So my perfect game would be Everquest with Ultima Online housing or SWG housing. I've played to many MMO's to count since Ultima Online beta and I can tell you that housing pays the bills. MANY people who get bored with raiding or have those 2-6 month waits till expansions release where they disappear STILL log in to refresh their house or mess with it, which means they keep their subscription active. Ultima Online still has people today who log in to keep their castles. Same with EQ. Lord of the Rings online housing owners are the reason i believe the game still had money to stay alive. The community there is great and people use their guild houses and normal houses for everything.
So with that said, Pantheon is going to have an older/slower pace (besides the hardcore...like me) community and to capatilize off that I highly suggest housing. While creating housing please make it functional and not cookie cutter. Don't make housing a hook system where small houses get 20 hooks and medium houses get 32 hooks, ect. Allow us to ensure no one house looks the same (atleast allow us to change the look of the house of the house. Colors, window design, ect. Don't have to change the entire structure, just small things. I also don't mind if they are instance vice in the open world. With this game instance makes more sense. I don't want housing to be a system that lets us port all over the world or anything that becomes game breaking so a system where you port to your house and back to where you entered only as an option. Or can only access them from main towns.
As far as housing goes, would love the guild houses to have a dedicated PVP pit area. I believe this could be a great way to add PVP to the game on PVE servers. Maybe Flagging the 1st, second, or third floor as PVP. Guild members and players could hold tournmounts for prizes ect (builds community). Example. IF a guild house had three floors, the third floor could be designed to be the watching area from above. The second floor could be designed to give both players equal obstacales to protect themselves (or teams) and then let them go to town in organized combat. Be fun to watch and be great way to keep the lights on when people are all geared up with the best of the best items. Ultima online had players who ran these types of events 2-3 times a week for gold prices or rare items ect. They also setup their houses to do auctions selling off rare items to members of the crowd (was pretty amazing to watch what items came up).
My point is housing can really bring in some funds for VR. It allows you to not have to constantly make the next big raid to keep players happy all the time. There needs to be some content besides tradeskills to keep people entiertained when there are no raids. Everquest turned into a game (me being one of them) where I only logged on 30 minutes before raid time. But the raids were so amazing it kept me coming back. Ultima online kept me coming back because of all the side content you could do, housing, taming, racing, ect. If you marry these up you can keep us older folks online for a long time and maybe show some of these younger players what it was like back then and why it was so fun...go retro! You have to remember that people logged into EQ during the early stages because that was the only way to talk to them without getting their phone number. Now with text/discord/1000 other ways to communicate we have to find ways to keep people logged in for something other then to talk to their friends.
Just some other suggestions that I'd like to see added to the game, that wouldnt break the vision of VR of having a slower paced harder game.
Gambling. Not loot boxes. Actual games/gambling. A Pantheon style poker/blackjack game. Have a bar/saloon/whatever in all major towns with tables people can sit at and gamble their in-game gold or whatever (not real life cash). People will get lost for hours just trying to double their money or win what they loss back. Ect. Have small casinos with different options. Allow these to be house add ons you can make so guilds/players can hold tourneyments. Think of /Gems. Keep people entertained between pulls ect. Now amplify that to keep people entertained when their friends arent online waiting for a group that night or raid ect. VR can also hold sponsored tournies that would be easy to run and winner gets something cool (special title or something). Could be a system the new community manager to organize:) For anyone playing Red Dead Redemption 2...you walk into a saloon and end up spending 2 hours playing poker. These side games WORK. Can add leadership boards, ect. Can become endless.
Special in-game mechanic that allows to collect special locations. You are making a HUGE amazing world where it takes a lot to explore. Why not use that to your advantage. Hide special markers all over the world that people need to click on to "collect". When someone collects all of them they get a special title or whatever you feel. Don't make all the points stagnant. Make them only appear during night or once a week or super rare ones once a month. This will make it a long-term hobby for people. Its easy to implement because its like a rare spawn every 3 days. Just make a special location do the samething. Can also make these guild related....having these spots require a small raid force having to clear the area and keep the mobs back while people discover the spot (making it a legit raid target). Make it so you have to collect the spots in a special order so people can't just randomly be there and collect it giving it more challenge. This will force people to group up together to organize collection groups. Hence keeping the grouping mentality going strong.
