The last few weeks I have been pretty lax with my daily blog post.  My friend Ariad has managed to churn out some posts to fill the void, but in the end I have just been slacking due to some fairly significant deadlines.  I’ve also noticed that when I have been incubating a large post, I seem to get thrown into a minor writers block.  In the past these are marked by the days I have posted patch notes and nothing much else.  However in the post E3 / Pre 1.3 lead up, there isn’t a lot I have felt like reacting to.  After several weeks, I am finally posting this topic.

How Randomness Ruined Crafting For Me and Rift Revived It

I know that is a big subheading, but over the last few weeks I have come to realize a few things about crafting in general.  I have always respected crafting in MMOs but in general I have never been one to hang out at the forge as it were.  It has been a fun diversion, a nice break in the adventuring action at times, but never really something I sought out.  I think a good deal of this is the way that WoW and other games have treated crafting in general.

Crafting has always fascinated me.  The ability to gather up seemingly unrelated bits and through an interface bind them together into something new and usable by my characters.  There almost seems to be an arcane thrill to it, and your serious crafters carry with them an aura of sage respect.  Many folks look to crafting as a profit center for them, but for me it has always been either a nice way to augment my characters gear list, or simply something I can do to make myself useful for the guild as a whole.

The Basics

Above is an image from the game Minecraft.  This pretty much shows the kind of crafting that first enthralled me.  I could not find a really good image of the Everquest crafting system, but for the most part Minecraft is a good facsimile.  EQ featured a system that I can only think of as crafting off the rails.  Later crafting systems became stratified, with certain classes and recipe books, but in the beginning it was just you some gathered materials and a machine.

Fishing was pretty straight forward, and I think everyone in Everquest spent some time on the docks fishing for fun and profit.  However for me at least, the serious crafting came far later.  It was not until I started getting random ore drops from the Orcs in Crushbone that I started to wonder exactly what I could do with them.  Thing is in Everquest, there was no instruction manual.  You never knew whether an item was just there to be sold, or if it could be repurposed in some amazing way to craft something for you.

The crafters in the game, had not only managed to raise some numeric skill, but also figured out and memorized a vast number of patterns in their head.  Later on Allakhazam took a good bit of this trial and error out of the equation as players began to share resources.  However it was still up to you to gather up all the needed materials, and remember how to combine them once you got back in game.

The biggest problem with crafting in Everquest however was that it was an extremely expensive and or time consuming venture.  Materials were either purchased from players or vendors, or farmed in dungeons.  This was not a fast process at all, and the weight of ore made it so you could not carry much of it at any given time.  As a result we would spend hours in zones like Beholders Maze farming the mudmen for hours on end, trying to get enough ore to turn into metal to begin to craft anything at all.

The Big Shift

The biggest problem with Everquest was the acquisition of materials.  The first big shift in crafting was the creation of the “resource node”.  The first game I can remember playing that had unique resource harvesting nodes was Horizons: Empire of Istaria.  Almost as insanely difficult to find as the Everquest shot, was one of Horizons, now renamed Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted.  The above shot shows a basic resource area, with little bits of rock scattered around the land.

While the game itself had many shortcomings, it had an amazing crafting system.  In addition to resource nodes, Horizons also introduced the concept of crafter only gear, that increased your skill and the ability to carry crafting items.  It also introduced a system of sleds, that you could load up with resources and then drag like a cart back to town.

In addition there were numerous “public works” projects, like building towns and bridges that opened up new content areas to the players.  The big problem however is, crafting was extremely tedious.  You spent literal hours harvesting materials in the field, then dragging it back to town to craft components, then additional hours spent applying them to the projects.  Building bridges for example, took literal weeks of players crafting nonstop to create.  While the game play was very unique, and intricate, it was also a bit dull.

The Mini Game

While extremely detailed, crafting in Horizons quickly became a chore and after the first few times doing anything it really lacked much fun.  With the release of Everquest II, I honestly feel the developers were trying to take this concept and make it fun.  As a result they introduced what I can only call the crafting mini-game.

On the right is an image of an item being crafted in Everquest II.  As you started crafting you reached certain milestones, each producing a slightly different version of what you were attempting.  Each step you managed to reach, produced a higher quality item.  If the item was part of a multi-step process, it ultimately determined the maximum quality of the final product.

As the player crafted an item, they would encounter various events that would impede their progress.  If you look below in the window you see the event “Loss of Concentration”.  Each crafting profession gave the player a set of new abilities for their action bar, each with an icon  that would correspond with a certain kind of event.  To counter “Loss of Concentration”, the player would mash the corresponding button on their hotbar.

