player-housing
Latest
The Daily Grind: Is player housing overdue in WoW
It seems that while Blizzard is doing a good job of making sure that there's more than enough raiding content out there to satisfy the folks who have gotten to endgame. But what about those folks who are just enjoying the ride, and very slowly and casually getting there, or who have just joined? As our sister site, WoW Insider pointed out, unless you have The Burning Crusade installed, there's really very little for you in the new content patch at all. Enter the easy way for Blizzard to fix this: guild or player housing. Blizzard has mentioned adding it before, but it has yet to materialize. What do you think? Is player or guild housing overdue in World of Warcraft? Do you think adding another layer like that might help to retain members, giving them something else to do, as well as giving the game a bit more of a gold-sink?
We built this city: Age of Conan's constructible PvP city system previewed
During the week of GDC we talked briefly about the mounted combat in Age of Conan, part of the demo run for us by Gaute Godager. There was a great deal more to the demo, though, content very much worth talking about. The event started by reshashing the game's starting point, your rise from slave to adventurer in the wake of a ship wreck. We've discussed that experience, both in our own coverage of the game and in reference to work done by other sites. Probably the most interesting element of the demo, though, was the so-far little seen guild and guild city elements. Essentially a sort of RTS-lite element plopped down in the dead center of the game's endgame PvP, Age of Conan's city construction takes the crafting and housing elements we've seen in other games and explodes them out in some interesting directions. Read on for details on this new way of tackling a well-known game system.%Gallery-16341%
Player housing revisited, Blizzard still not interested
Of all the recurring topics Blizzard faces on the forums, player housing might be the most recurring-- since many other MMOs are more than happy to offer customizable spaces to their players in the game world, a lot of players continually ask Blizzard why they haven't. And the answer is only partially unclear: as you might expect, Blizzard isn't interested in doing something if they can't do it better than everyone else, and at this point they just haven't figured out exactly how to do it their own polished way.But in its current iteration on the forums, there's a bit of a surprise: many players don't care about player housing in the first place. As Drysc says, "support is not widespread," and considering everything that Blizzard is working on, there's no way they're going to jump into something as big as player housing without having a large portion of the player base behind them.Then again, players are always in favor of customizing their characters-- look at the hairstyles coming up in the next expansion. If Blizzard can figure out a way to give players a customizable space that was both great looking and easy to customize-- something players could show off to each other and store achievements in-- then there's no doubt that most players would probably jump at the chance.
Official guide to new Star Wars Galaxies housing options
Last week's Friday Feature on the official Star Wars Galaxies site is all about the new player housing item placement options coming in Chapter 8. In addition to moving objects in their houses back and forth, up and down, players can now slant things side to side with new pitch/roll/yaw commands. There are also new options to 'copy' placement instructions, making it easy to place a large group of items at the same height or having the same orientation.What's especially interesting is that some of these new abilities have to be earned by completing collection quests. They don't outline details of which collections quests are involved, but a number of new space-based concepts are slated for introduction in the upcoming content update.
The Daily Grind: Home sweet home
In all the years we've played online games, one of the things that many of us have had some disagreement about the real use of was that of player housing. Some of us don't really care for it, equating having to bother with a space like that to playing The Sims Online. Others of us liked the idea, thinking it's a great way to show off our personal achievements and house things so we don't have to carry them around, if nothing more. In some games like EverQuest II, being a game veteran (or for that matter, having played the original EverQuest) can land you some extra goodies for your house. In games like Second Life player housing takes on a whole new meaning with people wheeling and dealing in land deals with one another. As for me, I always wanted a house in WoW, but that was largely to show off personal sets of armor that I'd collected from running both normal and raid instances to death. I also figured it would be nice to have a small cupboard somewhere that I used to toss in mementos of adventures I'd been on that I simply didn't need anymore. Blizzard has met the desires of players like me slightly with the creation of Guild banks -- thus allowing me to off-load all the bags I made for new people and make more room in my bank. But for those not in a guild, there still remains no real place to house all those bits and baubles without taking up valuable personal bank space, or having to go through the hassle of starting a guild just to get the extra room. So today we ask you to join in the discussion we've been having for some time. Do you think that player housing is just a form of mini-game or time sink for trophy hunters, or do you like the idea of having a place to show off the stuff you've gathered together on your travels in your favorite world? Are you one of the many who have a player house? If so, what kinds of things do you do with yours? Are there any games that really need to incorporate player housing that don't currently have it?
