity to cities?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
solution is to give space in or near cities to build non-instanced houses.
It leads to another problem .. the ghetto in UO.
Plus, it won't solve the problem. Everyone will still be inside their guild housing. You won't be in another instance with them, but you still cannot see them, unless there is no WALLS in the guild housing.
Yeah, a lot of that issue is however because you can craft inside the guildhouse and have a broker there. Take those 2 things away and there wont be so much problems.
As for the player houses actually allowing players to build house without much city planning will indeed create a slum that LeSoto can't compete with.
Either you let people rent prebuilt houses which is easiest and evict players who havn't paid the rent or you have some order and let the players buy lots which only support certain kind of buildings instead depending on the lot.
The last thing makes it so the town looks somewhat planned at least, anyone just throwing up a building anywhere might sound sandboxy, but the towns you build becomes ugly, ill planned slums.
solution is to give space in or near cities to build non-instanced houses.
It leads to another problem .. the ghetto in UO.
Plus, it won't solve the problem. Everyone will still be inside their guild housing. You won't be in another instance with them, but you still cannot see them, unless there is no WALLS in the guild housing.
Yeah, a lot of that issue is however because you can craft inside the guildhouse and have a broker there. Take those 2 things away and there wont be so much problems.
As for the player houses actually allowing players to build house without much city planning will indeed create a slum that LeSoto can't compete with.
Either you let people rent prebuilt houses which is easiest and evict players who havn't paid the rent or you have some order and let the players buy lots which only support certain kind of buildings instead depending on the lot.
The last thing makes it so the town looks somewhat planned at least, anyone just throwing up a building anywhere might sound sandboxy, but the towns you build becomes ugly, ill planned slums.
Lots and general building restrictions can resolve a lot of the aesthetic issues that pop up. The biggest problem in the housing issue is the central city that MMO gamers have accepted as a standard feature rather than rejected for a more dynamic and mutable system. When the core gathering spot can migrate to where the players are mainly concentrated, the use, need and utility of player owned structures changes to a more dynamic system.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
The cities atrocious layout did. More people started using Kelethin (and to a lesser extent Neriak) because it was just so much easier to navigate (no zoning).
By the time guild halls rolled around qeynos and freeport were already sparse. The guild halls ma have been the deathblow, but it wasnt an overnight thing.
And the other issue is, guild halls were too good. Remove some of the ameneties, and put the entrance inside the actual city
Why go to a player city, when you can chill out in your Guild Hall or personal virtual house.
this seems to be the main fear developers have against player housing now days, because in game cities would depopulate.
What's the solution to this flaw, in MMORPGs?
Does it need one? What's the big problem having people hang out at a Guild House rather than a city? It's not like anything exceptional happens in a city, apart from a few vendors, and as far as socialising goes you can socialise just as much in a Guild House as in a City.
The same thing happened in EQ1 when PoK was introduced, and then later the Guild Halls in there. It made no practical difference in the long run. Standing in PoK was the same as standing in a City - all it did was move the population centre.
problem is IF housing is implemented (which is not so common nowadays) it is instanced(with very few exceptions) and sometimes this instance also has AH , bank and vendors. That's why it kills cities.
Make housing in open world and voila!
In order to avoid slums, make house 'buildable' in some areas not everywhere. Then devs can control how big / where will houses be.
Total freedom is great, but it lead to not so fine effects in UO after game was running for quite a bit.
+ if someone not playing for like f.e. 3 months make his house be converted to an "deed item" (so after he come back after long playing break he just have to find space and not build / buy whole new house) and send to bank with house space freed.
This need diffrent game engine, and game concept though so...
solution is to give space in or near cities to build non-instanced houses.
This. Non-instanced housing kills this problem dead.
That doesn't solve the problem at all though,
The issue being brought up is redundancy, having two things that perform the same function means players will find the one that is the most fun or efficient and largely ignore the other.
It doesn't matter if it is instanced or not, if you can do the same things in your house and cities then there is little reason for players to use both.
The only way to solve redundancy is remove one of the options or give the options totally different functionalities.