While in some ways this made crafting seem a bit more like an epic struggle versus your materials… the realization was that ANY time you wanted to create even the most simple item, you had to deal with this interface.  Items never “grayed out” and became truly trivial.  There was always a chance of getting something that you couldn’t use from the process.  Over time they streamlined the process to reduce the number of useless items that got created in the process, and removed many of the 5 or 6 part processes to craft an item.  However it still retained the sluggishness of knowing, any time you needed to craft something for a guild member you were committing yourself to 10-20 minutes worth of slogging through the crafting mini-game.

Dumbing it Down

The release of WoW was game changing on all levels, and crafting was no different.  Prior to WoW the trend with crafting seemed to be to make it more and more intricate, giving players the option to make crafting their primary game play experience.  WoW went completely the different direction.  Everything about the crafting process was streamlined compared to its predecessors.

WoW kept the resource gathering system that was node based, but managed to greatly streamline the item creation process.  Sure there were very painful leveling experiences that involved lots of odd items (leatherworking I am looking at you), but for the most part the process was straight forward. 

You chose a gathering profession, and a crafting profession that complimented each other.  Gathering collected the items, and crafting spit out the finished items.  As the game moved on the leveling of these professions became even more streamlined.  However from day one, wow leaned on a crutch that would ultimately become the source of all of my frustration with the system.

Randomness Sucks

For some reason, Blizzard developers LOVE random chance.  If this were used primarily for those nice to have items, it wouldn’t be so bad, however every major crafting recipe relied solely on random chance.  Instead of making resources hard to get to, or drop off difficult to kill monsters, they placed a random loot game into the equation.  This was seen in the need to find the holy grail ore node like Khorium or Titanium, or the need to skin and herb for those annoyingly rare Arctic Fur, and Fel Lotus (or any Lotus for that matter).

There are many ramifications with a system like this.  Firstly, the rare must have items become ridiculously inflated in price in all of the markets.  This was especially noticeable with the rare Lotus drops, due to the fact that every raid on the server needed multiple each week to craft flasks.  Secondly there is a social cost to the random element, especially with the rare ore spawn.  Players will do anything and everything in their power to beat others to these spawns. 

The policy of fastest fingers win, ultimate leads to frustration on the whole.  Ultimately, I had reached a point where I really had no interest in crafting.  It was something I did, because ultimately as a raider I felt like I needed the various crafter only bonuses.  However once max level, I rarely did any crafting for fun.  Doing the daily quests, just seemed like skull drudgery due to the massive contention for resources.

The other major point of frustration with the WoW crafting system is actually two fold.  Firstly crafting has always been something you could do while leveling to augment your gear, and ultimately lead to a more enjoyable leveling process.  Problem was, that in general, past the first 75 levels of a trade skill, the items you could craft were greatly under your usable level range.  On top of this, there was the annoyance that very rarely could you ever craft a complete set of armor for any given range.  You could get one or two pieces, but never a full suit like most other games had.

Restoring My Faith

Due to the amount of loathing that I had built up towards crafting in general, I never really messed with it much during the first few betas of Rift.  Honestly it wasn’t until guild members started talking about being able to create weapons they couldn’t equip for several levels, that it peaked my interest.  So when I finally managed to start crafting during the head start, I was amazed at how enjoyable I found the process.

There have been complaints from those used to the more complex systems, that Rift crafting is too simple.  However for me, coming from the streamlined system of WoW, I appreciated that fact.  As I began leveling, I was impressed with the ease of resource gathering, and the ability to craft full sets of gear for any particular level range.  In addition, like my guild members talked about, I was able to craft items that I would grow into as I leveled rather than those that were of no real use to me.  This alone fixed several of my annoyances with crafting systems in general.

However, the big fix was still to come.  As I was harvesting copper nodes, I noticed I got a quest item: Unusual Ore.  When I took it into town, the Mining trainer gave me a quest to gather up 10 tin bars  and 10 copper bars.  Upon turning in, the trainer gave me a recipe for crafting bronze bars.  Instead of relying on random chance, all of the rare crafting materials in the game are similar to Bronze Bars, being an “alloy” of two existing items.  This pretty much knocks down my other major problem with the WoW system, it removes most of the randomness on a daily basis.

