Forums » General Pantheon Discussion

Community Debate - Open World Housing vs Instanced Housing

    • 107 posts
    October 22, 2018 9:24 AM PDT

    Watemper said:

    If I would have to pick..Open world housing. And I don't want designated zones for housing. I think you should be able to house in Thronefest and places like that. There would also be limited areas soo not everyone can get housing. Through expansions as more content is created inevitably with other city type areas people can go to you can also have housing there. However, only one house per account and can be shared with your other characters. 

    All in all I think you shouldn't do housing. Never saw the appeal and only ever saw it effect MMOs negatively. With instancing the world will be more vacant. With open world..and only in cities...it will be mitigated quite a bit, and atleast make cities more populated.

    I think the only type of housing that should be done are guild halls in designated areas like cities.

    Housing shouldn't be done from the start either. Very low on the list of priorities that need to be done.

     

    Do you want some company owning everything? Because thats how you allow small groups to corner the market on it. Then they will sell the few plots that exist for real money only options. No thanks. If you do housing it needs to be where everyone can do it thus no open world stuff.

    • 844 posts
    October 22, 2018 9:34 AM PDT

    Sarim said:

    Anyone here who has seen the mad land rush in Archeage?

    Tbh, I liked the open world areas for housing there, fully integrated into the worlds zones. And the housing itself was amazing!

    BUT: Not everyone could have a piece of land. This lead to a fair amount of frustrated people. It also had other problems, like you could "block" land by placing your house stupidly. And you could only pay the rent for two weeks ahead (no long holiday for you!). I still think it was overall a good system, but it definitely should be improved upon.

    Overall I'm not too obsessed with housing however. If there are instanced areas where people can place houses, that would be fine with me too.

    Housing in AA was interesting. But as with everything in AA it got badly hacked and abused.

    By not limiting ownership per account hackers easily used offline tools to purchase vast numbers of houses, bypassing the in-game process. And bypassing the taxes by use of another exploit that was more bad code.

    It was just another example of unintended results from very bad code work and poorer planning. In addition to an obvious cash grab by a game 100% designed to milk players pocketbooks.


    This post was edited by zewtastic at October 22, 2018 9:37 AM PDT
    • 10 posts
    October 22, 2018 9:39 AM PDT

    If housing is to be done by imitating games already in existence, then I would probably consider instanced housing to be a safer bet. I do however believe that when done correctly, then open world housing would bring so much more wealth, both to the player experience and the in-game world.

    • 844 posts
    October 22, 2018 9:41 AM PDT

    zendrel said:

    Watemper said:

    If I would have to pick..Open world housing. And I don't want designated zones for housing. I think you should be able to house in Thronefest and places like that. There would also be limited areas soo not everyone can get housing. Through expansions as more content is created inevitably with other city type areas people can go to you can also have housing there. However, only one house per account and can be shared with your other characters. 

    All in all I think you shouldn't do housing. Never saw the appeal and only ever saw it effect MMOs negatively. With instancing the world will be more vacant. With open world..and only in cities...it will be mitigated quite a bit, and atleast make cities more populated.

    I think the only type of housing that should be done are guild halls in designated areas like cities.

    Housing shouldn't be done from the start either. Very low on the list of priorities that need to be done.

    Do you want some company owning everything? Because thats how you allow small groups to corner the market on it. Then they will sell the few plots that exist for real money only options. No thanks. If you do housing it needs to be where everyone can do it thus no open world stuff.

    Did you actually read what he said?

    How would one 'company' own everything if housing is limited to one per account?

    And frankly game world designers cannot lay out a persistent world unless they do designate at least generally where some housing might be.

    Vanguard, Brads last game effectively worked this way. And it worked well.

    • 844 posts
    October 22, 2018 9:44 AM PDT

    Caldawn said:

    If housing is to be done by imitating games already in existence, then I would probably consider instanced housing to be a safer bet. I do however believe that when done correctly, then open world housing would bring so much more wealth, both to the player experience and the in-game world.

    You are going to have to elaborate on what 'safer bet' means.

    And what do you mean by 'bring so much more wealth'? What are you quantifying as 'wealth'?

    Your post is entirely too vague.

    • 793 posts
    October 22, 2018 10:09 AM PDT

    Unless housing provides something other than a place to decorate, I won't use it.

    Give me some additional storage capacity or something and I'd consider it.

    Make it instanced and I probably won't use it.

    • 844 posts
    October 22, 2018 10:17 AM PDT

    Fulton said:

    Unless housing provides something other than a place to decorate, I won't use it.