LotRO player creates excellent housing database
The Lord of the Rings Online forum regular Rainwhisper embarked on an ambitious project to put together a website that would catalog floor plans, decorations, and ambient music for LotRO housing. With the help of fellow players on the forums, Rainwhisper succeeded!The site is hosted by the Dawnsong Explorers kinship of the Windfola server. It's an excellent resource. There's a spreadsheet-style list of all the housing items that players can make or acquire. There are floor plans for the different types of houses. You can also check out pictures of the decorations. As far as we can tell the site's listings are complete or very close to it.Rainwhisper and any other contributors will have quite a bit more work on their hands when Book 12 comes out but if their success with the site so far is any indication, that won't be a problem!
Details on Book 12's player housing updates
So here's a scenario for you: you buy a house for your character in The Lord of the Rings Online. How exciting! You check it out; it looks good, if a bit sparse. You buy all sorts of decorations to solve the sparseness problem -- a chair, a table, a painting or two, some plants, and so on. You set up a dinner table and put a chair at its head, but the chair is facing the wrong way, and you can't turn it.That sucks, doesn't it? But wait; there's hope!Book 12 will address that and many other housing complaints and requests. We know this because a Turbine developer who goes by the alias DangerDan told fans pretty much every thing there is to know about the coming changes to Middle-earth's sprawling suburbs.Rotatable placements? Check. Sharing your house with all the other characters on your account? Check. A way to find out the name of your next-door neighbor? Also check. Deed-based trophies and other new kinds of decorations? Also also check. Your very own palantír for the living room TV stand? Not yet, but here's to hoping.[Via LotRO Life]
LotRO downtime today for Book 11 Patch 1
Book 11 provided a huge chunk of content for Lord of the Rings Online players. Player housing, Balrog raids, the Harvest Festival, revamps to the Lore-master and Burglar classes, the introduction of Gollum, the list goes on. And with every fat patch comes a swarm of bugs that make it to the Live servers.Today, Turbine is stomping on a number of those bug with Book 11 Patch 1. Servers are down from 7am - 1p EST while the new patch is implemented on the Live servers. Along with usual pathing problems, stability adjustments and mob AI tweaks, fixes include DirextX 10 support coming out of beta, fixes to the Hooks in housing used to place decorations and nerfing some Conjunctions used in Player vs Monster Player combat.For a complete list of patch notes, check out LotRO's Lorebook wiki.
Stuffing more stuff into your LoTRo player housing. Literally.
One of the things I love the most about writing for Massively and WoW Insider is that I get incredible exposure to what is going on in the MMO world and the ideas that come from the brilliance of the people who make these games we love so much. Some ideas are "me too" ideas that hopscotch from one game to another to another. I think it's safe to say that player housing is one of those. Lots of games have had it, Lord of the Rings recently introduced it, and I think there's a chance World of Warcraft may follow suit in the not-so-distant future to some extent. The problem with player housing -- from my experience -- is that you never have enough "stuff" to fill your home. I remember a few Everquest 2 homes I toured that were 98% candles, and others that resembled rat mazes of bookshelves simply because there was nothing more interesting to do with the virtual real estate.Turbine sure came up with a winner of an idea though... a taxidermist! Lotrolife.com has published a great article about the taxidermy vendor in Bree near the Vault-Keeper. The premise is simple. Animals now have a chance of dropping a rare undamaged hide when you kill them. If you get one of these hides, you can take it to the taxidermy vendor and get it stuffed into an item you can display in your home! In my opinion, this idea has limitless potential for future development. The undamaged skins are rare drops now, but what about rare creatures? Will they (or should they) always drop a skin? Wouldn't it be cool to have a trophy in your virtual living room of an especially difficult or rare encounter? In my opinion this is a brilliant way to allow players to decorate their homes without needing to pick up a tradeskill or spend a ton of money on player-crafted items.