Universal Currency

One of the other nice systems that rift introduced was a universal crafting currency.  Artisan’s Marks are gained from doing work orders in the crafting center of your faction’s capitol city.  These are then used to purchase various “nice to have” patterns, especially the ones that use the rare materials.  You can level from 1-300 in any of the crafting professions without ever using these patterns, however they unlock often times higher quality items.

Having a universal crafting currency was a massive step in the right direction.  In WoW it became extremely frustrating that there was a unique currency for each profession, that could only be gained by doing daily quests.  With a universal currency, you can pick and choose which professions patterns to purchase.  On my rogue I am doing 2 rune crafting and 2 outfitter quests a day, but as a result I am saving up the currency to buy those expensive outfitter patterns. 

Where the system becomes counter intuitive however, is with the crafting Plaques.  Basically crafting plaques undo a lot of the good of having the universal system.  When you complete master level work orders, you have a random chance of gaining a plaque for your specific trade skill.  These plaques are used to purchase the most sought after epic quality patterns.  There is no construct in game that allows you to trade one flavor of plaque for another.  It seems to me, that Trion would have gone with a single crafting plaque currency rather than tying things down again to specific professions.

Ultimate System

As a whole, I can’t really call the Rift system the ultimate crafting system, but for my purposes it works.  Crafting for me is something that I like to use as downtime.  I go out adventuring in the world, gathering materials, and then go back to town and craft a few things up.  It acts as a much needed pause in the action, before going out again to kill more baddies.  However I have heard from others that they really miss the level of intricacy from systems like Everquest II. 

Problem is I am not sure where the happy medium would lay.  Adding complexity also adds to the amount of time that a player is forced to sit at the crafting machine.  For most of us this is not really a win situation.  In EQ2 I loathed having to craft anything for a guild member, because not only did it mean porting back to a central location, but also tying up a good amount of time that I could be off doing cool stuff.  With rift, I am always game to knock out whatever is needed, because I know that once the materials are pooled I can do a combine in a matter of seconds and be on my way.

I hope given time, additional patterns can be added that are more complex that will help give the craft-centric players more of a sense of ownership in the process.  As a whole, there really are not that many plaque patterns to gather.  I know on my armor crafter I have already purchased everything available, and simply do the dailies for money and the hope that eventually new patterns will be introduced.  However were the plaques trade-able I would be gladly handing them off to guild members to help them complete their sets.

Quality of Items

My other complaint is the fact that without dungeon drops, you cannot create high end gear at all.  In other games, I am used to those rare item patterns being equivalent to the first tier of dungeon/raid gear.  Problem is, that in Rift the epic crafted items are as a whole below Tier 1 dungeon level.  The player funnels all these resources into an item, and quickly finds out that it will be replaced the first time they run an expert dungeon. 

As a result, one of the big complaints is that none of the gear crafters can create is really valuable and worth selling.  Personally I have never used crafting as a profit center in games, but I can definitely see this as a problem.  Crafted epics as a result are becoming the stock and trade for secondary characters, and thoroughly useless to mains.  I am hoping that one of the patches manages to buff these up to at least Tier 1 level, giving them a slightly longer shelf life and worth more.

Long Ramble

I realize this post is extremely long, far longer than most of mine.  However I wanted to dig into the various systems before arriving at Rifts.  I like most of what I see in the Rifts crafting, and it has like the subtext said revived my interest in crafting as a whole.  I almost always have a stockpile of materials in my bank, and that is something I never could have said back in previous incarnations.  I can definitely see some weaknesses here and there, and some things I don’t like, but overall I think it managed to strike a “happy medium”.  Also anyone who actually managed to make it to the end of this post has some serious fortitude.

Apologies for the recent lack of posts.  I’ve found myself irrationally tired lately, and to make matters worse I have not been sleeping great only making issues worse.  On top of it all, my Grandfather has been in the hospital, so not exactly prime time to be thinking about blogging.  I have a half written post on crafting, that I need to find the train of thought to go finish at some point.

Trion’s Master Plan

With all the hype surrounding the game world that E3 brings on, I had a realization yesterday.  Trion for me at least was this juggernaut that came from nowhere.  I never really followed any information on the company, and I had never heard of them prior to getting into one of the Rift beta events. 

All that said, it felt to me like this company stepped out of the shadows and right out of the gate assumed a position of dominance over the MMO market.  Thing is, it finally hit me that Trion is not just gunning down World of Warcraft with Rift, but instead making a push at the entire Blizzard game structure.  Trion has fairly quietly been aligning to strike against each of their core game markets.