I'm with Cactus-Man here. Having dedicated space for housing doesn't really eliminate the problem, it changes it. Non-instanced housing, even rented, means that there is a draw to pull players from the 'city centers'.
And non-instancing brings other issues, as well. Games don't currently have mechanisms for 'ownership' of real estate within the continuous world. The developers have to keep other people out of the space you've rented, and that's pretty easy to do with a loading screen. Additionally, there's a whole security issue. How many people are willing to put down their ultravaluable Sword_Of_Uberness_081623 when just anyone can pick it up? So, it's your room/house/palace, if the developers don't keep interlopers away, your sword will be looted almost before you can blink. Normal social rules, conventions and taboos are too easily ignored in a computer game, and implementing such moral behavior into a game would probably be nightmarish. Most all of the fantasy-based games have some sort of burgler or thief class, even. I can already hear the 'we wanna break and enter' cry now.
For the forseeable future, instanced housing is easier for the developers to implement. But I think the issues associated with instanced housing are far easier to live with than a non-instanced alternative.
First off, as Cactus-Man said the issue here is the usage between cities and private housing. It's the activity of use that's the issue. If you can do the same things at your house as you can in the cities, one or the other isn't going to be used. The real problem is that there isn't enough activity to spread around between the two.
You need to have activities that players both want and need that are separate for each.
Originally posted by Amaranthar Originally posted by Mendel
Originally posted by Cactus-Man
Originally posted by dreamscaper
Originally posted by Robokapp
solution is to give space in or near cities to build non-instanced houses.
This. Non-instanced housing kills this problem dead. That doesn't solve the problem at all though, The issue being brought up is redundancy, having two things that perform the same function means players will find the one that is the most fun or efficient and largely ignore the other. It doesn't matter if it is instanced or not, if you can do the same things in your house and cities then there is little reason for players to use both. The only way to solve redundancy is remove one of the options or give the options totally different functionalities. I'm with Cactus-Man here. Having dedicated space for housing doesn't really eliminate the problem, it changes it. Non-instanced housing, even rented, means that there is a draw to pull players from the 'city centers'. And non-instancing brings other issues, as well. Games don't currently have mechanisms for 'ownership' of real estate within the continuous world. The developers have to keep other people out of the space you've rented, and that's pretty easy to do with a loading screen. Additionally, there's a whole security issue. How many people are willing to put down their ultravaluable Sword_Of_Uberness_081623 when just anyone can pick it up? So, it's your room/house/palace, if the developers don't keep interlopers away, your sword will be looted almost before you can blink. Normal social rules, conventions and taboos are too easily ignored in a computer game, and implementing such moral behavior into a game would probably be nightmarish. Most all of the fantasy-based games have some sort of burgler or thief class, even. I can already hear the 'we wanna break and enter' cry now. For the forseeable future, instanced housing is easier for the developers to implement. But I think the issues associated with instanced housing are far easier to live with than a non-instanced alternative. First off, as Cactus-Man said the issue here is the usage between cities and private housing. It's the activity of use that's the issue. If you can do the same things at your house as you can in the cities, one or the other isn't going to be used. The real problem is that there isn't enough activity to spread around between the two.
You need to have activities that players both want and need that are separate for each.
Or eliminate the NPC City as the main social hub of the game. Have players build up cities, and the if you have main NPC factions, they are just somewhere else that players don't go. Maybe players go there for training or something and that's it.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
You go for non-instanced housing and you get another huge problem. Space... Where do you put all those houses? Even if you use a renting system, it will still require a ridiculous amount of space around cities. If a city can allow for only 100 houses, then what's left for the other 5-10k+ people on the server?
Or is the idea just to throw huge areas of empty space around cities and hope that population is not super high as in games like WoW?
Another issue renting brings is what happens to my stuff when my house is removed or am kicked out of the house? I keep them in a crate or do I lose them? Also what if I spent a lot of time on designing my house? Do I have to start all over again?
I think that instanced housing is fine. However, you don't put in any amenities like AH in there. You never ever do that. Housing should serve only for decorating purposes.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
solution is to give space in or near cities to build non-instanced houses.
It leads to another problem .. the ghetto in UO.
