SWTOR Goes F2P in the Fall

[Amaron]

Also the voice actor thing is worse than you think - they have to have a set of them for every language they translate the game into! Didn't really occur to me until I ran across the French version of the world event trailer that came out today.

I don't really see why they have to do that.  You don't have to understand voice acting to enjoy it.  The reason simple text suffers is stuff like emotion/tone/etc in the first place.  That sort of thing is easy to pick up from a foreign language with subtitles.  Not to mention a cheap localization with poor acting is a far worse choice.

[Count Nerfedalot]

If I could just decorate my SWTOR ship, I'd be pretty content.

But in terms of housing, SWTOR has no more need for it than WoW does, so I didn't miss it.

This principle, repeated ad nauseum on thousands of design decisions, is why nobody will dethrone WoW until it dies of its own (whether that is of old age, neglect, or incompetence remains to be seen).

[Mrbloodworth]

People like a place to put Trophies. Even if that Trophy is a Ewok toenail, or not even a Trophy.

I ran a small museum of oddities in SWG.

[Mattemeo]

Were a poll taken on the matter, I highly doubt the number of WoW players who didn't want some form of housing or guildhall would outnumber those who did.

[Musashi]

I have never met a version of housing I found even remotely compelling.  At the end of the day, I'm not visiting your 'house.'  And if you want to visit mine, I think you're kind of weird.

[Rendakor]

EQ2's housing worked because there was a gameplay mechanic tied to housing; if you wanted to buy something from a player (assuming that player had a house set up properly) you could go to their house and purchase it directly to avoid a 10-40% broker fee. For cheap mats or low level stuff you would just use the broker, but if you were buying a Master or a couple end-tier rare harvests, it was worth the walk to save a bunch of plat. And because of that, you had an incentive to decorate your house because other people would actually see it.

[Mrbloodworth]

I have never met a version of housing I found even remotely compelling.  At the end of the day, I'm not visiting your 'house.'  And if you want to visit mine, I think you're kind of weird.

Your funny looking!

[Ingmar]

I have never met a version of housing I found even remotely compelling.  At the end of the day, I'm not visiting your 'house.'  And if you want to visit mine, I think you're kind of weird.

I'm not decorating it for you.

I mean shit, I decorated all my houses in Skyrim.

[shiznitz]

I just filled my EQ2 house randomly with all the random crap I found.  It ended up like some weird fantasy zoo.

[Numtini]

I don't find housing compelling unless its in the real world. I still think it's possible to manage that with pre-set plots. AC did and it was nice to be wandering about and find a little settlement.

[Sjofn]

But in terms of housing, SWTOR has no more need for it than WoW does, so I didn't miss it.

I missed this before but:

I don't need housing. In fact, I prefer the game not need housing. I just like a space to call mine that I get to decorate however I feel like.

[Count Nerfedalot]

Housing is one of the few mechanisms that can both provide something to do other than quest/combat grind AND gives the player something they can make uniquely theirs. It makes the game more worldy, and makes the gameworld more interactive and even sticky for those even remotely involved with it. ANY online RPG hoping to collect subscriptions should have it (and appearance slots) and WoW's lack of it might be its biggest weak spot.

[01101010]

EQ2's housing worked because there was a gameplay mechanic tied to housing; if you wanted to buy something from a player (assuming that player had a house set up properly) you could go to their house and purchase it directly to avoid a 10-40% broker fee. For cheap mats or low level stuff you would just use the broker, but if you were buying a Master or a couple end-tier rare harvests, it was worth the walk to save a bunch of plat. And because of that, you had an incentive to decorate your house because other people would actually see it.

This is what I was getting at. Housing had a purpose or better yet a function. Shopping around by zoning into people's rooms was cool.

[Raknor]

EQ2's housing worked because there was a gameplay mechanic tied to housing; if you wanted to buy something from a player (assuming that player had a house set up properly) you could go to their house and purchase it directly to avoid a 10-40% broker fee. For cheap mats or low level stuff you would just use the broker, but if you were buying a Master or a couple end-tier rare harvests, it was worth the walk to save a bunch of plat. And because of that, you had an incentive to decorate your house because other people would actually see it.

This is what I was getting at. Housing had a purpose or better yet a function. Shopping around by zoning into people's rooms was cool.

Had girl on our SWG server who made her money by being an interior decorator. She'd fly from planet to planet buying crap from other people and bring it back to your house and set it up. I have to admit, I tossed her some credits and was very happy to do so. I certainly didn't have the attention span for it.

[Amaron]

I have never met a version of housing I found even remotely compelling.  At the end of the day, I'm not visiting your 'house.'  And if you want to visit mine, I think you're kind of weird.