The Rise of Rift

 

The fact that Rift was aligned to directly compete with WoW has been evident since the first marketing blows.  With slogans like “We’re Not in Azeroth Anymore” and the more recent “Join Our Horde” they have very overtly been throwing jabs here and there at the big blue giant.  They managed to pull off a near flawless launch on a bigger scale than we have seen in years, and immediately followed it up with an uppercut of constant content updates. 

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating, in the amount of time it took Blizzard to release the 4.1 patch Trion managed to launch Rift and release 3 content updates and around 30 hotfixes.  The 4.1 patch itself was comprised primarily of recycled content, whereas the Rift updates have introduced numerous raids, and a slew of new world content in the form of rifts and events.  This level support is a roundhouse to the slow and unresponsive player Blizzard environment.

Like always there was an initial drop after the opening sales, but since then the Rift player base has stabilized and continues to grow.  Earlier this week Trion released that they are nearing the 1 million sell-through mark, meaning units actually sold in various outlets and not just shipped and encumbered.  While some of those sold only stayed for the first month, there has been a serious dent in the available player pool by this newcomer.  Blizzard itself came clean, stating that they are down 600,000 players, so it isn’t hard to see where a large chunk of them have arrived.

End of Nations

 

What I am coming to realize however is that Rift is just the first strike in a greater war against the Blizzard/Activision bottom line.  Quietly gaining player focus is the new MMO-RTS title End of Nations.  Similar to the Trion strategy with Rift, they brought on veterans from the RTS industry, Petroglyph Games.  The company is made up of mostly Westwood Employees, some of which notably worked on the grandfathers of the genre:  Command & Conquer, and Dune II.

End of Nations itself is shaping up to be a game that feels very familiar to those who have played Command & Conquer in appearance but taking it on a much larger scale.  All indications at this point make this title look to be another AAA RTS title.  It brings to the field a server infrastructure that seems more scalable than that of the Blizzard standard in Battle.net.

 

All these things add up to place this squarely on the field as direct competition for the Starcraft players attention.  If this manages to ship and release as smoothly as Rift did, and have a similar level of player support and content updates then I can see End of Nations pulling away a good number of Blizzard loyalists in the process.  I am not a huge player of the genre, so I may be wrong, but having played through Starcraft I can see this title drawing away the old Westwood fans.

The Defiance Experiment

 

So far we can see clear lines on the battlefield placing Trion in direct competition with Blizzard in the MMO and RTS market, but wait… there is more.  Trion in additon to all the other work, is teaming up with the Syfy channel to embark on a unique experiment.  They are creating a multiplatform MMO-FPS title that will somehow be linked to a TV Show.  Supposedly the show will effect the gameplay, and the players themselves will ultimately effect the TV show.  I will be honest, it is somewhat hard to really wrap my head around the ramifications at this point.

What we do know however is that Defiance is a third person mmo shooter, set on a future version of the earth transformed by decades of conflict.  There isn’t alot of detail yet on the title, but like every company they state they are looking to produce a AAA shooter.  Ultimately the success of the title will rely on so many issues, such as the ability to merge console and pc game play into one cohesive environment.  Many titles have promised this, *cough* DC Universe *cough*, but so far not a single one has delivered.

Why this is interesting particularly within the scope of this post is the fact that Blizzard also is working on their very own MMO-FPS title, dubbed Project Titan.  Funny thing is, there was another Project Titan… the ill fated Ensemble Studios Titan, which was the Halo MMO.  MMO Culture gives the basic rundown of the theory, but the quick version is:  some of the disbanded Ensemble staff joined Blizzard Entertainment, Activision and Bungie announce exclusive worldwide partnership, and this document is leaked showing a Blizzard release schedule with Project Titan on it.

 

With Blizzard now working on an MMO-FPS, this places Trion yet again competing directly.  From all indication however, it seems likely that with a TV show tie in, this will probably be coming out well before Blizzard’s normally sluggish schedule (which is also shown on schedule as late 2014).  How many years have we been waiting for Diablo III for example?  If Trion can beat Blizzard to the MMO-FPS market, and deliver the same kind of performance they have shown possible with Rift it will definitely soften the later’s potential market holding.

Wrapping Up

Basically that is three major titles with two in hardcore development at the same time from Trion.  Each title seems to be directly aligned to take down a Blizzard market.  It honestly leaves me wondering, if we will soon see information about a similar title to take on the Diablo III market.  I am just still floored that this company, that I had not heard of prior to Rift has come out of the gate and is presenting serious competition.  I look forward to seeing more information on the above to come out during e3.  Hopefully Trion will continue to delivery quality products and keep up with the same level of support.