    Give me some additional storage capacity or something and I'd consider it.

    Make it instanced and I probably won't use it.

    You comment confuses me.

    You say you want storage, but not instanced storage?

    I am not aware of any MMO housing that did not provide more storage, instanced or otherwise.

    And generally storage in housing gave you tools to share it with friends, guildies and otherwise. Unlike banks.

    • 793 posts
    October 22, 2018 10:25 AM PDT

    zewtastic said:

    Fulton said:

    Unless housing provides something other than a place to decorate, I won't use it.

    Give me some additional storage capacity or something and I'd consider it.

    Make it instanced and I probably won't use it.

    You comment confuses me.

    You say you want storage, but not instanced storage?

    I am not aware of any MMO housing that did not provide more storage, instanced or otherwise.

    And generally storage in housing gave you tools to share it with friends, guildies and otherwise. Unlike banks.

    I probably wouldn't use instanced housing, EVEN if it provided storage. I said probably, because depending on the type and amount of storage, I could be swayed to change my mind. :)

    • 166 posts
    October 22, 2018 10:31 AM PDT

    The FAQ already answer this question with open world housing. And this is what I also support, of course with some restrictions on how much houses a player can own and where the players are able to build their houses.

    20.1 Will the game have instances?

    Pantheon will support instancing to a limited degree, using it primarily for storytelling in a linear fashion, perhaps at the end of an epic quest. The vast majority of content, however, will exist in non-instanced shared zones.

    As already mentioned, Arche Age could be used as an example on how to do it and improve on this. Mini games to really build the house and not only placing it would imporve the fun of housing, as some mechanics like farming and breeding would do.

    • 646 posts
    October 22, 2018 10:35 AM PDT

    Landbert said:As already mentioned, Arche Age could be used as an example on how to do it and improve on this. Mini games to really build the house and not only placing it would imporve the fun of housing, as some mechanics like farming and breeding would do.

    AcheAge housing is awful. Everything from being completely inaccessible to free players, to the limited availability, to limited customizability, having to defend it, etc.

    Though there are clearly two different mindsets when it comes to housing. One group thinks of it as very literal and almost purely functional. The other group thinks of it as a creative outlet that might not even involve a literal house. I'm part of the latter.

    • 1315 posts
    October 22, 2018 10:36 AM PDT

    The Disney Experience vs Persistent Living World

    Instanced housing is very appropriate to The Disney Experience games where every player experience the same exhibits and has equal access to all content and resources.  Instanced housing goes hand in hand with personal harvesting nodes, instanced dungeons, instant travel, linked banks and global auction houses.

    Open World Housing is very complex, gritty and comes with real maintenance.  Open world housing fits a lot better with large persistent worlds where access to everything is a competition and there are no guaranties or short cuts.  To combat issues discovered in other open world games there will need to be a lot of controls and limiters on Open World Housing for it to be worth it, but if it can be done it would make Terminus feel a lot more like home.

    From a Game Master perspective any time I let my players build/buy houses or castles they become prime story points that can be used to drive plots.  Players become very attached to something they have dreamt up and built themselves through labor, especially if it comes at both high monetary and opportunity costs.  That being said the designing and rules involved with player domains is very book work heavy and that’s when its 1 GM (see developer/writer) to 4-6 people.  When you scale it up to maybe as many as 50,000 players per server that’s a lot of book keeping and space.  The right tools can help minimize the work per player but there will always be some to do.

    The real question is whether Pantheon is more a Disney Experience Game or Persistent Living World.  Many of the goals listed for Pantheon are a lot closer to the Persistent Living World model of competition, delayed gratification and strategic difficulty of combat.  Additionally some of the Disney Experience tools are just plain nice as they are usually used to bypass un-fun tasks and increase overall user experiences.  The more convenience tools that exist the less opportunity cost there is per choice and from that the less each choice matters.  Eventually there will reach a point where no choice really matters so it’s a balancing act between gritty accounting and The Disney Experience.

    For Open World Housing to really fit in Pantheon then the two continents would need to be fully created at playable scale from day one.  There can be vast areas of impassible mountains, immense dust covered plains where the occasional herd roam and endless forests that will not likely see a players foot.  As content is added grids of undeveloped land could be swapped out with newly discovered ruins, fresh worlds overlaying onto Terminus or the militant expansion of some denizen of the depths.  At launch this would leave just enormous amounts of land filled with generic mobs and terrain similar to SWG with only small areas of hand crafted content.