Jeffrey Steefel on all things Book 11
Tentonhammer have got a great interview up on their site with the executive producer of Lord of the Rings Online, Jeffrey Steefel, discussing all things Book 11. (LotRO Books are roughly equivalent to major content patches in other MMOs)A lot of the new content in the update is discussed, ranging from the three-piece, 12-man Balrog raids, to... usable cowbell & bagpipe musical instruments. Blue Öyster Cult would be proud. It also features player characters first encounter with the wonderfully crazy Gollum, with promises that he'll play a major role in the LotRO storyline -- although what kind of role is still being kept under wraps, it's probably not a wild guess to assume he'll be causing a lot of trouble. Nassty hobbitses!Player housing (covered just a few days ago by us) is discussed too. It's a strange -- risky? -- move incorporating player housing into a patch, rather than an expansion pack or, as in certain popular other MMOs, not at all -- yet Jeff comes across as enthusiastic about the subject, and Turbine appear to have thought it through carefully. He also does everything except say "there will be an expansion!" without ... actually saying it. But we all know it's coming, amiright?Book 11 also included some love for the Loremaster & Minstrel classes, the latter of which sorely needed some outside of healing.The interview is three pages long, and definitely worth a read if you're a LotRO fan.
Home on the Barrens
Ever since I first explored Stormwind and saw that huge instance portal behind bars in the Canal District, I've been waiting for the day that housing would be added to WoW. Oddly enough, I'm not the only one wishing we had a place to call our own. Anthony on Idle Chatter says that player housing has worked well in LotRO and SWG, and wants to see it implemented into WoW. He brings up the instanced housing districts as an idea, an idea that makes a huge amount of sense, considering the instance portals are already set up. He proposes that there are two solutions to the housing issue, guild housing and player housing. In this scenario each would be an alternative spot to hearth to, and in the case of the guild housing, one would be able to read the Trade Channel within your dwelling.As much as I love the idea of creating my own house for my characters, the one thing I noticed about the housing in EQII for instance that I did not like was the solitude. I much prefer the supergroup base concept from City of Heroes, where more than one person can enjoy it. In my mind, I would love to see guild housing with real world locations, so that much like Anarchy Online, the PvP element comes in and you can siege an opposing faction's guild lair. Wouldn't it add an additional element of risk to know that when you flag for PvP your guild hall is flagged as well? There is a lot that can be done beyond the traditional "this is where I keep my stuff, and those trophies no one will ever see" sort of housing concept. What good is a trophy if you can't show it off to passersby?
LotRO housing won't be barren forever
Ever since Turbine dropped the Book 11 update to Lord of the Rings Online, much of the attention usually focused on new content as been siphoned away in discussions about the game's new, and admittedly flawed, housing system. Though players continue to be excited about the prospect of filling their homes with exotic goods, a common sentiment seems to be that though the inside of the houses are fantastic, the instanced neighborhoods in which they reside are... sparse. Like a new suburban development, these neighborhoods are immaculately trimmed and utterly, unsatisfyingly barren.Never let it be said that Turbine isn't mindful of their fans. Forum moderator Scenario was there with a quick reply. To wit, "As housing receives continued exposure, we will be looking over our metrics and seeing how much more we can add while still providing an environment that performs adequately (so far we don't have anything to worry about but we've never instanced landscape in this fashion before, so we wanted to be cautious at first). At the soonest, you may see some new NPCs added to neighborhoods in Book 12 - but I make no guarantees!"We can't fault them for wanting to be cautious, but we want more surly dwarf milkmen! But anyway, there's your answer.