I talk about a lot of stuff without really filtering it. I kind of rely on Belghast to yell at me if a post devolves into jargon, but he’s been listening to me blather for so long that I think he’s developed an immunity. Someone commented recently that I didn’t consider most of the implementations of player housing to involve “gameplay”, and seemed quite upset about it. I thought I might share some of how I view games from a building-them perspective.

Gameplay and Feedback Loops

The word “gameplay” means a lot of things to a lot of people, but it has a fairly specific and reasonably well-defined meaning. Like a lot of things within the industry, it isn’t universally agreed on, so any attempt I make at pinning down a definition is tricky. I’ll need to draw the camera out a little bit.

To define gameplay, I need to touch on something called a “feedback loop”. Simply put, a feedback loop is what you, the player, are doing in any given three-to-ten-second window of time while in the game. It’s the smallest amount of time in which action can occur and you both experience the primary mechanics of the game and make decisions on how to use said mechanics.

In Mario, your feedback loops are jumping between platforms, or onto enemies. In Street Fighter, it’s an exchange of blows, or a combo, or a special move. In racing games, it’s the various inputs that make up actually driving the car. You can boil a game down to the most basic concepts, stuff like “when at edge of platform, press A to jump”, and that’s a feedback loop. Feedback loops are the building blocks of game design; and in almost every game they involve either movement or combat, because they’re the easiest things to abstract into button presses and build upon from there. Oversimplified, feedback loops are “when you are pressing buttons”.

Gameplay, then, is feedback loops strung together. It is the time when the player is actively involved in the game using the most developed mechanics available within the system (usually movement or combat or both).

What About The Rest of the Game?

My definition of gameplay above is pretty restrictive. Depending on the game, it excludes huge swathes of the overall time you spend, and often there’s overlap between gameplay and things that aren’t. Designers have a term for that: “experience”. The experience of a game is everything from the art, the music, sitting around roleplaying in chat, taking screenshots, watching cutscenes, fighting enemies, wandering around… everything. The term “player experience” is bandied about a lot, and there’s a lot of back and forth about how certain things things are presented, how the game communicates what the player is supposed to do (“messaging”), how the UI helps or hinders, and how that all interacts with gameplay.

When I mentioned that player housing didn’t involve gameplay, what I meant was that few player housing systems to date have involved the basic feedback loops that exist in the game. They are, without a doubt, a core (and dearly loved) part of the experience, but they aren’t gameplay.

To draw a bit of contrast, compare Minecraft to EQ2, in terms of housing. Minecraft has its basic feedback loops built around obtaining and processing material, as well as placing it in the world to fit your whims. Housing in Minecraft is centered around these feedback loops; it is gameplay. Belghast’s immediate excitement about a player housing system used a Minecraft reference, and the spark that came through when he mentioned it is precisely what I’m talking about when I say that player housing should involve gameplay.

Gameplay versus Experience

The sad reality of game design is that on every project, on every game that gets released, some features are cut, and some content doesn’t make it, and some things that might have been awesome die before seeing the light of day. It’s called “scoping”, and it’s insanely difficult to do. Sometimes these decisions are easy and popular. “Oh, we don’t have the art budget to have 30 player races, and so we’ll only have 8? Okay.” Somteimes they’re easy but unpopular. “Designing and balancing 25 unique classes is completely infeasible, so we’re cutting down to 10, and of the 15 that got cut were the favorites of half the staff? Ouch, but it has to be done.”

Mostly, though, the decisions are hard. Do you ship with 10 classes, or 6 well-balanced ones? Do you ship with 30 zones, some of which might not be complete or even have much if any content in them, or do you ship with 15 and try to make sure that every single one is fully complete? Do you craft a lot of side content for explorer-type players, or do you include less content but put more development time into it so that the experience is richer?

Almost always, these decisions will have gameplay as the dividing line. If it involves gameplay, it’s a lot less likely to get cut than something that doesn’t. The reason for this is that gameplay is the thing that absorbs the most programming time, the most tech, the most art, animation, worldbuilding, etc, and it’s the thing that engages players.

In the case of player housing, in order for it to justify its massive resource expense, it’s going to need to be inextricably linked to gameplay, so that the housing system doesn’t end up on the “easy and (un)popular” chopping block, when push comes to shove.

