Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

I"ve always wondered why they don"t implement housing zones directly into major cities. Have a CBD type area, which would consist of your shops/trainers/bank/whatever that every MMO city has, then towards the edges have it merge into various residential districts. Obviously it would have to be designed with anticipated population in mind (perhaps additional zones could be designed but walled off, then opened as necessary), and with appropriate transport (an above ground tram system? or the like), but I think it would be an awesome way of implementing housing and at the same time giving a truly epic feeling to ingame cities, since they"d actually feel like, well, cities, and not minor outposts.

The ultimate in player housing would be allowing players to create a destination on par with any NPC town. Shadowbane achieves this, but then their NPC towns aren"t hard to compete with.

I don"t care much for individual player housing. Let it be tiny. It"s probably just a vanity anyway. I want guild housing to be a big deal. Encourage guildmembers to operate out of guild houses.

I want to be able to hire or enslave NPCs to work at the guildhouse and fulfill various functions; guards, merchants, healers, smiths. I want to be able to make trophies out of epic critters and hang them from the walls and ceilings. I want to be able to fashion teleportation devices, crafting apparatus, regeneration wells, etc. and I want to be able to put the guildhouse outside town. Perhaps there is a guild residential district around various villages and cities or along specific thoroughfares that players can set up in. It doesn"t have to be 2 steps from the epic dungeon, but renting an instanced apartment in town is weak.

If you really want to go to the next level you make end-game PvP revolve around guild housing. Perhaps there are conquerable castles dotting the landscape and control of them has benefits like in Lineage 2. I like the system, I just don"t like it being the only system. Just like PvE, PvP is more fun in groups. Balancing 1on1 fights is nigh impossible with classes, so the emphasis should rest on skirmish warfare, and housing is a suitable focus.

I want housing to be a strategic asset. Any less and I just don"t care, but there are tons of people who enjoy the metagame of developing their home.

Well, here"s the thing: Housing is just territory. It"s silly to talk about housing being "meaningful" in a PvE game. How can a house be meaningful in a large world unless you"re attacking or defending it?

You get trophies? You know that if the game"s popular, a thousand other people will have them, so you won"t care. You store stuff? A glorified bank that makes it take longer for you to switch out equipment. You have vendors? Everyone else will have vendors with the same stuff. I don"t see how you can make your house unique when you"re competing with a million other people making their houses unique.

I mean, it"s fine, and it"s cool to have a house, and a guild hall, but I don"t think there"s any huge breakthroughs in awesomeness to be made here in a PvE game.

Twobit Whore said:

Yes, because the RNG is something we love and not the spawn of the devil.

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Windows RNG problems appear to stem from two sources. (1) it"s not being initialized correctly (i.e. a new seed isn"t being introduced when appropriate).

(2) it generally sucks (I don"t pretend to be an authority on RNGs but this seems to be the consensus from people who are said authorities -- see, e.g., google "windows rng bad").

There are two solutions for this problems.

(1) MMO/game devs need to implement their own software pseudo-RNG that is (hopefully) better or use a commercially available pseudo-RNG that is (supposedly) better.

(2) Given that MMOS require a network use random.org (or other secure internet random number provider) to provide a "hardware" RNG. I"m a fan of #2 assuming the connection is secure & etc.

GTFO with this RNG bullshit. Any dev team worth their scratch could easily look up the multitude of algorithms out there for RNGs and roll their own if it was a limiting factor on gameplay.

You"re derailing this thread needlessly by expounding upon RNGs in such a stupid fashion.

Maxxius said:

K scratching my head on that one. Can"t think of another PVE game pre EQ that expanded the whole "raid" scene.

P.S., Curt it is ok if you call certain people dumbfucks in this thread, myself included if you wish ;p

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Well, EQ was stolen almost exactly from the mechanics of the old diku MUD, Sojourn. Down to 50 levels and most classes. That game had raids with tanks, healers etc etc. This is the game Brad played and raided in.

I remember raiding Planes of Fire/Earth/Air and killing Tiamat etc. Fun game.

I think Jotunheim was still my general favorite though (after Undermountain, for personal reasons (Blue Polkadot Cloak ftw! ). Roots and Manscorpion Hive/Lost Library of the Seer Kings were well up there too. Tiamat was fun, but not a day-to-day thing. Sojourn was fun for a long time.

