They said player hosueing as people want it too hard to do, there is a very large diffrence.

anyone who says that Zenimax said player housing, as in the entire concept of it, is impossible to do are wrong.

I want player housing. Don't ask me how it would work though.

An RPG with the TES name, without player housing, would be incredibly disappointing. Games new and old are able to do player-housing. Heck, it's an often-asked-for feature in TOR, and Bioware is trying to do something about it.

I personally don't care if it's instanced or not. Just HAVE it. As an RPer myself, I feel it's a very important feature. Is it 'make or break'? Probably not. But I do believe it will be a heck of a lot more 'make' having it, than 'break' by not having it.

EQ2 has my favorite form of housing, and it's instanced. I think it works incredibly well, and you have a lot of control over decorating. Basic floorplans, sizes, etc, are finite yet still numerous. But with the editing capability we have as players, you really can come up with near-countless varieties of home layouts. Spend an evening visiting various houses and you'll likely not see two that look alike.

As others have said, having houses actually take space in the open game world would really depend on several things, not the least of which would be 1) How big IS the actual game-world, and 2) game engine limitations. And from what little we've heard from Zenimax on the subject, it doesn't sound like their game engine is capable of doing it.

But, I'll cross my fingers that they will have SOME form of player-housing available. It only makes sense.

Let's say each server houses 10,000 players. Are you going to include 10,000 homes in each major city? How many available homes are you going to put in the wilderness? How many homes are you going to put in smaller towns that are available? Do you protect player homes from being broken in to? How? How do you prevent players from using cheats to get into homes? How do you inform a player if they have been robbed, if you even inform them at all? How do you prevent other players from not littering player's houses with items? How about preventing them from stacking corpses in your house? Is every house of the 10,000+ going to look exactly the same? Will they all have the exact same upgrades? Etc, etc.

Just because housing was done before does not mean it's not a [censored] to deal with and therefore perhaps not worth the potential trouble.

Even Lord of the Rings Online has player housing with some customization...

Pathetic.

There were banks in Daggerfall, but those were actual banks, not some sort of global safety deposit box. You could get loans, get a letter of credit, cash in letters of credit (merchants paid you with a letter of credit if transactions with them went beyond a certain gold value), and store money. You could also buy houses and boats.
All of those are rather easy to deal with:

Where are you going to put Homes: It's rather easy to designate certain areas as being off-limits to player-built homes, so the devs could define certain areas of open terrain as areas where players could build, and players could only put homes in those places. Another possibility would be to have have multiple homes throughout the gameworld with instanced interiors. Players "buy" their own instance of the interior.

Do you protect players homes from robbery? How?: This one is insanely simple to deal with. You simply program things so that only the person who has rights to the interior can place or take objects. Galaxies did this quite easily. Even if someone glitched into a private home somehow, they could never rob the place. The game simply wouldn't let someone without the proper rights take objects.

Other players placing items in the house: simply disable the command for dropping items when inside another person's house.

Corpses: We're probably not going to be able to drag corpses in this game, so it wouldn't really be a problem. Especially if interiors are instanced. Even if someone lured a monster into the house, the house can be set to not allow most players inside. Even if a player glitches themselves inside, the monster probably can't do the same.

By doing all that you effectively make a lot of people angry because they can "no longer RP a proper Thief."

If someone wants to "RP a proper Thief" the game can feature NPC shops and homes you can rob. Robbing players is a bad idea though. It will discourage the use of homes by the player base ("if a house isn't safe storage, why buy one? I'll just sell non-essentials or have duplicate characters hold on to them"). In order for Homes to be worthwhile, they have to have tangible benefits, such as safe storage. If people can rob them, then it's essentially a form of storage that's more dangerous than one's own inventory. It would make homes pointless.

I'd only throw my hat in the pro-housing ring as long as I am allowed to burn yours to the ground.

One possible way to make non-instanced player housing system work? Make the houses expensive, as well as with decent weekly payments on them, but not too high that it would be impossible for people to get unless they just weren't trying. If you can't afford your payment one week, your items can be reclaimed from that city's hall/castle/whatever indefinitely. Make the fee high enough so that people will be discouraged from getting one unless if they have a really good reason for it(such as RPing), so that your standard non-RP folks wouldn't want to deal with a gold sink on something so "frilly" and "useless."

TL;DR:
Non-instanced housing.
Expensive cost to buy.
Weekly fee low enough to be manageable, but high enough to dissuade non-RPers.


If there are enough cities, I don't think there'd be much of a problem if it was mostly RPers using housing. If one or two cities are insanely popular and in high demand they can always put in more houses there.

This exact reasoning is why Housing in an MMORPG, especially following the "open world" environment TES creates is why Housing is better left out because balancing it could be too difficult to bother with.

