Guild Halls and Player Housing - do we really need them?

The next EQ2 Game Update has been somewhat eclipsed by all the fanfare surrounding the largely successful launch of WAR, but one thing it does include (besides much needed improvements in crafted armour models) is the eagerly-awaited guild halls. Though when I say 'eagerly-awaited', I mean by the community as a whole, rather than by me personally.This is largely due to the fact that I see little to no point to in-game housing in MMORPGs, whether they be personal houses or guild halls.

Now, I must admit that the EQ2 guild halls look amazing. The tier 3 ones are bigger than most in-game dungeons, and look like palaces. There's some poor-quality videos of them on Youtube that give you an idea of quite how stunning they look (if you don't mind the blue of the projector), which can be found here for the good guys and here for the bad guys. Despite their mighty impressive appearence (particularly of the Good side's hall), though, they all suffer from the same problem as the in-game housing - an ultimate lack of purpose.

That's a fairly liberal (but awesome)  interpretaton of the word 'hall'.

The first MMO I played was UO, which had implemented in-game housing in the most logical and disastrous way possible. Basically, players could buy houses, and then place them anywhere in the game world where there was a flat, open space. Predictably, every square inch of the world was covered in player housing, which resulted in it being extremely ugly and laggy and impossible to hunt in. Thankfully when I began playing the game had been split into two facets, the green and pleasant Trammel and then Felucca, which was the same world but a lot darker and grimmer. PvP was enabled in Felucca, but I never really spent much time there because I just found the place so depressing.

Thankfully, housing was only allowed on Felucca, giving people some respite from the urban sprawl if they wanted it. Until, of course, the day that they made Trammel eligible for housing too, and the open space in UO became an endangered species. There were of course plus points to owning houses in UO, the main one being that you could place NPC vendors there to sell stuff. This was before the days of a centralised Auction House, remember, so a well-positioned house meant lots of customers for your wares. You could also only start a guild if you owned a house, and it provided immense amounts of storage space for your characters - which could often be important.

So in UO, there was some justification for owning property. It in no way excused the fact that allowing it turned the game world into a huge eyesore, but at least it was functional in some way. EQ2 added player housing when it was released, and many in WoW clamoured for the same thing, but the solution that they offered was personal instanced housing. As this has no phyiscal presence in the gameworld, other people won't find it unless they are specifically looking for it (and why would they?), which sort of defeats the entire point of owning real estate.

What it does do is serve the needs of the roleplaying population or the hardcore gamers who really just want a space of their own to show off. EQ2 has more of those than other games, and there's actually a lot of people who really enjoy decorating their houses and then posting on forums so other people who also like decorating houses can congratulate them on it. It doesn't really interest me (partly because I think the finished houses really don't look that good), but it's clear some part of the community does enjoy it even though few people will ever see their hard work.

The problem is giving housing an in-game reason to exist. Instanced housing isn't ever really going to have too much of a reason to exist, even if devs take the most obvious route and make the guild halls/houses transport hubs. EQ2 has done that with its guild halls, allowing people to pay to install Mariner's Bells and portals to the various areas in Norrath. I can see them being a good mustering point before raids/dungeon runs, which I suppose is an end in itself. The second thing that EQ2 has done is make the guildhalls a crafting resource, where you can add tradeskilling vendors and machines - but they've also added harvester NPCs who will go and harvest a hundred resource nodules every two hours. I suppose this makes it easier for everyone, but it does somewhat undercut the rest of the economy so I'm not sure if it's exactly appropriate. Time will tell, no doubt.

A view from the top of the Qeynos (good) guildhall. Inside, there's 30 or 40 rooms - check out the videos.

Player cities in Age of Conan were put in-game in special areas, to make them a hub of player interaction, but apparently they're hard to get to and not particularly useful, so they aren't used either. Perhaps the best bet would be to do a modified version of what WAR does at the moment, with the keeps that can be attacked and captured by both sides.  If a guild captured one, they'd then be able to decorate it as they wanted and have it display their heraldry on the side. Maybe there could be a portal inside the keep to that guild's instanced guild hall?

The problem with that, of course, is that it restricts ownership of property to the end-game hardcore players, which is a shame as it'd just further widen the gulf between casual and hardcore players. Personally, too, I really can't see any use for instanced in-game housing at all. Sure, some people like decorating it, but that's not overly functional as a game mechanic and I don't think it's worth spending the dev time to amuse people whose primary objective in the game is nothing that you couldn't do better in Second Life. Guild halls I see more use for, mostly as rallying points before going on a big raid, or just for guild meetings and social events.

The problem there, though, is the fact that the entire guild is locking itself away where other people can't find them, away from the rest of the playerbase. To me, that just seems a bit wrong. It's an MMORPG, and I'm not sure I like the idea of all the guilds having a little haven from which they occasionally appear to go and kill something, and then return to. It'd serve to further divide the community into cliques, which is never good. Forcing players to do everything in the non-instanced world would retain a lot more interaction between the community. The last thing you want, after all, are for the main cities in a game to become underpopulated because all the endgame players have guild halls that do everything they need more quickly and conveniently than a city could.

You have to balance this off against a guild having a space to call their own, and to foster a sense of community within the group. While I don't see much point for player housing because it's inherently non-social, guild halls certainly ARE social - just within one particular clique. I think I am actually slightly pro-guildhalls on balance, I just don't think a guild hall should be too functional, rather that it should be a record of that guild's achievements and a show of status to other players. Quite how you can get other players to see a guild's guild hall without putting them in-game and then ruining the playworld (a la UO) is another puzzle in itself, though. I'm going to go off and give some more thought as to how I'd like to see them implemented.

Player housing, though, really isn't something I see any room for in the current MMO genre (besides possibly in EVE-style economic simulation games).