Housing in an MMO really depends on the context of the game. More often than not it fails to be at all important. In a game like shadowbane, it was completely integral to gameplay. For many other games it"s just a perk that really doesnt matter except that it gives players yet another thing to own/achieve without really impacting 90% of gameplay. I think in general alot of the flaws with many subsystems in games is that they have almost NO context in what players spend their time doing.

Housing is always talked about because it allows players to impact the game space. You have a permanent mark on the game without having to be in game. In terms of functionality though it almost never matters to anyone but you.

One thing that could be considered is to have upkeep associated with housing. Whether in constant gold spending or having to defend your keep against neighbooring monsters etc etc. It should be inordinately expensive to keep any sort of house / tower in the middle of a high level area (imagine karazhan in wow) such that you have to spend a ton of resources to keep it up. Vs. a player who wants to be townsfolk 213 in a normal spot. If you fail your upkeep your house eventually gets torn down by surrounding monsters etc etc.

Asheron"s Calls housing didn"t seem too bad at the time. I honestly don"t remember all the details but I believe housing plots were limited as well as the type of house. Mansions/guild halls were in shorter demand than your normal house.

ShroudedMist said:

GTFO with this RNG bullshit. Any dev team worth their scratch could easily look up the multitude of algorithms out there for RNGs and roll their own if it was a limiting factor on gameplay.

You"re derailing this thread needlessly by expounding upon RNGs in such a stupid fashion.

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As if a discussion on player housing is any less pointless? Holy fuck I was responding to 2bit"s snarky comment about a proposed mechanic. I can"t recall a good RNG in any MMO. WoW? I like how I would get purple drops within a week of each other and then nothing for months. VG? Don"t get me started.

Seriously, if player housing was key to MMOs WoW would have it. It doesn"t and still has billions of players. Mechanics matters. Lore matters. World/Art design matters. Details like harvesting/professions -- matter. Player Housing? Not so much.

Player housing really doesn"t interest me really unless I get to burn down other peoples houses.

Ngruk said:

How about player housing? What"s the best ever? Worst ever? Your dream setup for player, guild housing? Instanced? Real "virtual" real estate? Combo?

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A lot of people have already said part on my own take on the subject, so I"ll simply summarise:

Housing is interesting the following main reasons:
- Playing house/legos/whatever, which is a small, but fun, sub-game
- Displaying your achievements
- Acting as a social hub
- Acting as a more realistic storage

The social hub function is better exemplified by the teleport. Since the Realm, housing is meaningful in that it allows people to quickly go to a central point. That"s a given. So, make housing an integral part of the city. All those buildings that serve as filler? Make each have 2-3 rooms at the top floor. Nearly every building in any town should be livable. The model of ghettos outside of the main area is an artefact that stems from the fact that almost all the games that implement it had housing tacked after the fact. EQ2 had in-city housing, because it had it from the start. It devoted too much (IMHO) buildings to housing purposes, and didn"t integrate housing into the "life" of the city. So, copy the old medieval feeling, and place shops and stores on ground floor, and all housing on the floors above.

"I live above the component vendor, next to the market"

Make lots more floor plans. You don"t need to decorate things after all - the players will. So there"s small rooms (based on a 4x5 tile base), larger rooms (vaguely L-shaped 40ish tile wide), appartments (a hundred tiles, with separating walls), luxury suites.

Add a mini real-estate market. The base price for any appartment is proportional to the number of tiles of the floor plan, plus X% per number of people who are renting an instanced copy of that appartment. A well located appartment is going to fetch a premium - and you don"t have to fix the prices, the players will do that for you (and the more cash they have, the bigger the drains that they will create).

No / Nearly no furniture (NPC) vendors. You populate your appartment essentially from adventuring - you went into that old library to slay some ghost; hey that was a nice little waist-height bookshelf (which acts as a container for scholarly-themed things, adding storage to your appartment. It will look good next to the weapon rack you won with a random 100 in the bandit tower).

As already said, you make the house an integral part of your storage. Bank? There"s no bank... oh you mean that small (20 slots) magic chest in your appartment, that can be accessed from remote chests.

Draegan said:

Player housing really doesn"t interest me really unless I get to burn down other peoples houses.