Plus, it won't solve the problem. Everyone will still be inside their guild housing. You won't be in another instance with them, but you still cannot see them, unless there is no WALLS in the guild housing.
Yeah, a lot of that issue is however because you can craft inside the guildhouse and have a broker there. Take those 2 things away and there wont be so much problems.
As for the player houses actually allowing players to build house without much city planning will indeed create a slum that LeSoto can't compete with.
Either you let people rent prebuilt houses which is easiest and evict players who havn't paid the rent or you have some order and let the players buy lots which only support certain kind of buildings instead depending on the lot.
The last thing makes it so the town looks somewhat planned at least, anyone just throwing up a building anywhere might sound sandboxy, but the towns you build becomes ugly, ill planned slums.
DOAC's housing zone solved the planning issue since the zones were planned and the houses could only go in designated areas.
They used pre-built hoses. I believe there were 3 types of houses. standard, 2 story, and a 3 story mansion gimmick. Each had weekly rent that had to be paid (you could put up to 5 weeks payment into a lock box in case you went on vacation or what have not)
You could also put up your own NPC that sold YOUR stuff. give your stuff to the NPC, set the price, and forget about it.
Now this posed an issue. At the start, you had to physically visit the house to buy from the NPC. Pros being you visited the house someone spent time on, possibly met someone or the owner itself. Cons being the travel there and then trying to find the house. While the plots were numbered, they werent exactly sequencial. A grouping could be numbered 501-524 and the grouping next to it could be 436-460.
Later they allowed players to just buy directly from the market explorers. This lead many to tear down their huge houses and just settle for the cheapest house with only the needed items. since no one was visiting houses anymore.
Comments
Asheron's Call did that long ago and did it well. Back in the day it was nice. Non-instanced, convenient, etc. People still went to town to buy/sell, though that did die off eventually. Housing doesnt kill the towns. The lack of any real reason to go to them is what kills them. Some imagination & creativity by devs is what is needed to fix the problem, not fewer choices for players, imo.
How about instanced Housing in town?
A town could have 40 different priced/looking houses which people could rent in town.
So you would keep the people in towns and everyone can have one?
I prefer games though that let you build houses in more places than one.
But imagine in WOW if you could have an auctioneer in your house along with crafting tables and a banker.
The answer to this conundrum is obvious. Player housing in themeparks doesn't work. Its so obvious. Answer, make AAA sandbox!
Anyone trying to find a way to integrate player housing into a themepark is fooling themselves.
Also the tibia housing system was fucking awesome.
The solution is to make sure that there are activities and offerings that can only be found in the cities and towns.
edit: in addition, the guild housing in Lineage 2 was not instanced but was located inside cities and towns. It was great.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Slightly unrelated but does anyone find it funny that the lead dev of RIFT of all games is talking about the danger of abandoned "cities"? :P
"Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."
I need to take this advice more.
Pretty sure I heard this a couple times from a WoW dev before. They don't want to draw people out of major hubs, leaving them feel dead. It really does make sense.
Non-instanced housing isn't the most eloquent of solutions as it would require a lot of space and eventually instancing of the area itself as populations grew, then we'd see problems when player A's house is in a different instance to the rest of his/her guild due to population caps.
Guild Halls worked well in GW but that's because each city is a mission/quest hub and the lack of an AH makes the cities the only place to trade. I can see why Anet are holding off until post release to be doing guild halls and personal housing. IN GW2's case the cities have been built with social interactions through minigames in mind, whether that will be enough remains to be seen. That's another way of looking at it though - what can devs do to make the cities somewhere we want to hang out in ?
Lineage 2 does this quite well, the problem with this is it becomes very elitist big clans will keep their guild halls forever and there is no chance for the common player to experience it. I still say do it that way, make it so every house prop in big cities to become someones house.
Also add conquerable guild/player houses where you need to fight for it.
if Hartsman was worried about making the cities feel alive, the "cities" wouldn't be nothing but flat landscapes with NPCs standing around in gazeebos...
