I'm also a little confused by the call for guild and player housing. Is there really enough replay value to make this stuff worthwhile? If it's instanced, then player housing just becomes a way to customise your log-in screen. If non-guildies can't see the trophies in your guildhall, is there a point to displaying them?

In a guildhall sounds like fun, but in reality it'd just be normal guildchat except that you're also watching 40 of your guildies' characters compulsively jumping around a room while they wait for instance queues to pop.

Yeah, guild/player housing always seemed like a feature that was "broad, but shallow".

That is, most people, if you ask them, will say that want it ("broad").

But then if you question them further and figure out how much they'd actually use it, you'd find that they really wouldn't use it very much after the initial purchase ("shallow").

That's not to say that some people won't use it A LOT. Of course some people will. But when you really look into it, they're a minority.

The two justifications I've heard for guild halls are (a) to display guild achievements, and (b) to use as a meeting place. Personally, I'm fine with the Achievement pane, and I wouldn't make a point of zoning into the guild hall to count the tally marks next to Sartharion's head.

As for the latter, it's not that hard to escape the crowds. Steamwheedle cities are well protected, while smaller settlements like Brill or Kharanos are within friendly territory and offer fewer distractions than the capitals (Goldshire being a big exception). If everybody's a high enough level, Thrallmar and Valiance Keep are just a short trip from the faction capital. I once attended a guild meeting by the arena in Nagrand, and we concluded the proceedings by going inside and beating each other up. With two big worlds to explore, why limit yourself to another cookie-cutter fortress?