I commented on Psychochild’s weekend design challenge from Sunday, and I thought I’d follow up my short statements with something more complete. I also wanted to follow up on some of the other comments, because they were reminding me of some entertaining ideas.

The challenge:

This time around, let’s pretend that you’re a designer on an MMORPG, and you’ve been tasked with designing the player/guild housing for the game. Your goal is to introduce a new housing feature not found in any other current major game. This is to make the feature more appealing to the players.

Here was my response:

In a word, trophies. One of the things I enjoyed most about DAoC and SWG’s housing implimentations was the occasional ‘trophy’ reward. Completing important quests, achieving certain levels, perhaps traveling to new areas, all should result in some sort of collectable trinket you can display in your home. The badge system in SWG was something I greatly enjoyed, essentially, but I thought it ridiculous that you had to be nearby to the character in order to see their accomplishments. Going to a person’s home and seeing things like a ‘Declaration from the King’ for reaching max level, or a ‘Dragon’s Tooth’ from that big raid encounter mean far more than an entry in your /whois description.

I realize this isn’t a wholly new idea, but every other implimentation I’ve seen has been half-hearted at best. SWG’s really obvious trophies were limited to either player rewards (for loyalty), or hunting trophies from the Rage of the Wookies expansion. While both of these are great, why not go bigger and better? I’d say that, hunting wise, you (or a crafter PC) should be able to make a trophy out of almost any animal kill. The first time I killed a drake in the Badlands was a great moment for me as a player. The first time I took out the named Rabbit spawn outside of San D’Oria, I’ll admit it, I did a little dance.

Additionally, given the importance many MMOGs place on equipment, I think in-game items should be trophies as well. It would be important to make sure players are not penalized for showing off the cool gear they’ve gotten, though, so my thought is that what is displayed in the home is not the actual item. That is, a player should have the option of displaying in their home a likeness of any given piece of equipment their character has ever owned. I’m specifically thinking here about WoW, which binds almost all of your equipment specifically to one avatar. Being able to look back on your level 30 loot, gotten by tooth and nail from an instance boss, would be a very nice thing indeed.

This is really just a tie-back to the ‘trophies idea’. I’m thinking, very specifically, of Verigan’s Fist. In the Thott thread there, it’s described as a ‘right of passage’ for Paladins, and that’s completely true. The guy who said he solo’d The Test of Righteousness at level 30 is a damned dirty liar. It’s hard, and it’s annoying, but goddamnit is the Fist a great reward. I used that thing well into my 30s before I found a decent replacement, and the ‘Pallyness’ of the weapon is undeniable. I stubbornly refused to sell the thing, though, even after it was relegated to the bank … right until the point where my bid for 300 level mining and engineering ate every slot I had available. Then I sold her, earning my lousy 74 silver.

When we finally get player housing in WoW, when we can enter that gated-off instance and check out our new digs, I know I’m not going to have the Fist. I’m not going to be able to hang that over my mantlepiece, and that kinda ticks me off. In the ‘life’ of my Paladin, that was a defining moment. Why wouldn’t it be possible to keep a simple record of important items, suitable for recreating an even more virtual virtual item? Perhaps, not even every item would be recorded (database entries, and all that). When you sell something magical, bound, attuned, whatever, you get a prompt asking you if you want a copy saved for your home. In this way, the virtual past of our avatars will live on
in the present. Good stuff.

The comments all had good stuff, too. I particularly resonated with John Gardner’s observation about player use of urban spaces. Why we couldn’t rent apartments in Theed at launch has always been a design decision beyond my understanding. Extending off of that, park settings and the ability to do ‘urban planning’ are complete no-brainers. The need to do city organization by the crude methods of SWG are yet another tweaker.

Player Housing is easily one of the most under-developed killer features, a way to call a part of a virtual space your own. It’s almost the entire draw of the 2L population, and yet (outside of SWG’s flawed implimentation), it’s never gotten the attention it deserved.