    There are technological hurdles to Persistent Living World games on how to map and track all those zones that are likely fairly empty but at a moment’s notice could include 200 players chasing down a random spawn world dragon.  Setting up tools that can iterate out the uninhabited zones in a non-clunky method is also very daunting.  You still need to hand craft multiple templates that are then mixed together to make a still fairly repetitive pattern base which can be very manpower heavy, especially for a small team.

    One of the benefits to a true scale Persistent Living World is that all the servers of one rule type could easily be combined into one without too much crowding as you would iterate out starting cities and end game content.

    Realistically though I believe Pantheon will be forced to be more of a Disney Experience Game just for expediency which is kinda a bummer because I would love to see what Brad could do with a real Persistent Living World.

    • 2138 posts
    October 22, 2018 10:37 AM PDT

    As much as I want open world housing, I know that I will not be the only one to find that wonderful spot. and even though I may be the first, once I see the other house going up I will think the area is ruined- there goes the neighborhood!. Then, as I get more confident and skilled in game, I will want to be in the center of things, and I know I will not be the only one that will find that one area that is equi-distant to everywhere else (think the fire-pot room in timorous deep) and I will be inscenced that there is no room left or that devs nerfed it just the day before I discovered it. And then wonder why the devs ever listened to "those people" that demanded housing as it's just fluff and not the point of the game from a purist perspective and a waste of resources when game play and adventuring is the whole idea.

     

    Yes I have a house... but only for extra inventory space!.....and I figured out how to make smoke look like its coming out of my chimeny with torches places just so...and the trophies look nice.. and the flowers.. and that building looks like a stable for my mounts..........

     


    This post was edited by Manouk at October 22, 2018 10:38 AM PDT
    • 2752 posts
    October 22, 2018 10:37 AM PDT

    As always for me, no to instanced housing and no to open world housing that doesn't enhance/support gameplay in some way for all players (not just owners).

    Instanced housing takes lots of resources away from what could be any number of other features that would support the PvE experience and ultimately only serves to hurt the open world experience by giving players a means to hide from the server in their own private areas, making the world feel much less lively/populated. It is an entirely cosmetic feature that doesn't serve the world or core game experience at all yet is a continued tax on development and resources. There are plenty of games out there dedicated to housing/building to scratch that itch for players like that, to me it's similar to someone asking for them to put in PvP battlegrounds where the game turns into a FPS/MOBA like Overwatch. 

    • 844 posts
    October 22, 2018 10:37 AM PDT

    Having played both EQ2 and Vanguard extensively, as well as having numerous homes in both game, I do see the arguments for both.

    The instanced house were obviously unlimted in their design. I have the castle, the floating island, and a couple others. Housing in EQ2 was a game in itself technically. You could build extensively. It's like when Fallout 4 came out and added base building to Fallout 3. Players tend to spend more time in their virtual houses decorating, building, modifying, crafting, etc. They rarely are seen again in the game instances. :)

     

    But in Vanguard I could never get over the feeling of riding my griffon over the lands and across the water to my own physical house I built on a little island. Oh yeah I could have recalled to my house in a instant, but flying there was always a joy. The house was never as pretty or expansive as the EQ2 houses, I could not spend hundreds of hours decorating, building, playing with my myriad of mindless pets. But I did have some decent storage, And my friends and guildies could access some of it if they wanted.

    It's odd I still miss that experience even though Vanguard was sunset years ago.

    • 627 posts
    October 22, 2018 10:38 AM PDT
    Personally I got no interest in housing at all.

    I'd rather see the time used to build more cool dungeons, interesting quests and optimising.
    • 646 posts
    October 22, 2018 10:41 AM PDT

    Trasak said:Players become very attached to something they have dreamt up and built themselves through labor, especially if it comes at both high monetary and opportunity costs.

    I've felt far more attached to my custom WildStar housing builds than any shallow open world house I purchased in other MMOs - for exactly those reasons. In instanced, fully-realized housing, you can build whatever you dream of, dedicating countless game hours not just to the construction but the gathering of decor and in-game currency to purchase said decor.

    I built out an entire zone area - a dense, twisting jungle, canyons, caves, all around my character's crashed space ship. I use it for RP constantly and have invited many people to come explore. I will never forget my home in WildStar.


    This post was edited by Naunet at October 22, 2018 10:43 AM PDT
    • 1315 posts
    October 22, 2018 11:01 AM PDT

    @Naunet

    I bet that was pretty cool and took a lot of time.  I never picked up WildStar so I don’t have the frame of reference to appreciate how much work I bet that took or what options were available.  I meticulously decorated my first SWG house then when I accidently picked it up and stuffed everything into a combined storage I never rebuilt it and just dumped stuff on the floor.  I’ve done a bit of customization in other games but if no one else ever sees it I tend to lose interest.