Secondly, prior to the release of guild halls, I can't honestly say that the cities in EQ2 were all that active to begin with -- at least not compared to the hundreds that would be packed into Iron Forge or Stormwind during that time period in WoW. Some MMORPGs just don't have a central social hub, and EQ2 was always one of them.
I firmly believe there are three main reasons why players are drawn back to their starting cities. The biggest reason is the auction house. If you limit auction houses to one zone per faction, that'll net you your largest influx of players. The last two reasons are far less important, but reason number 2 is to train. When you get new or upgraded abilities every three levels or so, you are periodically forced to return to your capital city to visit your skill trainer. Thirdly, there is the bank/guild bank. Players will return here often to store unneeded items clogging up their inventory space.
I liked Guild Halls in Everquest II even though I freely admit that they had a bit too many amenities, and I think Hartsman is making a mistake if he never includes them or gives us a barebones housing model similar to something in LotRO. The customization features for EQ2's Guild Halls were a huge reason why a lot of people even play the game. You don't need an auction house in guild housing, but I would like to see them use for tradeskilling purposes, guild banks, and as a central travel hub.
Agreed.
EQ used to have a vendor in our guild lobbies that offered a merchant selling some portal stuff, and you could unload your items, but for things you wanted to buy you had to hit the bazaar.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
Instanced housing sucks. It turns into a personal storage vault, and little more. Few people want to go out of their way to visit someone else's place. There's also no real drive to explore houses either. The advent of the Auction House took item sales and centralized/depersonalized it into a WalMart-like experience.
Put houss in the real world and give people a reason to visit them, and people will take time to make them something special. I do not believe in-game housing is a problem. We learned from mistakes like Star Wars Galaxies that caused tons of empty homes to litter the land. Surely a design can be made that will work in today's games. Perhaps then we would start getting a sense of community back.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
It leads to another problem .. the ghetto in UO.
Plus, it won't solve the problem. Everyone will still be inside their guild housing. You won't be in another instance with them, but you still cannot see them, unless there is no WALLS in the guild housing.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Yeah, a lot of that issue is however because you can craft inside the guildhouse and have a broker there. Take those 2 things away and there wont be so much problems.
As for the player houses actually allowing players to build house without much city planning will indeed create a slum that LeSoto can't compete with.
Either you let people rent prebuilt houses which is easiest and evict players who havn't paid the rent or you have some order and let the players buy lots which only support certain kind of buildings instead depending on the lot.
The last thing makes it so the town looks somewhat planned at least, anyone just throwing up a building anywhere might sound sandboxy, but the towns you build becomes ugly, ill planned slums.
Lots and general building restrictions can resolve a lot of the aesthetic issues that pop up. The biggest problem in the housing issue is the central city that MMO gamers have accepted as a standard feature rather than rejected for a more dynamic and mutable system. When the core gathering spot can migrate to where the players are mainly concentrated, the use, need and utility of player owned structures changes to a more dynamic system.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
guild housing did *not* kill freeport or qeynos.
The cities atrocious layout did. More people started using Kelethin (and to a lesser extent Neriak) because it was just so much easier to navigate (no zoning).
By the time guild halls rolled around qeynos and freeport were already sparse. The guild halls ma have been the deathblow, but it wasnt an overnight thing.
And the other issue is, guild halls were too good. Remove some of the ameneties, and put the entrance inside the actual city
Does it need one? What's the big problem having people hang out at a Guild House rather than a city? It's not like anything exceptional happens in a city, apart from a few vendors, and as far as socialising goes you can socialise just as much in a Guild House as in a City.
The same thing happened in EQ1 when PoK was introduced, and then later the Guild Halls in there. It made no practical difference in the long run. Standing in PoK was the same as standing in a City - all it did was move the population centre.
problem is IF housing is implemented (which is not so common nowadays) it is instanced(with very few exceptions) and sometimes this instance also has AH , bank and vendors. That's why it kills cities.
Make housing in open world and voila!
In order to avoid slums, make house 'buildable' in some areas not everywhere. Then devs can control how big / where will houses be.
Total freedom is great, but it lead to not so fine effects in UO after game was running for quite a bit.