Mount racing. Same as above. Can make this a progression system that allows you to gain experience for your mount. Adding colors/items like bridles or what not. Maybe a way to unlock a second person being able to ride on the mount.
My piont is...add EASY system in the game that take little upkeep on your end (housing obvsiouly being the hardest for VR to upkeep). But many of these systems you just have to put in place and then the community will do the rest and even surprise you with the crazy stuff they come up with.
Hope people /sign this. Especially the ones that have experienced in other games and know that I am speaking truth, that these systems work. I'm all about making a game that is basically what we all really wanted in the spiritual successor of EQ, but nothing wrong with using what we have all learned over the past 20 years to add some spice to our new home:)
Name Pending...:)
I agree that having good housing system will be a big plus.
I am referring to the ability to decorate and customize - I disagree with having pvp areas for the same reason I don't want crafting areas in houses.
We want people spending time and in-game money on housing and house-related items but we do not want them spending *too* much time in the houses. It makes the world emptier.
The best housing system I've seen in a game that I've played is in Archeage. The housing in that was phenomenal. You could grow trees and plants and such for crafting, and you could set up crafting stations and such in it. It also allowed for more storage, and if you got a good enough house you could port to it (with a long cooldown). In that game, there were people who had 15+ houses just for the benefits that having them gave. The drawback was you paid taxes on houses, with the first three being at a reduced cost and any after that costing more taxes.
dorotea said:I am referring to the ability to decorate and customize - I disagree with having pvp areas for the same reason I don't want crafting areas in houses.
We want people spending time and in-game money on housing and house-related items but we do not want them spending *too* much time in the houses. It makes the world emptier.
I disagree with this statement. If you make houses just a cosmetic thing then once someone decorates their house then what is the incentive to log on? I'm ok with no crafting stations but a storage area along with activities to do inside the house like PVP or a conference area to have guild meetings ect will boost the amount of people in the world (people being online traveling from cities to houses ect). This is for long term activities. If houses don't have anything to do besides decorate and storage then people will continue to do what I would like to prevent, logging in only to raid or maybe group with their friends for short periods during the day. THAT will make the world not just seem empty but actually BE empty. Having many people online messing in housing will help maintain the population as a whole.
My housing experence is pretty much limited to Vanguard. I built them as a profession, made decorations and furnature, and all kinds of ****. We built a guild hall. Is was a massive endevor and we loved the hell out of it, but other then decorating, displaying a few trophies, and having some guild chests..... they were not functional. It was just a really big house.
I can see not wanting craft stations in houses, though I could see a strong argument for them as well. However, I would absolutly want to be able to have them in guild halls. They are suppose to be a nexus of guild activity, and crafting is usualy a big part of that. There could be hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of game potential just fully expanding and upgrading a guild hall. Unlocking different merchants, building crafting stations, holding PVP tourniments..... We had a cove next to ours that we would park our boats in. The potential of modular expansions for guild halls could be amazing and make guilds and the guild hall a vibrant nexus of activity for not only the guild, but possibly surrounding houseing and adventuring areas near by.
Stuff I always want in vangard: Armor and Weapon display racks that actually show off the armor. Expecially for the armor sets you outgrew but spent a lot of time in (Swamp Armor, Trengal Keep, others). Crafting stations (house and/or Guild hall) and storage areas that link to them so you don't have to swap out 200 items when your going on a crafting binge, then empty all that **** back into a storage box when your done. Could possibley make it so only items use in that craft could be stored there (Think pantry for cooking, lumber rack for carpenters, so on).
I was chatting with one of my Vanguard buddies yesterday. We though it would be awesome to have some kind of moble craft station (think chuck wagon kind of thing) that could be set up on site when waiting for a raid spawn or before a big whatever. Gather at the site, make expendibles, repair gear, get the whole troop ready for action. Hell, just unlocking (finding recipes, components, so on) to make such a thing could be yet another major endevor. Or maybe not major, but deffently something that a guild could pursue and sink time and resources into.