SWTOR could easily solve that though.  Simply put in a flashpoint where you start on someone's ship.  They could create a whole mechanic of group content involving ship travel.

[Malakili]

Had girl on our SWG server who made her money by being an interior decorator. She'd fly from planet to planet buying crap from other people and bring it back to your house and set it up. I have to admit, I tossed her some credits and was very happy to do so. I certainly didn't have the attention span for it.

This sort of thing is what I imagined the MMO genre was going to be all about.  Emergent stuff based on the world just being.  But instead in turned into a loot treadmill genre 

[Paelos]

Part of the problem is that the developers of these "successful" MMOs are of the hardcore raiding ilk. A lot of the WoW developers are cut from that mold. That's why it took them so long to understand that people REALLY wanted appearance tabs.

They simply don't see value in cosmetic items, and the playerbase suffers for it until they get bitchslapped with facts or start losing cash. They only cared about the grind, the raids, the gear, and the "challenge" of the game. That's what they do, so that's what they assume all people do.

[Musashi]

You know who likes to play house?  My two year old niece.  That's who.  Just sayin'.

DIKU is a game.  It's set in a world, sure.  But you do not need to fuck it up with your sandbox worldiness in order to play.  If you want that, it's fine.  I really don't have a problem.  There are programs you can execute on your computer that will transport you to such a place.  But you're not playing a game.  You're participating in a social experiment.  There's nothing inherently wrong with that.  But I'm not going to apologize for not wanting to participate. 

Now you can say all you want about how DIKU games reward narcissism, schadenfreude, and general asshattery.  But it's a separate argument from why you've got to foist your sandbox into it.

So why are we so hell bent on co-mingling these two obviously separate objectives?  Honest question.  I really don't get why that is in any way advantageous.  We're talking about two general demographics that pretty much don't even like or care  about each other.

TL;DR:  When Sandbox meets DIKU we get half-baked housing, and nobody wins.  Every goddamn time.

[Ingmar]

What the hell dude? It's housing. It isn't turning shit into a sandbox any more than cosmetic gear is. I don't even like sandbox MMOs.

[Musashi]

What do I win with housing?

[Ingmar]

I dunno, it's like turning up to someone complaining about not being able to jump in GW1 and saying KEEP YOUR PLATFORMING OUT OF MY GAME.

Your preferred method of play (which is also my preferred method of play or at least pretty close, I infer here) is not threatened by having some extra stickiness for people who are so inclined to mess around with in their downtime between normal DIKU achiever events. I mean if we were talking about turning this into SWG 2 and suddenly I have to RP with skanky club dancers to heal my character or whatever else people hold up as examples of what was "good" about SWG, then I'd be right there with you, but we're talking about a subsystem that is already halfway in the game (we have the 'house', just not the modularity) and wouldn't affect you in any way that I can see.

[Lantyssa]

I'm about as fan-girl as one can get (PS - Raph, where are you hiding!?!) for SWG and sandboxes, and I don't advocate that extreme, either.  There's room for both.

[Musashi]

No I'm with you.  It doesn't hurt me directly.  But indirectly, the time spent developing such things is wasted time, at least for players of games like me (and you).  It's not that I object to their existence.  It's just that I seriously wonder why we're so sure that these two things should go together.  And I'm talking about emergent sandbox world shaping on one extreme or the other, and a game of any type.  Of course they CAN go together.  But why?  For all practical purposes they don't go together WELL no matter what extremes we're talking about in either case.  Hell, a guy on this very page is insistent that ALL mmo's should have housing because why not?  Because you can't just shit out a housing system for an MMO in an afternoon.

So if you've decided to make a world, then sure you need things like housing.  But if you've decided to make a game, then you'd be best served by relegating things like that.  Because they don't contribute to stickiness by definition.  They don't make the game better just for existing.  And for the majority of players who don't troll game forums like this, I suggest they're - how do you say - 'doo doo.'

[Ingmar]

They just need to give dungeon end bosses housing decoration drops that we can sell! Boom, everyone's happy.

[Musashi]

I'm still not going to your house, damnit!

 

[Evildrider]

I'm still not going to your house, damnit!

 

He really wants you in his house...  I bet the offers of candy or ice cream are coming up next.  

[Ingmar]

I have a protocol droid that is programmed to serve you, as it likes to say every time I walk past it.

[Tannhauser]

Housing was first and best with UO.  Oh and boats too.  My house was part of the world, not cordoned off into a dead zone.   I ran a successful shovel selling business.  I had to kill griefers to keep my customers safe.  I even had a pet giant trapped in my guildhouse.