    Just think though if a lot of your work got saved as a template that was then used to help populate other places in the world.  There could actually be a period of beta where we as players just build and design houses and cities that then become the fodder for the open world populating tools that either use our exact houses or just use the location nodes to generate a mixture of objects of the same class at those nodes to make something similar but different.  I have partially written a decision tree tool to basically artificially generate a lot of hand crafted content by combing small amounts of variable hand generated content.

    For the record I favor needing to place your housing in player founded cities that require a lot of people to contribute to start.  Free floating, place anywhere housing is just a mess.

    • 646 posts
    October 22, 2018 11:10 AM PDT

    Trasak said:Just think though if a lot of your work got saved as a template that was then used to help populate other places in the world.  There could actually be a period of beta where we as players just build and design houses and cities that then become the fodder for the open world populating tools that either use our exact houses or just use the location nodes to generate a mixture of objects of the same class at those nodes to make something similar but different.  I have partially written a decision tree tool to basically artificially generate a lot of hand crafted content by combing small amounts of variable hand generated content.

    While that would be cool (and a great idea for another game), I wouldn't want to front-load all of my creative juices like that. I'm always coming up with ideas! My husband constructed a plot in WildStar that was a part of a lunar surface where an enormous robot (they're known as Megadroids in the WS universe) had crashed there. He built it as a specific setting for an RP plot we were working through, where a rogue AI was making use of the Megadroid to transmit a very dangerous message into deep space. In WS housing, you can "link" decor to one another, so that when you click on the central linked decor and move it, all the other decor linked to that item move with it. He took advantage of this to be able to manipulate the arms, hands, and fingers of the robot to make it appear to move while we were roleplaying. It was super cool! And not an experience one would ever get to have with a housing system constrained by open world server requirements.

    • 2419 posts
    October 22, 2018 11:18 AM PDT

    BamBam said:I'd rather see the time used to build more cool dungeons, interesting quests and optimising.

    I agree completely.  But once those things are done, at least when it comes to the game at release, I do not see any reason why some resources could not be allocated to development of housing that can then be introduced in a later expansion.

    • 1860 posts
    October 22, 2018 11:23 AM PDT

    Put me down as one of the people who chooses not to answer the question because I feel time is better spent elsewhere.  I would rather have any number of systems other than housing.

    Some people are talking like housing could be in on release.  They have made it very clear when it is brought up in streams that any type of housing would be post release.  That is also what has been in the FAQ.  I don't expect that to change.

    • 32 posts
    October 22, 2018 11:34 AM PDT

    Instance housing is my vote.

    Open world housing just means more travel time, in that area. While it would be very cool to have open world housing, we don't presistently stay logged in, can't interact with people at our homes, and very likely won't be spending the majority of our game time in the homes.

    Instance housing allows those who want to decorate a home, have one.

    • 1479 posts
    October 22, 2018 11:38 AM PDT

    Naunet said: The pros of open-world housing often include things like "it makes you more connected to the community"; however, after being a dedicated housing enthusiast in both Rift and WildStar (games with very detailed, instanced housing), as well as participating in housing in more open-world systems, I can say with great confidence that the experience with instanced housing was better. And with NO loss to community. The community aspect is easily maintained through 1) a chat channel that spans all instanced housing zones; 2) a searchable list of all available housing plots; 3) the ability to make one's housing plot either private or public. The community will blossom automatically around it.

     

    I understand from where you went, but I really can't take seriously "Instanced housing was better" with absolutely no experience with "no instance housing". I'm not saying your arguments aren't valid, or that your experience is not real, simply that you lack references to determine what is better between two dishes withouth tasting the other.

    I started my MMO career between EQ & UO, and houses played a real big part in UO's community. Even if it ended crowded (there were no relinquish mechanic at start) because it wasn't thought forward , players created villages, guilds saves for houses and their fellow members built small houses around them, untill of course, it ended completely overcrowded.

    When I started playing MMO's with instanced housing (Anarchy online beeing the first I remember, but the housing was uncomplete when I played, you had a room but no way to fill it), it looked like it would completely fix the crowding factor, but it made it so well it simply removed any sense of group, community, and player's village. It's just a disconnected flat from any neighbourhood, that you can fill and compose at will, but it ends there.

     

    I do know that the playerbase is chaotic, constantly changing not only because of your game's success of failures, but also because word of mouth spread demotivation faster than any mechanic. And that making non instanced housing is allways a risk between crowded place and phantom village, but I think it's worth thinking of a way to make things non instanced, and not crazy like building your house next to a dungeon ala UO.