More LotRO house brokers added to meet demand
Following Book 11's update and the addition of player housing, the allure of one's own Hobbit-hole or sturdy Dwarven lodging has brought droves of people to the brokers -- so much so, in fact, that Turbine has made a post on their official Lord of the Rings Online forums to say that there will be a few more brokers on the way.The extra auctioneers will be showing up to assist their overburdened co-workers in Bree-land, The Shire, and both the Dwarven and Elvish regions of Ered Luin homesteads. However, take note that these guys are temps -- the post states that they "may depart at any time" -- so it is likely that once demand dies down, they will be out of a job. Click below to read Turbine's post and find out the exact locations for the brokers.
LotRO servers busy after Book 11 rolls out
While server populations remained relatively normal in the first hour or so after Book 11: Defenders of Eriador, rolled out today, this evening is painting quite a different picture. All of the servers are busy this-evening, and the Brandywine, Elendilmir, Silverlode and Landroval servers are particularly busy, with logon queues for would-be adventurers. The OOC and Advice channels are full of chatter and questions about the new Player housing. Where it is, how to get it, what it's all about. Comparatively few players seem to have checked out the Lorebook's Housing category, particularly there are helpful maps identifying the location of the four housing zones: Bree-lands Homesteads, The Shire Homesteads, Falathlorn Homesteads, and Thorin's Hall Homesteads. Each entry links to details about the features of each property in the Homestead group. Check out our Book 11 tips and Known issues, and take up arms against the Witch King!
Useful tips for Book 11
As Lord of the Rings Online players happily patch away in anticipation of buying housing, summoning their new stealth Lynx or gearing up to take down a Balrog, we at Massively wanted to provide you with a few tips and links to help you get started. Can't find the instance portals leading to the new Housing Neighborhoods? Female Gamer has screenshots of the where each Housing instance is on the map for all four racial areas. Eight more Housing Brokers, in addition to the ones in front of the Housing Instance portals, will be temporarily available to help people buy property. Check here for a list of where to find them. You cannot "hold" a house for a friend by buying it and then releasing it. Releasing a house starts a 24 hour timer before that residence is available for sale again. The Epic story for Book 11, 'Prisoner of the Free Peoples', starts where Book 10 ended, with Calenglad on the island of Tinnudir in Evendim. And don't worry if you don't get the residence you want. A new neighborhood instance is spawned as soon as the current one is sold out.
LotRO down for update to book 11
Lord of the Rings Online is offline as of now (6AM ET) for an update to the new Book 11, Defenders of Eriador. There are updates to Minstrels and Lore-masters, player housing, a Balrog and more in this new update. All things being equal, LotRO is set to return around Noon ET. If you're looking for something to while away the hours, check out some of our other great content, read the patch notes and save yourself valuable time downloading the patch (900MB, so get in early)! The battle against the Witch King's minions returns at Noon!
LotRO introduces Player and Guild Housing
The Book 11 content update for Lord of the Rings Online introduces more than Gollum's first appearance, a Balrog to slay and class revamps for Minstrels and Lore-masters. It also introduces player and guild housing in a unique way.There are four different racially-styled homesteads. The architecture, neighborhood and decorations are unique to each. But players are not restricted to only buying property sold by their own race. Elves can move into the Dwarven cave-like housing and Men can squeeze into Hobbit holes.There are many kinds of housing available, including 16 different styles of personal housing, 10 more styles for the deluxe housing and 4 different styles for guild housing. Each neighborhood has a mix of two dozen or so housing types. Every time all the houses are purchased, a new instance is created with all nebw housing for sale.