On one hand, people want to have homes and want them to be safe places.
On the other, people want to be able to "open world" it, which includes stealing from other players.

The criticism for having safe zone homes would be high from the people who want an actual open world.
The criticism for having an actual open world would be equally high because their homes would not be safe.

So it really is just easier to say no housing because you don't have to worry about the balancing that would appease both, which would be very hard to do.

Galaxies was able to do safe homes just fine. I honestly don't think that people wanting to rob homes constitute a statistically significant portion of the player base who would be unwilling to purchase TES online if they could not rob player homes. The way I see it, it is sometimes perfectly possible to ignore one side of an issue without significant consequence, and this is one of those times.

Galaxies isn't an open world like TES is however, to my understanding that is, so having safe homes is completely fine.

It's not that they feel people wouldn't buy it, I feel as if it would just be too much of a chore to balance out because of the standards TES have set.

Back when I played galaxies, it was open world, and it had player built housing. There were multiple planets, each with wide-open, square, maps. You could walk in a roughly straight line from Coronet to the other side of the Corellia map. (or from Mos Eisley to Jabba's Palace, from the ruins of the Jedi enclave on Dantooine to the space port, from Nym's palace on Lok to that mountain over yonder, etc.) It was definitely open world, and without any of that instanced dungeon stuff either.

Could you walk into any building?

As I recall, no. However, not being able to walk into every building does not impinge it's status as an open world game.

That's why I continued to say to the effect of "in the fashion of TES."

TES is known for being able to enter every building within the game world. It's game world is far smaller than that of Galaxies so being able to enter every building, including player homes, is sort of important.

Yes letting other break in would make the house useless for storage, many would prefer breaking into the larger ones for loot.
As I understand they will not have player houses in any way.

But not more important than the player's personal convenience and interest. I think that, in the long run, most players would find access to a bit of inviolable security and privacy far outweighs not being able to enter every building they come across, even if the only buildings they are excluded from are those belonging to other players.

Housing should be like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5lXH4PIxww

well i think player-built houses really are a bit over the top.
but with a world as big as tamriel, why not just place little villages whith buiable or rentable houses all over the place?
the houses could be instanced, but it would be nice having a certain object in the world which belonged to you.
and having many little villages with maybe some npc traders etc., the world would be much more reliable and alive.
that wouldn't even be hard to implement.

They could go the EQ2/LOTRO way of doing housing,it's all instanced but other players can visit and buy from you.

EQ2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8zzb356xNE

LOTRO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fhqlhM5R8g

Take your pick.

On Robbing player houses.

This should be in, but only for players whose accounts have been canceled for 90 days or more. The house should fall into disrepair and all common items that can be gotten through basic gameplay should become lootable. Unique items earned through questing and are only awarded through epic questlines would go into the player's bank. So if they do return, the items that they really worked hard for would not be lost.

Abandoned houses would be available for anyone to claim squatter's rights until someone buys the house. Squatters would gain ownership for 24 hours, and any containers therein would be secure for that duration. If someone buys the house, the squatter has 24 hours to vacate.

There were people in Star Wars Galaxies who paid their house upkeep for as much as a year in advance and quit, knowing that nobody would be able to have that spot. And it wasn't isolated. It was all over the place. Cities maintained the metropolis status due to abandoned houses that were paid in advance. And there was a limit on how many cities could reach metropolis level. So the selfish acts of players who had no intention of playing ever again actually had an adverse effect on those who did remain and wanted to make the best of things. SOE came up with the idea of house packups, which stored all house contents and the house deed itself just in case some of those players might return. The packup process involved players finding abandoned structures and tagging them. A ship would fly over and blast the house off the fact of the planet. So allowing stuff to happen to placed property has a precedence in the MMO world. The terms guarantee everything for 90 days usually, so that is why the threshold for the packup was 90 days abandoned on an inactive account.

Well blowing houses up in tamriel is not a common-place occurance, but making all common items lootable and packing up uncommon, rare and very rare items would add that Elder Scrolls feel, in my opinion.

I think instanced housing is the best housing, as it gives you unlimited freedom. As you gain more power, you could go from a small townhouse in a city or cottage in a village to a massive estate with both outdoor and indoor areas, fenced off by a regal instance gate. Based on your playstyle you could make it a fierce barbarian's fortress, a regal noble's mansion, a surreal and zany wizard's tower, or anything else. The more creative we're allowed to get the better. I've always wanted to live in a surreal, nonsensical, wizard's tower like Karazhan, where giant magical automatons patrol the libraries, bizzare experiments take place, there are even times when you seem to be in some other dimension. Of course this is all just wishful thinking, but it's fun to think about.

So you think the MMO will let you go into every single building?