Posts with tag player-housing

One of the really nice things about being able to fly in Azeroth is the opportunity to discover little homes in the most unlikely places. On a recent archaeology trip through Feralas, I flew over a tauren tent hidden in the mountains at 88,32 (on the border between Feralas and Mulgore) that I'd never seen before. It's a beautiful spot on a small pond ringed by mountains and Feralas' giant trees, with a travois and a canoe nearby, and I thought to myself: This would be actually be a really nice place to live, if my main had to be concerned with such things.

And then there's the little house in the mountains northeast of Stormwind -- the dwarven farms in the mountains between Ironforge and Menethil Harbor (although players saw that for years on flight paths). And another collection of tauren tents, canoes, and a rather large cave on the southern shore of Silithus. (Man, the tauren really got around.) Since getting flight in Azeroth, have you seen any of these tucked-away places, and are there any you think others should see?

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The topic of player housing continues to crop up as a question on the official forums. Blizzard has stated that guild halls or guild housing will not to be included in the game (at least, not any time soon).

According to Bornakk:

While this originally came up before I was around, I think this has been answered at some BlizzCons since then. While we think this could be a fun idea, we also like the idea of seeing a lot of people in cities and don't want to make main cities feel like ghost towns - if you need an example of this head to Silvermoon (yeah, that's a cheap shot, I know). So for now this idea remains an interesting idea but we'd have to make sure it fits into the game well and meets our expectations which are pretty high for something like this.

The last game I participated in which had guild housing was Guild Wars. Inside, it stored various mementos and trinkets from different epic quests or sigils that my guild had won in the Hall of Heroes (and this was a long time ago, mind you). But that was it! There wasn't much to do from a PvE standpoint. I think we had our own vendor and a "Guild Lord" (someone like Drek or Vanndar Stormpike in Alterac Valley). Later versions of the game had guilds attacking other guilds on their turf. The guild hall in this respect played a huge PvP component the game because the hall you selected would also be your home base complete with various terrain advantages and defenses if you were "attacked" by other guilds.

Now that would be cool.

Unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be a purpose to having a guild hall in the game. However, I'm not going to completely discount the idea. Just because the developers have said they're ruling it out now doesn't mean it won't be included later in the future. Players continued to ask about flying around in the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, right? All it takes is a new expansion, but at least we're getting it.

I'm shotgunning the Beer Garden.

Our friends over at WorldofWar.de (who were listening live to the podcast this past weekend) recently got an interview done with Lead Designer Tom Chilton, and you can read it over on their site right now. There's not a lot of news in there (though Chilton does gush over the Dungeon Finder, just as players have for the past week or so), but aside from the usual player housing deny and the old "we don't know what the future holds" back and forth, but there is one fun thing he reminds us of in the second half of the interview: Blizzard is adding on to the old Blackwing Lair instance in Cataclysm. It sounds like kind of what they've done with VoA: Blackrock Caverns, which we heard about at BlizzCon, will be a new area (supposedly level 85 5-man, though Chilton says "lots of bosses") inside Blackrock Mountain that's connected to all of the Black Dragonflight bosses in Blackwing Lair.

Finally, Chilton sorta-kinda re-confirms that there will be a new content patch before the expansion -- he says it probably won't be a numbered patch like 3.4 or 3.5, but he says there may be some more class balances in there, new Battle.net features, and possibly even a new raid boss. But mostly it'll just be the patch that brings us all of the world events previous to the Cataclysm shakedown that we'll all go through. Sounds like fun.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgens to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.

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All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.

Playing Warhammer recently has made me think of more features that WoW could add in order to create a better roleplaying experience. Far and away the most important one, to my mind, was the Tome of Knowledge. WoW players really need an in-game resource they can refer to as a standard for information about the Warcraft universe, and having this at hand, roleplayers could do a lot better than they can today.

Knowledge is the most important thing, of course, but there are other features Blizzard could add to the game that would help roleplayers too. I'd like to address a few of these things, and see how much they could really do for us. Player housing is a possible feature that gets talked about a lot, but I have my doubts as to whether or not it would really help roleplayers all that much. Another issue is one that is more important to me personally, and is another feature inspired by my trial with Warhammer Online: looking at interactivity between characters.

Spicytuna has a nice little writeup about a much-discussed but never implemented feature in World of Warcraft: player housing. Blizzard has borrowed (and subsequently improved upon) many of the most common features in MMOs -- they revamped leveling with ideas like rested XP and recruit-a-friend, they changed the endgame with the ideas of Heroic instances and daily quests, and they've tweaked PvP with battlegrounds, Wintergrasp and Arenas.