LotRO Book 11 notes and early download available
Book 11: Defenders of Eriador , the third free content update for Lord of the Rings Online, is arriving Wednesday morning. In advance of the patch going live, Turbine has released the patch notes two days early on the LotRO Lorebook, their official Wiki site.There are no surprises since we saw these patch notes on the Preview server earlier this month. Still on track are all the major changes: The introduction of player and guild housing in the Man, Elf, Hobbit and Dwarf cities Four new level 40+ outdoor zones in and around The Misty Mountains to smooth out high level questing The Rift, the game's second raid zone, a 12-man level 50 instance that pits your group against a Balrog and introduces new class armor sets Class revamps for Lore-masters (new Lynx pet, new high level skills) and Minstrels (Warspeech, a new dps stance for faster soloing, new high level skills.) Also, the introduction of Gollum to the game through a flashback instance. And the epic quest series that allows the players to help the Fellowship in its journey to Mordor has a new 13-quest arc. We're not sure yet how the new Epic Quest series plays out yet, but the title of patch could mean all the playable lands are in jeopardy.The patch is currently available by Torrent and direct download. It will also be available through the patcher on Wednesday, October 22, 2007.
LotRO Book 11: Defenders of Eriador notes and release date
It's official! Book 11 has a name and an upcoming October 24, 2007 due date in North America and October 25, 2007 in Europe. Best of all, it's free to download -- zilch -- zero -- nada -- did I mention it won't cost a thing? Shiny, new, precious Book 11. We wants it. There's so much stuff crammed into Book 11 if you have been waiting for new content the wait was worthwhile, keep reading for the skinny. Home, sweet home the Middle Earth way. Player-housing is probably the biggest undertaking for a free content update and the developers didn't skimp on the overall implementation. The biggest thing to get right with player-housing is that the elves and dwarves don't live in the same straw huts on a beach somewhere. The developers whole-heartedly agree since there are four different racially-styled homesteads that feature a distinctive Middle Earth architectural style and environment. When it comes to room there's plenty of plots around with 250 neighborhoods to each homestead, so all the hobbits can all live happily ever after and frolic on one giant bed after adventure hour just like in the movie -- I'm sorry, don't hurt me. Don't like your homeland? No problem, you don't have to be a hobbit to live in The Shire. If an elf decides to move in with my dwarven renegade and brings any of that elf culture with em', I'm setting up a neighborhood watch. Kinships won't be left out of the house either and various decorations ranging from paint to taxidermy and even music to help you clutter your new digs and set the mood for that special occasion. Lots and lots of good stuff for the crafters to keep them busy clicking and housing won't be about just the looks, being a home-owner also comes with a few other lucrative benefits. If playing house isn't your thing and you are more into wielding something other than a paint brush Book 11 has you covered with The Rift Nûrz Ghâshu. A new large underground dungeon filled with adventure for up to 12 players. That's not the only high-level content planned either. Also on the endless chapters in Book 11 is a ton of monster play enhancements and a little trip down yonder to the new Goblin-town! For the classes, this time around the Minstrel and Lore-Master see some love with numerous skill updates including a new pet for Lore-masters and Minstrels will be able to train others in their musical ways, which sounds really neat.
Game Update 3 for Vanguard
The dev team at Vanguard: Saga of Heroes have released notes on what is coming in Update 3. Although the list is small, it is certainly significant. This is just phase one, of course, so I am sure there is more to come. First up are the additions to Ksarvi Gulch, an area for adventurers in the low to high teens, where players will have access to three new quest lines which will add 20 solo quests into the game. Group quests are added to, but they aren't nearly as exciting as the news that players will get to fight astride black wyverns. Expect new rewards to go with your new quests, of course. What is epic questage without epic loot?Next up is the news that guild and player housing are getting some love. Guild trophies are now available for placement in your housing. Player housing will now be located close to a crafting center, with vendors and trainers galore. I think it's important to note that the items for said crafting will also be easier to obtain. As a lover of crafting in any game, anything that streamlines the trade skill process is a good thing.Last but not least is the addition of a spam filter into Vanguard. This comes after the constant, and sometimes overly exhuberent requests of the players that they be shielded from the barrage of messages they were receiving. If you are familiar with other SOE games, the spam filter is supposed to be pretty much identical, with a flagging feature that alerts Customer Service of the issue while the game happily removes spam messages before you even get them.Read the rest of Update 3 phase 1.
