Tandor wrote: »

My ideal for player housing would be for it to be modelled on EQ2, including the incredible scope for furnishings. I don't particularly favour instances filled with houses, they get sold out immediately and then become deserted as players move on, LoTRO being an example of that. LoTRO is also an example of how not to do furnishings with a bare handful of "hooks" and virtually nothing available in the game to hang on them, certainly compared to EQ2.

Vanguard's system of house-building was also pretty cool.

What with EQ2, VG and SWG, SOE pretty well cornered the housing system in MMOs.

DAOC had a tax system and if you let the deposit run out unpaid for a month the house would be removed and the land again up for sale, which is what I termed rent in the OP. My idea in the op was to leverage phasing so that room doesn't run out, but so that you also don't have a silly door n a city you go into and vanish in a tiny instanced room. Half the point of housing in an mmo is the decoration and trophy mounting aspects to show to other passerby. And where to put the houses isn't a concern, it's not like new areas in a zone can't be added in the patch that introduces housing just like in other games. I covered this all in the original post but these points seem to be getting a lot of discussion when they wouldn't be relevant to this system .

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

Dixa wrote: »

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

Dixa wrote: »

dark age of Camelot was and is still a very small game player wise.

Actually, in fact DAOC was a large game for its time period.

not really. it never even hit original everquest concurrent subs. while you may look fondly back at emain rvr as awesome, huge battles there were only about 60 total players out there across all three factions during those "huge" battles.

Oh, I get your point now. It isn't talking about any facts or reality but just posting to post. Have a good night.

For those unfamiliar with mmorpg history, the above isn't accurate needless to say. It would be more amusing if he even had something realistic sounding to post... I loved nights when our guild's Alliance (in DAOC you could form alliances with other guilds to get a shared chat channel and some other functions) needed to form a third battle group on some big RVR nights . Each one holds two hundred people if you don't know from plying DAOC, and like cyrodiil is here, there was only one frontier per server ("campaign" here).

Good memories from a game ahead of its time in many ways.
Good memories.

SteveCampsOut wrote: »

Dixa wrote: »

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

Dixa wrote: »

dark age of Camelot was and is still a very small game player wise.

Actually, in fact DAOC was a large game for its time period.

not really. it never even hit original everquest concurrent subs. while you may look fondly back at emain rvr as awesome, huge battles there were only about 60 total players out there across all three factions during those "huge" battles.

You've obviously never played DAoC in it's youth! We had close to 200 Albs in our Zergs! Hell, a single "Group" in DAoC maxed at 8 people, not 4 like ESO. Get 10-20 groups going and the same in the other two realms and the lag still wasn't as bad as Cyrodull! Mind you, this was before the many MANY server consolidations when the game was collapsing.

Yup, no kidding... I played it from launch (2001) through mid-2008, and a couple of random months later on, almost continuously. I think the longest break I took was a few weeks from RL circumstances . I played on alb/lance and quite literally we had multiple battlegroups going a lot of the time, and in our alliance alone just the 5 guilds in it including mine were fielding 2 full ones for relic raids (200 people each = 400 people from just five guilds). It was a "drop everything!!! save the relic!" thing because people wanted to keep their bonuses, not an "I wonder if we have cyro bonuses tonight for raiding?" where because of campaign hopping, no ties to any specific campaign other than aiming for emperor, and being able to both change home as well as just port to player at will to any campaign "server" in ESO, people don't care about defending the scrolls terribly much, let alone territory. Different era... a better one for gaming, though not as mass-market accessible.

Daoc peaked out at 300k concurrent subs. EQ at 500k.

My guild - Sancti Graal which I and a friend founded - owned all relics on igraine for the first 6 months of that games release. Alb Had big numbers, mid and hib had almost nothing and only started to make a comeback when class changed started to give them some clear advantages to overcome the population balance.

The game was not as large as you remember. Most players were at least two accounts each as you needed a buffbot or buffs from one to be competitive in pvp and pve.

Housing worked because the pop on each server simply was not that large and the game was not that demanding on systems or server hardware. Eso on the other hand is.

@Dixa, as far as raw subscriber counts, as I said for its time period in the mmorpg market it was a large game. Only in the past few years have we now started seeing buy to play and free to play games regularly have more than eq and daoc had back in the day, except wow which I already covered and is a typical opinion as to its size given no game has come close before or since it . The mmorpg market also has a much wider popularity than ever before.

@stevecampsout, yep, I was disappointed to see that was allowed ages ago. I was also fairly disappointed that we were allowed to roll any race on any faction too for example. While I don't see ESO surpassing daoc and its community back in the day, I also don't see any game really doing that in the near or mid future with how much the gaming market and its demographic has changed and the need (want?) for making games more "accessible". Makes business sense, of course, but you do lose out on the purity of gameplay and design as you loosen rulesets to appeal to a broader audience.

ESO:

The game had 772,000 subscribers in June 2014 according to SuperData Research.[39] It was later reported in October 2014 by the same company that the game had generated around $111 million in subscription revenue, indicating that the game had about 1.2 million subscribers around that point


DAoC:

The Shrouded Isles expansion was released and populations climbed back up slightly, then in November 2003 populations once again rose to 250,000 with the release of the "Trials of Atlantis" expansion and remained at that level until October 2004 when market competition (Everquest II, World of Warcraft) caused these numbers to gradually decrease over time.

Eq1:

Verant, from 1999 to 2001, and SOE, from 2001 to 14 January 2004, issued formal statements giving some indications of the number of EverQuest subscriptions and peak numbers of players online at any given moment.[16] These records show more than 225,000 subscriptions on 1 November 1999,[citation needed] with an increase to more than 450,000 subscriptions by 25 September 2003

I'm a bit devastated that there is NO housing AT ALL!! As stupid as it sounds, I love doing my own place up in various games, and thought a game like this, with so much happening, would have housing as a matter of course!

first they should all the small issues ( who summed up ) to be a big issue, than content^^

They just better give us something cool, something cool for Tamriel's Heroes. Some cottage or simple houses isnt going to do it for me.

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

Sausage wrote: »

They just better give us something cool, something cool for Tamriel's Heroes. Some cottage or simple houses isnt going to do it for me.

DAOC's system did this too, like I talked about in the OP. Guild mansions could be bought by individuals who were wealthy enough .

That sounds decent but let us be leaders of towns, or criminals dens. That would be awesome.

If ESO implemented DAoC housing along with it's broker system it would make this game so much better.

The current system really only caters to the top 5% of guilds that can afford the kiosks in prime areas. This needs to change.

FF:ARR did somewhat the same thing.. it works well... im sure they have something planned but just like theiving and a few other things that took time to implament and wasnt in day dot... and im sure they have a reason for that too... nice ideas OP