The Player Housing Manifesto

Ack! No! No taxes! No rent! No upkeep! No negative progress, please. I don't want anything I own to have a bleeding cost associated with it, such that if I don't log in and work to maintain it, it could deteriorate and disappear. Always move progress up, never down. Don't force me to reinforce my gains, achievements and creations. Don't ask players to re-earn their achievements and don't take away their stuff if they don't keep claiming it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I think it's clear the Devs made the MASSIVE reduction in prestige costs as an attempt to try to appease those people who've always wanted personal housing for this game. That reduction made it feasible for people to cobble together their own "one-person SG bases" if they really wanted to. It may have been the Devs' "answer" to players' desires for personal housing, but it really was a "less than ideal compromise" than something that was ever "perfectly viable".

Frankly it's always had "half-baked" written all over it.

Actually, I do partially agree with you. I think, with all of the doors in the game, that it is possible to assign a door as person's residence so that it is part of the game world. However, once you click on the door and are "allowed in", then it is instanced the way a house or an apartment is in the real world.

SG's require you to pay "taxes" to keep them up. I think to prevent housing from being taken up by inactive players, there should be SOMETHING required to keep it if not taxes.

As for SG bases... they are absolutely not a substitute for player housing. The only way to have your own "private" space is if you choose not to belong to an actual SG. The two should be separate and one should not be forced to give up being part of a player community in order to have your own space. As for furniture for my "room" in an SG, I want more than a cot or rug to sleep on.

"Taken up?" This is a virtual world which lives on an array of hard drives. Who cares if the player is inactive or not? They're not taking up a "desirable" apartment or bit of land. They're taking up what would likely be a small description (item 17328, location x,y,z, color #####/#####, item, etc.)

See my Guides and Tutorials

The thing is, preventing inactive players from "occupying" a house is only necessary if the demand for houses outweighs the supply. With Instanced housing there is an effectively unlimited supply of houses for people to use*. As you say it makes sense to allow people to assign their house to a particular door in the game world but there is no reason not to allow multiple people to use the same door. If the housing is instanced all that happens is that you click on the door and get transported to your house. In the extremely rare event that two people select the same door and are in a position to enter either character's house (which would probably require them to be on the same team) or if a mission is assigned to the door of your house the game simply pops up a dialog box to allow you to select what to enter (similar to the SG group portal at the moment)

Greg's rational for having taxes on property makes a lot of sense in a situation where housing is a limited commodity. He also makes some decent arguments for why housing should be a limited commodity. The thing is, I don't believe that those arguments apply to City of Heroes. Here are my counter-points:

1. The Costume Creator. This is one of the major selling points of the game, unlike a lot of other MMOs your appearance and your ability are separated. As such people invest a lot of thought into their character's appearance and how it reflects their personality. Houses are, essentially, an extension of that and as such they should be readily available to anyone who wants to make the effort to set it up.

2. It doesn't make sense in context. Ultima Online was set in a medieval fantasy world. As such most buildings are rather small and there is a large quantity of undeveloped land for people to build houses on. City of Heroes is set in a modern metropolis and as such there is a distinct lack of land for people to build on but there are a lot of very large apartment buildings. Realistically most of our heroes who actually live in the city have a small apartment in one of those buildings. As such the most sensible way to implement housing is to have the house itself be instanced but allow the player to select a door in the city to be the "main entrance". Since most of the available doors are apartment buildings anyway it makes perfect sense for them to be shared.

3. Continuing a bit form number 2, in order to make houses sensible as a limited commodity they really need to have a real world presence that extends beyond "behind this door". With the current layout there isn't really any room for a significant number of "real world" houses. The devs would need to redesign specific zones (or introduce new ones) that were setup to accommodate this. They could do it but the houses would still end up in their own special area so you don't really get the social benefits of it.

Overall I think instanced housing makes a lot more sense and if done that way there is no need to take houses away from inactive players.


*Ok, they technically use up hard drive space, but even if the devs implement a house editor similar to the base editor the actual "cost" in terms of hard drive space should not be that excessive, hard drive space is pretty cheap these days.