Put housing in the 'real world'.  Let each account have a plot.  Let better/larger plots be boss drops, AH purchases, even real world cash. Let a guild buy several adjacent plots to make a guild town.  Spread them out and  weave them into the world.  You could have housing in Elwynn, Westfall and other 'civilized' zones and not in end of game zones.  This would keep the leveling zones somewhat populated at least with home owners.

Put some in pvp zones, maybe at a discount.  Let us buy and sell to our neighbors.  Let us craft items in our home and sell them at our door.  Make a lived in world again.   The MMO amusement park ride era is played out.  Time for some good old fashioned housing and lag!

[Paelos]

Housing does something that all MMOG creators want people to do. Waste time on bullshit that has nothing to do with the standard treadmill.

People have to have something "to do" when they log into these games. Achievements are just as stupid as housing trophies, but they exist, and they feed a certain percentage of players who enjoy killing things on one leg when the moon is full because it's on the list.

[Musashi]

But it only does that for the very small fraction of the player-base who care to fiddle with it.  In games of yore, that percentage was higher by virtue of being smaller and wholly populated by a different demographic.

In modern AAA terms that logic has no foothold outside of the few nostalgic fanboys/girls left here on this forum and others like it.

Or to put it in your terms, though fiddling with housing by your standards is very much something to do when you log in, by most people's standards it is not even worth logging in for.  It's just a relic from a distant time when we thought that immersion translated to more meaningful gameplay.  It does not, sir.  Gameplay still has to be meaningful on its own merits, and we can all agree that is a very hard thing to accomplish.  So if you're making a game, I say focus on the game.

If I want to jerk off to my own awesomeness, I can do it on the Armory.  Otherwise give me something to log in and do that contributes to the game in a meaningful way.  If that means that the game falls on a less worldly location on the continuum, then them's the brakes.

[palmer_eldritch]

Plenty of EQ2 players enjoyed fiddling with their houses in my experience, even though the game is very much diku and not sandbox. A lot of the coolest house items are rewards from quests or items you collect in dungeons and you'd place them in your house as status symbols. Simply owning a large house was also a status symbol. This seems to matter to people even when nobody else sees the house.

A lot of the same players also cared a lot about owning rare and cool mounts or clothes, even when these made no difference to their stats. I'm talking about hardcore raiders, not roleplayers.

Players also seemed to care a lot about owning a massive guild hall, decorated with trophies from stuff they had done in the outside world. Far from being an alternative to the game of killing and looting, it's seen as a sign that the guild is good at that game.

Letting players have visible evidence of their achievements, whether it's a statue of a demon they've killed or a flaming sword, doesn't seem to detract from the game in my experience. And it seems to be popular.

[Paelos]

But it only does that for the very small fraction of the player-base who care to fiddle with it.

Based on what metric exactly? I'll save you the trouble of trying to guess, you don't know anymore than we do.

Right now people in WoW are collecting pets en masse to get pet battles going. That's a completely ancillary part of the game that has nothing to do with anything, and yet it's coming across as a pretty huge factor in the economy. Just like people clamoring for transmogrification, and the fact they are putting in Challenge Mode gear models just for people to show off.

Imagine them adding housing and achievments/trophies like that. People love visual representations of their achievements. Housing can provide that in addition to filling a social/decorator niche.

[UnSub]

MMOs: Trying to cater to a fan base with a wide variety of different likes and dislikes is hard.

A better player housing system wouldn't have prevented what is happening to SWOR.

[El Gallo]

I love fiddling with houses, and I am all about farming billions of hours for cosmetic crap.  On the other hand, I like having lots of people around in cities rather than hiding away in little instances.  Housing was great in UO but I don't think it'll ever work nearly that well in a group-pve-oriented mmo.

[Musashi]

The point I'm making is that if WoW had, say, EQ2's level of polish and game-play, then nobody cares.  It's not chicken and egg, man.  The game parts come first.  WoW's mechanics are polished to the point that they've gotten boring and been revamped like three times.  It's not even an argument that WoW, of all games, has some cash lying around to throw at ancillary shit.  Of course they do.  But as far as I'm concerned that only furthers the point that you shouldn't even be thinking about that shit if you're making a game and not a sandbox.

Let's take it away from MMOs, since apparently taking the worldy bits out of them is touching people in a bad place.

Who's still playing Spore?  Anyone?  I would describe the emergent innovation of that game as a word like, oh i donno, mind-blowing.  But when I played the actual game, it sucked.  Total crap.  I haven't had it even installed since like a month after it came out.

Will I fiddle with bullshit if the game is great?  Sure, for a few minutes.  I admit that others may be more inclined.  But I am not the exception, here.  Us being the squeaky wheel clamoring for more muddying of the game-play waters makes me cross-eyed.  It just does not compute.