Blizzard can list all the reasons under the sun why they haven’t implemented Player Housing, but when several smaller MMOs already have Player Housing, and have done a fething good job with it, Blizzard are just blowing smoke out their arse. (source)
Cap’n John on the subject of player housing in WoW over at Wolfshead’s blog. Take time to read the whole entry, great stuff and I very much agree. World of Warcraft not having player owned housing yet is borderline pathetic. “[I]t’s incredibly complex to do right and we’re not sure yet if it’s going to be the right thing for WoW in the long run”, my behind.
(I had to fight the urge to add a lolcat-pic to this entry. I’m very proud that I resisted.)
I asked Kaplan about this one; he said something on the lines of “Well, we’ve thought about player housing, but we just can’t think of any way we could do it and be different from everybody else, it would just look like we’re copying everybody else”.
I know, which is bullshit on Kaplan’s part – they copied more or less everything else…
It’s also quite a bad excuse, considering they’ve been copying and improving features from older games. They could’ve done it and they probably know they should have done it a lot sooner. I think it’s a conscious design decision, they don’t want housing in WoW because it detracts from their design formula. Which is sad, really. There’s not much room from player creativity in World of Warcraft, at least not compared to other MMOs.