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This may be the only time I"ve ever agreed with you on anything. But yeah, I"d go for this.

In my ideal game I would combine housing and trade skills.

Here is what I envision...

To participate in trade skills, you would have to join on as an apprentice in a guild (the traditional sense of the word, i.e. Blacksmithing guild) house. Each shop would have two parts. The first part would be a "shop" where goods created are sold. The second part would be an instance where only players of that guild could enter. Additionally players could give the shopkeeper materials to make certain items for them. This would cost a small fee and theses shops wouldnt have any of the more rare or higher powered craftable items.
Inside would be trainers, tools, stations, mini quests and materials. Players would make goods and be rewarded with small amount of cash and/or experience. The NPCs goods would then go into the stock of the NPCs. There would be a baseline that these NPCs would always have, but the greater supply the more the prices would drop, and rare or special items made by players would be available as well.

Eventually players would move beyond apprenticeship and gain access to being a master of their own shop. At this point a player could purchase some space, hire some NPCs, and set up a shop of his own. There would be overhead costs that each master would be responsible for, or would lose their shop space. Part of that cost would be such mundane things as rent or NPC wages, but also would have things like a resupply merchant to keep your shelves stocked with certain goods.

As master of the shop this becomes a competitive field. For example:
I purchase a tailoring shop. I hire NPCs to work in my shop, as well as allow players who want to learn this craft access to my machinery and materials. I keep everything made in my shop using my tools. I can move and price goods as I see fit in my store.
I can also upgrade my store in several ways. The first way would be by having rare and hard to find recipes. This would be a great draw as would people not only want to buy these, but they would be able to learn them as they progress or meet requirements in my shop.
Another way would be the upgrading of equipment. Better tools and resources can be brought in that give higher success rates or the ability to craft certain items. An example would be a blacksmiths shop. Items would be very different depending a lot of factors. Quality of metal, heat of furnace, skill level of NPC assistants, ect. Maybe in my shop Ive brought in a anvil made of certain material which gives crafting bonus to anyone who uses it, or I have contracted to get a rare type of coal from a local trader which heats my furnace to proper temperature to forge Adamantite. Perhaps ive learned discovered a method for folding metals (which adds bonus to weapon damage or strength) that I learned from a rare book that dropped from a Dragon my raiding guild killed. The number of variables would make an incredibly exciting crafting system where players could build reputations and have name brands. Even if you had a rare blueprint, or recipe or whatever, the quality would still be variable and based on such things as quality of material, tools, workers, equipment, ect....

And all this could happen on auto pilot. Players could just allow the NPCs to manage the day to day stuff, add things when they want, adjust as they see fit. Or they could throw themselves into it. Micromanaging their own crafting shop and mini auction house. Upgrading, training, searching for rare recipes or equipment, finding and hiring special NPCs from the population, trading rare skills in competitors shops in some sort of exchange.

Who needs housing? Lets create a vibrant, alive marketplace. Lets create a real economy that rewards the best and allows real market forces to play themselves out.

If housing is tied to character or guild progression in some way then you are on the right track. When it just a perk, a place you can go to get things you can get in a lot of other places it is just an add on.

People want meaningful ways to progress their characters, make them individuals, to build them up with their choices. If guild or individual housing can work towards then it is something cool.

Most of our current games are damn near 100% item centric and if you took any 2 of the same level characters, stripped them nekkid, they would be damn near identical. If housing were to create something meaningful that added to your character then you are heading the right way.

Lleauaric~EW said:

Stuff

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I like a lot of your ideas, although I think there is room for personal housing in addition to trade buildings.

Going back to what I was saying earlier about the different instances you could choose to move in to, it would be interesting to see how player choices differed when it came to a shop rather than a personal home.

Take a certain neighborhood that is known to have a high amount of traffic. It would obviously be an attractive place, but not only to you, but other crafters as well. Players would have to decide whether it was worth it to try to compete with these established shops or place their shop in a different neighborhood and try to promote it. If a player decided they didn"t want to continue running their shop, they may find their space in the neighborhood is highly sought after by other potential shopkeepers. A whole new secondary market would arise for simply selling plots of land!

