In this week's article of The Scrying Pool, I look at possible player housing in Guild Wars 2.

In the story, the player has his own house, can show off his stuff to other players (the children in the story), is part of a neighborhood of other player housing and can open or lock his house to the public. All of these flow together in a very natural way. There wasn't a loading screen between inside and outside his house, there wasn't a need for party invites to enter the house (though having locked to only party, friends or guild would be a nice feature) and the house was not an isolated experience.

The neighborhood was one of the first things I thought about for player housing. As a veteran of Star Wars Galaxies (Pre-CU of course) I loved the idea that players got a piece of the world as their own, but I also really liked that my house would be next to all of the other player houses. I could go check out my neighbor's house if they allowed visitors. It was cool to see what they were showing off, but it also gave this sense that anyone could go and see my awesome achievements or the cool loot I was showing off in my house.

This is one of the reasons I wasn't a fan of the housing in Rift. You can do amazing things within the house editor in Rift. I made a really quick and easy jumping puzzle in my instance just because I could. But the whole instancing part made it not really feel like my house was a part of the world and didn't make it all that accessible for random people to just go in and check out. While it was an awesome experience, it was an experience that felt completely disconnected from the rest of the game.

In the first idea of the neighborhood, they were tied to Guild Halls. A guild would choose its guild hall from the available list of halls, for example a cool castle like the innermost parts of Stonemist, then players would buy up the lots of land surrounding the castle to become create a Guilddom.

I really liked this idea, because it allowed for some neat additional features tied to this. In GW1 there was GvG, which essentially worked out to a guild trying to raid another guild's Guild Hall and kill their lord. This Guilddom could have functioned the same way with some interesting personal involvement. A player could install a trap in the front wall of their house that shoots any enemies that walk in front of it. Because the castle is in the center of the Guilddom, these personally setup traps could be a great boon to the fight.

The problem with that is the multiple guild setup. What happens if you have a house but are in five different guilds? Can you only place a house in one Guilddom? Do you have to pay for five plots of land to get your house in each Guilddom? Once you update your house in one Guilddom, will it automatically update in all of them? Then there is the instance problem of how do you show off your house to non-guild members.

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