     

     

     

    It does seem, Vanguard made some significant steps in that domain, island free to buy things on, present in the world but limitless, or so. I do however not know how it would react to playerbase inflation and deflation. Were there "fixed plots" you had to buy and build a specific size house on them (FFXIV style) ? Were there "fixed parcels" allowing you to either have a big garden with a small house or a big house with a small garden ? Were there "free area" on which you build a house withouth a garden ownership, but placing it freely (meaning you could cut the room for others to build between you and your neightbours with proper placement, and thus reducing the number of houses.) ?

     

    The first problem with the crowd, is the absence of room for new players, and for that a few mechanic can easily be done :

    -First: one house per account, including guildhouse (if you're the GM, then it counts towards your house count, or guild houses will be abused for houses placeholders)

    -Second: If your subscription end, your house is removed in the few days with a monetary compensation and a recovery of all furnitures, that way you can't keep space withouth playing and subbing for the game, the least of justice. (FFXIV keeps your house for 45 days after your last entrance, so with proper timing of "free days" happening twice or thirce a year, you can basically sustain all your houses with 3  months of gametime per year...)

    -Third : Upkeep cost, because evey house include repairs, fixing things, cleaning, etc... if a house has a static cost, then keeping one will be a budget and you will have to think twice if you can manage that cost. Nothing excessive (except for supercastles or such), but enough to require you to make money at least once a week or you're bailed.

     

    With that, the game should be thought forward with a lot of housing places, if possible close to cities or upcoming villages, to create either citizen areas of capitals or new places to hang out far from thoses. But nothing completely isolated or nonsense.

    • 107 posts
    October 22, 2018 11:39 AM PDT

    zewtastic said:

    zendrel said:

    Watemper said:

    If I would have to pick..Open world housing. And I don't want designated zones for housing. I think you should be able to house in Thronefest and places like that. There would also be limited areas soo not everyone can get housing. Through expansions as more content is created inevitably with other city type areas people can go to you can also have housing there. However, only one house per account and can be shared with your other characters. 

    All in all I think you shouldn't do housing. Never saw the appeal and only ever saw it effect MMOs negatively. With instancing the world will be more vacant. With open world..and only in cities...it will be mitigated quite a bit, and atleast make cities more populated.

    I think the only type of housing that should be done are guild halls in designated areas like cities.

    Housing shouldn't be done from the start either. Very low on the list of priorities that need to be done.

    Do you want some company owning everything? Because thats how you allow small groups to corner the market on it. Then they will sell the few plots that exist for real money only options. No thanks. If you do housing it needs to be where everyone can do it thus no open world stuff.

    Did you actually read what he said?

    How would one 'company' own everything if housing is limited to one per account?

    And frankly game world designers cannot lay out a persistent world unless they do designate at least generally where some housing might be.

    Vanguard, Brads last game effectively worked this way. And it worked well.

     

    What happens is fun little farm bots come in and the race to get plots begins. Once they are all scooped up those accounts will either be sold for cash so you can actually do housing or else the plots themselves will go up on some website for literally hundreds of dollars or more. If you don't pay you wont get it because everything is already taken. If you limit the number of plots it happens easy.

    • 646 posts
    October 22, 2018 11:41 AM PDT

    MauvaisOeil said:I understand from where you went, but I really can't take seriously "Instanced housing was better" with absolutely no experience with "no instance housing". I'm not saying your arguments aren't valid, or that your experience is not real, simply that you lack references to determine what is better between two dishes withouth tasting the other.

    I have plenty of experience with non-instanced housing. Not sure where you got that I didn't. It's those contrasting experiences that directly lead to my decision that I vastly prefer instanced housing systems.

    • 696 posts
    October 22, 2018 11:55 AM PDT

    Zendrel "What happens is fun little farm bots come in and the race to get plots begins. Once they are all scooped up those accounts will either be sold for cash so you can actually do housing or else the plots themselves will go up on some website for literally hundreds of dollars or more. If you don't pay you wont get it because everything is already taken. If you limit the number of plots it happens easy."

     

    You do know that selling accounts is usually a bannable offense in Pay to play MMOs. Also, purchasing accounts is also bannable. So if that does happen..they have to advertise in game..which will then have the developer team banning those accounts. So I don't think that would happen unless they are very secretive about it. And selling houses like that will not make it secretive and the community members..like me..will report them. So I don't share your fear frankly.


    This post was edited by Watemper at October 22, 2018 11:57 AM PDT