But for some reason they've never taken on the idea of player housing: a place in the game for players to make their own. The reason we've always heard is that they never landed on a good implementation of it -- if they couldn't do it right, they wouldn't do it at all.

But Spicytuna proves there's no shortage of ideas. The main thought so far is that such an area would be instanced, as having actual buildings in the game as player houses just leads to emptied out ghettos of buildings left to rot.

• Etherjammer has an old but quite humorous look at BlizzCon etiquette. My favorite line: "Use spells such as Slow Fall and Levitate to go from one level of BlizzCon to another at your own risk, as players report that these spells have been unreliable at best in past BlizzCons." Why? Because some idiot jumped off the escalator half way up last year, and it caused quite a ruckus. Pardo was near the esclator talking with some folks, and he just looked and shook his head in a /facepalm manner.
• Activision-Blizzard is suing Double Fine over Brutal Legend.
• Guild halls and player housing. Love 'em or hate 'em, lots of people want them. The Hunter's Union has an interesting take on them.
• Casual Raid Leader has a great post about encouraging more oraganic and communicative raiding.
• Stoneybaby of Big Hit Box has a good review of how he got back into PvP, which would be useful for those of you looking to do the same.

Notice how we've linked Big Hit Box a lot this week? It's because they're producing great content for the community! If you're writing compelling content or come across a great site or blog post, please let us know!

Reader comments – ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.

Flamers and trolls aside, WoW Insider readers are generally a contentious lot. Their viewpoints are as divergent as the player demographics the site attracts – all types of players, from the casual to the hardcore. With this many angles to consider, WoW Insider becomes a melting pot of ideas and opinions, from the sublime to the ridiculous. (And let's face it – some of the so-called ridiculous ideas are the most entertaining to read.)

Yet this week, readers seemed to be more often of one mind than not – whether that agreement was ultimately to agree over the topic at hand or to agree to disagree. [1.Local] highlights several reader conversations that made the radar this week.

Now this is by no means the first time we've interviewed World of Warcraft's Lead Developer Tom Chilton (aka Kalgan) but we though with the recent release of Patch 3.1, this would be the perfect time to sit down with him and get the 411 on Blizzard's plans for their latest patch.

WoW Insider: Blizzard seem to be treating each major patch as more of a mini expansion, what are the reasons for this?

Tom Chilton: I would say the biggest reason is because we're always pushing ourselves to do as much as we can in every patch. We're never really satisfied with what we have in the patch versus what we didn't have. Maybe the developers get a little out of control - but in a good way as that's good for players. More than anything else we want to make sure that in a patch we have content for everyone.

We feel like one of the things we didn't do so well in the past was to deliver content for everyone, we would deliver content for different parts of the player base at any given time like a 25-person raid or a 10-person raid or here's a new battleground, back in the day of Arathi Basin. However we didn't really hit everyone at the same time so we're trying harder to do that while at the same time maintain our pace of Expansions ... our blindingly rapid pace of Expansions.

April Fools' Day came and went, and as expected, a lot of jokes popped up all over the 'Net. Of course, among the jokes we looked forward to (or dreaded, as some of you curmudgeons ranted yesterday) were the World of Warcraft-related jokes. However you might feel about April Fools', I think we all eagerly awaited Blizzard's April Fools' gag, a long-standing tradition. The European World of Warcraft site had theirs -- a Pimp my mount feature -- launch earlier than the North American gag, an RP-ization of the forums and the new Dance Battle System. Not bad, but definitely not their best prank.

Actually, the Dance Battle System was less funny to me if only because it reminded me of the one promised feature they still haven't delivered on. Remember the dance studios that were supposed to come with Wrath of the Lich King? They pruned that feature away even before Beta, but it doesn't mean we've forgotten all about it. In fact, this latest gag might've been Blizzard's way of poking fun at themselves for failing to deliver on their promise.

The Daily Quest brings you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Today we bring you a lot of lists.

• Foofy has posted part 3 of her How To Moonkin video covering Idols and Enchants.
• CriticalQQ is exploring the major lore character of Azeroth that are Mages.
• The Thunderstorm blog has a new guide to speccing Elemental for Shaman.
• Blessing of Kings has a prediction about who will be the big winners and losers with the new Dual Spec system.
• The Druid Team has been writing a series of on-going posts detailing how they see Player Housing working in WoW. They have designed housing for many major starting cities as well as for Crafting, complete with floorplans.
  