Of course, the only way this would work would be to limit the auction house somehow (EQ2 did it by allowing players to drop the broker fee if they bought directly from a player, for example), but I"m not sure this is necessarily the best option. I"d have to think on it a bit to come up with alternatives. Either way, if you could get the people to come to your shop and make player-owned vendors attractive like they were back in the UO days, I think the idea of a player market is incredibly good.

Ukerric said:

A lot of people have already said part on my own take on the subject, so I"ll simply summarise:

Housing is interesting the following main reasons:
- Playing house/legos/whatever, which is a small, but fun, sub-game
- Displaying your achievements
- Acting as a social hub
- Acting as a more realistic storage

The social hub function is better exemplified by the teleport. Since the Realm, housing is meaningful in that it allows people to quickly go to a central point. That"s a given. So, make housing an integral part of the city. All those buildings that serve as filler? Make each have 2-3 rooms at the top floor. Nearly every building in any town should be livable. The model of ghettos outside of the main area is an artefact that stems from the fact that almost all the games that implement it had housing tacked after the fact. EQ2 had in-city housing, because it had it from the start. It devoted too much (IMHO) buildings to housing purposes, and didn"t integrate housing into the "life" of the city. So, copy the old medieval feeling, and place shops and stores on ground floor, and all housing on the floors above.

"I live above the component vendor, next to the market"

Make lots more floor plans. You don"t need to decorate things after all - the players will. So there"s small rooms (based on a 4x5 tile base), larger rooms (vaguely L-shaped 40ish tile wide), appartments (a hundred tiles, with separating walls), luxury suites.

Add a mini real-estate market. The base price for any appartment is proportional to the number of tiles of the floor plan, plus X% per number of people who are renting an instanced copy of that appartment. A well located appartment is going to fetch a premium - and you don"t have to fix the prices, the players will do that for you (and the more cash they have, the bigger the drains that they will create).

No / Nearly no furniture (NPC) vendors. You populate your appartment essentially from adventuring - you went into that old library to slay some ghost; hey that was a nice little waist-height bookshelf (which acts as a container for scholarly-themed things, adding storage to your appartment. It will look good next to the weapon rack you won with a random 100 in the bandit tower).

As already said, you make the house an integral part of your storage. Bank? There"s no bank... oh you mean that small (20 slots) magic chest in your appartment, that can be accessed from remote chests.

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This. I don"t have much to add, this sums up my thoughts on the matter.

I thought EQ2 did housing quite nicely. I think their biggest area for improvement was in overall city usage. There was one building for the cheap housing in each of the city areas, and usually a few expensive houses. Lots of dead/useless buildings (mind, this was in Qeynos/Freeport...it has improved since then). But the house was a place to store things, decorate, craft, utilize the market. It wasn"t a true "social" area - you didn"t go there to talk to a friend, for instance. But it certainly was a nice part of the game - making for more things to do when not adventuring. That, IMHO, was key.

Ive only played EQ2 with player housing, but from what I experienced it was adequate.
Things I liked about it:
Something to do in the off time instead of standing around by the bank.
Gave meaning to all the items you make skilling up a trade skill. You could sell them on the AH or put them in your house.
It appealed to the wife. It gave her something to do to help break her into the game.
Created a niche sub culture of budding house design people. Some of the designs done in EQ2 were superb, the ingenuity of some people was astounding.
The ability to put some quest rewards on mounts and put them in your house was fantastic. Give the ability to do it with most items/armour and Id love it. I hate getting rid of some of my "treasured" items, so instead they sit in my bank taking up space. I am a pack rat and proud of it.
Having some items with a function is good. Im thinking here of the mat that ported you into the maj-dul instance.

Guild housing?
Im not really clued up as to what this would serve other then a place to hang trophies. If you could do things direct from the house, then sure a hub is a good thing, but tbh I would hate for my gaming experience to be "log in > guild house > port to instance > log off".
With the rise in popularity of guild banks, I think the need for a guild house is rapidly declining.
Give each "boss mob" a house item that everyone can loot, and they can stick their epeen items up in their own house if they so wish.

I have always loved the thought of guilds having houses, upgradeable to keeps and stuff, that could be sieged against from warring guilds.

I also thought that a guild being able to "show off" accomplishments such as hanging Boss mob trophies for public display was very cool. Also having a tabard or some marking on the guild house that progressed with a guilds level, maybe even the building architecture would be fun and very cool.