+ if someone not playing for like f.e. 3 months make his house be converted to an "deed item" (so after he come back after long playing break he just have to find space and not build / buy whole new house) and send to bank with house space freed.
This need diffrent game engine, and game concept though so...
First off, as Cactus-Man said the issue here is the usage between cities and private housing. It's the activity of use that's the issue. If you can do the same things at your house as you can in the cities, one or the other isn't going to be used. The real problem is that there isn't enough activity to spread around between the two.
You need to have activities that players both want and need that are separate for each.
Once upon a time....
This. Non-instanced housing kills this problem dead.
That doesn't solve the problem at all though,
The issue being brought up is redundancy, having two things that perform the same function means players will find the one that is the most fun or efficient and largely ignore the other.
It doesn't matter if it is instanced or not, if you can do the same things in your house and cities then there is little reason for players to use both.
The only way to solve redundancy is remove one of the options or give the options totally different functionalities.
I'm with Cactus-Man here. Having dedicated space for housing doesn't really eliminate the problem, it changes it. Non-instanced housing, even rented, means that there is a draw to pull players from the 'city centers'.
And non-instancing brings other issues, as well. Games don't currently have mechanisms for 'ownership' of real estate within the continuous world. The developers have to keep other people out of the space you've rented, and that's pretty easy to do with a loading screen. Additionally, there's a whole security issue. How many people are willing to put down their ultravaluable Sword_Of_Uberness_081623 when just anyone can pick it up? So, it's your room/house/palace, if the developers don't keep interlopers away, your sword will be looted almost before you can blink. Normal social rules, conventions and taboos are too easily ignored in a computer game, and implementing such moral behavior into a game would probably be nightmarish. Most all of the fantasy-based games have some sort of burgler or thief class, even. I can already hear the 'we wanna break and enter' cry now.
For the forseeable future, instanced housing is easier for the developers to implement. But I think the issues associated with instanced housing are far easier to live with than a non-instanced alternative.
First off, as Cactus-Man said the issue here is the usage between cities and private housing. It's the activity of use that's the issue. If you can do the same things at your house as you can in the cities, one or the other isn't going to be used. The real problem is that there isn't enough activity to spread around between the two.
You need to have activities that players both want and need that are separate for each.
Or eliminate the NPC City as the main social hub of the game. Have players build up cities, and the if you have main NPC factions, they are just somewhere else that players don't go. Maybe players go there for training or something and that's it.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Agreed. Guild Housing is fine, but not when instanced and filled with teleporters to zip you around the world.
You go for non-instanced housing and you get another huge problem. Space... Where do you put all those houses? Even if you use a renting system, it will still require a ridiculous amount of space around cities. If a city can allow for only 100 houses, then what's left for the other 5-10k+ people on the server?
Or is the idea just to throw huge areas of empty space around cities and hope that population is not super high as in games like WoW?
Another issue renting brings is what happens to my stuff when my house is removed or am kicked out of the house? I keep them in a crate or do I lose them? Also what if I spent a lot of time on designing my house? Do I have to start all over again?
I think that instanced housing is fine. However, you don't put in any amenities like AH in there. You never ever do that. Housing should serve only for decorating purposes.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
DOAC's housing zone solved the planning issue since the zones were planned and the houses could only go in designated areas.
They used pre-built hoses. I believe there were 3 types of houses. standard, 2 story, and a 3 story mansion gimmick. Each had weekly rent that had to be paid (you could put up to 5 weeks payment into a lock box in case you went on vacation or what have not)
You could also put up your own NPC that sold YOUR stuff. give your stuff to the NPC, set the price, and forget about it.
Now this posed an issue. At the start, you had to physically visit the house to buy from the NPC. Pros being you visited the house someone spent time on, possibly met someone or the owner itself. Cons being the travel there and then trying to find the house. While the plots were numbered, they werent exactly sequencial. A grouping could be numbered 501-524 and the grouping next to it could be 436-460.
Later they allowed players to just buy directly from the market explorers. This lead many to tear down their huge houses and just settle for the cheapest house with only the needed items. since no one was visiting houses anymore.
It's pretty obvious what the solution is..non instanced housing.