You know, kind of like Minecraft.

I’ll get to part 2 of Ugly Truths in Gaming at some point, but I recently got into a discussion with some friends about the kinds of things they want to see in MMOs.

Top of the list, as always, was player housing. I have such a love-hate relationship with the concept. On the one hand, some people LOVE it. It’s their own personal in-game space that they can make their own and get that little extra bit of immersion going. People love it, and get super invested, goes the argument, so why not put it in? Everyone loves it, right?

Why Not Every Game Has Houses

Player housing is hard. Yes, I know other games have done it, yes I know it’s possible, but honestly no one has done it *right*, and it’s incredibly resource-intensive. I’ll get to the part of that sentence that makes most people angry in a moment. First, a little bit of tech:

In order to implement even the most basic player housing, you need a few things. First, you need the ability to create instances. Sure, Star Wars Galaxies, Shadowbane, and Ultima Online didn’t do this. I would point to the vast amounts of empty space (or ridiculous overcrowding) in both of those games, and comment that city planners exist for a reason, and players simply slam houses down wherever if given the opportunity, which is not something you actually want. Instancing, in this day and age, is not that difficult, except that for player housing you need to have a very specific instance saved per player. Not terrible, but it’s notable that that kind of data (i.e. saved instance data) doesn’t generally hang around more than a day or a week in most games, for things like raid lockouts.

You also need a complete in-game interface for placing the stuff that goes in the house. This is an entirely separate interface from any other part of the game, requires you to be able to dynamically generate collision and pathing information (so that your pet doesn’t walk through the chair you just placed, and neither can you), and needs an entire items database for things that you can display, how they work, how to orient them, and how they behave once they’re placed.

Then you need art, visuals for all of the stuff that goes in the house, that has to be tested with all of the other things that could go in the house to make sure there aren’t any unintended things that happen when they’re placed (like, for example, a little seam that makes you fall through the world). This usually involves thousands of objects, many of which are custom-made just for the player houses.

What Do I Get For All Of This?

The above is not an insurmountable amount of resources. A development team dedicated to putting in player housing can reasonably implement it, if they so desire. Unfortunately, one of the big things that comes up in design discussions when picking what things to add is “what are we giving up to get this?”

In the case of player housing, it can be something like “large group (raid) content”, or “PvP”, or “four to six full zones”, or “three player classes” or “crafting”. None of these are small things, so if you’re going to give one of them up for player housing, you’d better make sure that your return is more awesome than whatever you’re giving up.

I mentioned above that no one has done player housing right. What I mean by that is that no one has designed a model for player housing that makes it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s worth the trade-off. The pitfalls are as numerous as the benefits; player housing splits people up into little private instances, making cities feel empty, they’re huge resource hogs, only some percentage of players even care, and that number is smaller than feature X that would otherwise be removed.

The biggest one, and the one that I have the hardest time with, is that there’s no actual gameplay involved with player housing. You have this extra system for houses that is only used there, only used for decoration, and then you look around it or show it off to other people.

Housing That Matters

I don’t think it’s a hopeless cause, though. The system just needs to be designed to be more than just a dollhouse to show off one’s fancy décor. A house should be something that adds tangible value to your character, rather than simply a money and time sink. Imagine a game where part of it is colonizing new, uncharted lands. You need to forge out into the wilderness and make your home there. The instanced neighborhoods in LOTRO would be great for this, either little pockets in a larger landmass or little islands or both, but instead of simply a row of houses, there would be hostile mobs, resource nodes, everything a “real” zone has.

You could get hooks into the crafting, raiding, and questing systems as well, as you actually build your house and clear out hostile mobs from your territory. As you develop your land, you worry less and less about mobs coming and wrecking shop and more about the most efficient means with which to harvest valuable materials from your area. If you’re working collaboratively with several different players, you can clear an area faster and develop more quickly. Possibly, if you’re a devoted crafter, you hire other players to help you clear out the baddies while you craft what you need for the house. Dragon inhabiting your island? Get some raiders to take it down for you, and in return they get a nice place to hang out.

In The End

I think the biggest issue with player housing is that it needs serious evaluation from the design side. There simply hasn’t been a compelling design that’s been more than a little added bonus to the game rather than a fully-featured system, and it’s incredibly difficult to justify that kind of resource expense without a solid design plan and without appeal to a wide range of players.

Hopefully we’ll see a design that simply blows everyone away, for the industry as a whole to latch onto and build upon.