• Part 1 - Stormwind and Thunderbluff
• Part 2 - Personal mailboxes, vendors and more
• Part 3 - Darnassus and Silvermoon
• Part 4 - Secondary profession housing items
• Part 5 - Orgrimmar
• Part 6 - Gathering professions housing items

Submit a guide, post, podcast or resource for inclusion in TDQ, by using our tip line and we'll consider it for a future TDQ post.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.

It's Wednesday, which I've determined is the worst day of the week ever, so let's skip any delays today and jump right into the Q&A. If you disagree that Wednesday is the worst, you are wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. As wrong as you could possibly be. Just sayin'.

Robsato asked...

I recently got my warrior to level 71 and I really miss my riding crop especially since my main is a pally going at normal speed feels really slow. Is there a way to get my 10% speed increase back?

There's a huge forum thread over on the forums right now (though it's been going for the better part of a month) about Blizzard putting in more for roleplayers -- player housing, surnames, and "a more interactive world" are all asked for, and much later in the thread, Nethaera does weigh in with a nice long statement about how Blizzard is dealing with all of this stuff. The bottom line, as always, is that there's only so many hours in the day, and Blizzard has to prioritize what gets worked on. And as of yet, neither player housing nor surnames or any of the other suggestions have made their way to the top of the list.

Which makes sense -- as many roleplayers as there are, nobody would really call them the primary audience of the game. There are definitely other games out there that are much better for defining a character. Which doesn't mean that we'll never see these things ingame -- player housing has been wanted (and promised) for a long time, and surnames are something that's common in almost every MMO but World of Warcraft. Neth just says that it's a matter of time, and that while player housing is still on the horizon, the world of Northrend will be more immersive and interactive than the rest of the game so far. Which is good news not just for roleplayers but for everyone else as well.

Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week Alex Ziebart answers your quests about the lore in the World of Warcraft. If you have any questions, no matter how big or small they might be, ask them in the comments section below and we'll try to answer it in a future edition.

Let's get this party started with Lionheart's question...

What is that barred off instance looking portal thing in Stormwind, by Old Town? Were the gates once open?

There are actually two of these in Stormwind. Neither of them were ever open, they're relics of unfinished projects. One is a closed off little guarded island in the Canals. That one was going to be the Stormwind Vault, probably a dungeon like Arcatraz or the upcoming Violet Hold in Dalaran. Probably.

There's also the barred off one at the end of the Canals, right down the way from that one. This is probably the one you're referring to, I'm going to guess? I don't think we've gotten a real answer on this was supposed to be, but it was probably going to be the portal to player housing. They actually did start work on player housing at one point, but never got far. There are relics of it in the game files. Half completed houses/structures, things like that. They all use the Stormwind motif for their appearance, and they would have to put it somewhere. Through this portal is a safe bet.

thinice asked...

Jaina Proudmoore and Arthas. Any chance they'll hook up against in the future? What are the details of their history together?

There's a new game in town, and Artirius of the Aerie Peak server has noticed it, and admittedly, so have I. With attunements gone, it is now possible for any level 70 to go in and see tier 5 and 6 content whenever they want. Of course, they don't generally have a prayer of actually downing bosses unless they have 20-24 well geared people to help them out.

That's where gold comes in. With a few thousand gold, you can buy your way into a tier 6 group that doesn't need the tier 6 armor and go along for the ride. A few hours later, you come out on the other end with Illidan dead and a few shiny new drops, even if you've never set foot in Karazhan.

It's not just people trying to buy these slots in the trade channel either. As Artirius observes, many raid groups are actively soliciting for buyers for their raid slots. On my own server, one Horde group is trading tier 6 runs for large quantities of certain herbs, promising that all but a few select drops will go to the people who buy their slots with stacks of Netherbloom and Ghost Mushrooms.

So what's causing this?

The author of "Warcraft and Other Hooha" read on the Lord of the Rings Online's site that there are taxidermists in game who will mount and show off your kills, and wondered why the same thing wasn't going on in Azeroth. It seems silly at first, but there's actually a lot of precedent -- they collected all the current taxidermy in Warcraft, and the case is pretty convincing. Clearly someone is stuffing and mounting animals in Azeroth.

Of course, as in LotRO, this is a feature that would go hand-in-hand with player housing, so we shouldn't expect to see one until we've gotten the other (and odds are that we won't see player housing anytime soon, though guild housing is another story). Not everybody would want dead animals adorning their walls (Druids probably wouldn't appreciate having that bear around), but what better way is there for you to show off what you've taken down out in the wild?

[Via Mania]