Grace

Content by Grace

Player Housing Wishlist

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A few days ago Alunaria asked me in the comments what my ideal player housing in WoW would look like. I figured it would be more fun to answer with its own blog post, because I’m also curious how you folks would answer this question.

Player Housing Wishlist

There’s a lot of things I love about WildStar’s housing, and would definitely steal those for my perfect player housing.

  1. Full control over item placement. Great player housing must allow for player creativity. For me that means lots of cool housing decor, and the ability to move it, rotate it, and scale it in any way I want. “Hook” systems are frustrating. Let me place all my decor freely.
  2. Multiple ways to acquire decor. WildStar’s decor can be crafted, earned through repeatable activities, dropped from mobs, and gained through quests. Decor should drop in pretty much every type of player content so there are always new items to discover or chase.
  3. Some pre-built set pieces can be nice. WildStar gives you choices for when you didn’t feel like building your own buildings from scratch. Having some modular pieces like pre-built houses is great for people who want housing but don’t want to micro manage every inch of their space.
  4. A reason to go back there. Like WoW’s garrisons, WildStar lets you earn some resources through your house. Unlike garrisons, the amount of resources never completely removed the need for gathering in the world. Also WildStar lets you choose other useful things for your plot, like portals to zones you like, or mini-dungeons you can run for fashion or more housing decor. No matter what, there should be some benefit to having a house.
  5. Social controls and social events. I love that WildStar lets you choose who can enter your house, and what they can do there. For example, you can let your friends  harvest your resources, and you can set it so you split then so you both get a benefit when they visit. I would also steal WildStar’s use of housing during seasonal events. Visiting different housing plots to trick-or-treat at Halloween is something every game should do!
  6. Housing should be accessible. You don’t have to be anywhere near the end game to unlock housing in WildStar, and it doesn’t cost very much to get started. I know WoW loves to add features specifically for new expansions at the level cap, but housing should be something like pet battles, that everyone can hop into right away. Save some fancy decor until higher levels if you have to, but at least let folks get their foot in the door early.

Player Housing WishlistThere’s also some housing ideas I like that aren’t stolen directly from WildStar Player Housing Wishlist

  1. The ability to have both guild housing and player housing. This one is basically taken from FFXIV. Have a guild space that also lets players have a small personal section in it. This way folks who don’t want to mess with housing can still have a cool place to hang out for RP and guild events.
  2. Dynamic neighborhoods. This is my dream feature. I’ve got no idea how to make the tech work, but what I would like is something like FFXIV’s housing districts, but without the crazy prices and housing scarcity that is so annoying in that game. I’d like an instanced zone with 20 – 50 houses set up in a reasonable neighborhood that you can wander around. Unlike FFXIV, all the plots would be the same size, and you’d just pay to upgrade your house or the number of items you can place on your plot. Your neighbors would be semi-permanent, but to keep it feeling lively if someone hasn’t logged in for 60 days someone active or new would get moved into their spot. Maybe you could bypass this for people on your friends list, or in your guild. And if your neighborhood is feeling lonely you could request a new spot near a friend. You would never lose your house from inactivity, and people wouldn’t have to wait for someone to move out to find a plot. You’d just end up with a new neighborhood if you’ve been gone for a while.
  3. Housing districts in lots of different zones. Don’t just give us one size fits all housing. I want to spent hours agonizing over whether I want a fancy apartment in Suramar, a peaceful treehouse in Moonglade, or an underwater grotto in Vashj’ir. There should be lots of different housing districts to fit lots of different player tastes.
  4. A choice to link alt housing. I have lots of characters, but not a lot of time and energy to make an awesome house for each of them. Let me choose if I want to let them share a house. Maybe my main wants to have her own big fancy place with all her raid decor, but everybody else could share one cool house instead of each having a mostly empty space.

Most importantly, I would want assurance from Blizzard that if they add proper player housing they aren’t going to abandon it at the start of the next expansion. Garrisons and Order Halls are neat, but it was sad to leave them behind as soon as the next new thing arrived. If they want players to get invested in housing and be creative, the players have to trust that all their hard work isn’t going to get swept away.

AggroChat #217 – Toots and Trolls

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Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Tamrielo

aggrochat217

This evening we talk about a bunch of stuff but first Ashgar sings for us and makes me lose my shit…  so working as intended. Grace and Bel talk about their experiences in Battle For Azeroth so far and how it turned out not to be as factiony as we expected.  We also sorta convince Tam to give the story a shot even though we know he will bounce off it eventually. Bel talks about his recent journey into Mastodon and how it seems like a throwback to the early days of the internet.  Tam also has joined in this process and talks about how the experience so far has been better for him than Twitter was. Tam also talks about his experiences with the game Detroit and so far how it seems to be less pretentious than the average David Cage fare.  Finally we talk about some comfort gaming and enjoyable mechanical loops like Warframe, Destiny and Dead Cells.

Topics Discussed

  • Battle For Azeroth
    • Convincing Tam to Play
    • Better Story
    • Shockingly Minimal Faction Nonsense
  • Mastodon
    • The New Not-Twitter
    • More like a BBS or Old IRC
    • Strength of Small Communities
    • Totally not another Ello
  • Detroit
    • Interesting story
    • Less Pretentious Cage
  • Comfort Gaming
    • Warframe
    • Enjoyable Mechanical Loops
    • Destiny
    • Dead Cells

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Ding 120!

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I actually hit 120 on Thursday evening. I didn’t use war mode for the xp buff, and I did take my time, read all the quest text, and watched all the cutscenes. There’s so much to do now I’m not even sure where I should start. I was so tired when I dinged that I didn’t do too much with it. Unlocking world quests was simple because even though I still haven’t finished the story quests in all three zones I am at least friendly reputation with their factions. I did a round of WQs so I didn’t miss out on the emissary for the day but then called it a night shortly after.

Ding 120!

I want to live here.

On Friday I worked a bit on the faction war campaign quests. I had already set up my bases in each of the Alliance zones, but now they were sending me back to start making excursions farther inland. I had the awesome surprise of getting to quest with one of my favorite characters, Lillian Voss. I’m not especially enthusiastic about faction nonsense, but it was nice to have the change of scenery and run around together as murdery bffs. The quest line ended without giving me any more breadcrumbs, so I’m not sure what I should be doing next to progress it. I wandered around to a couple places where there were flight points and found a few random bounty quests but not much else. There are plenty more horde flight paths to discover on my map so I know I’m not done. I suspect something else will open up when I increase my rep with the Horde war faction.

I’ve also run a few (normal) island scenarios. Supposedly they are a good source of azerite. I’m not really sure how I feel about them yet. I like the small (3-person) group size like scenarios in MoP. The islands do seem to be strangely freeform. I’ve seen groups stick together and roll through lots of enemies, and I’ve seen groups where everyone seems to wander off in a different direction. No group I’ve been in has ever done any of the quests that pop up, sadly. I’m sure soon an optimal strategy will evolve and everyone will start doing that. Overall they seemed reasonable to do, but I’m left wondering exactly what was the point. Maybe I’ll feel differently when I can do the more difficult versions with higher rewards. Side note: if you care about getting all your war campaign upgrades quickly, make sure to run a few islands sometime before reset. You have to finish five different ones to unlock one of the tiers of upgrades, and there are only 3 available each week.

I am sitting at the level cap but I still have most of the quests in Nazmir left to do. I plan on working on them slowly in between world quests and dungeons. I’m not in a huge hurry to gear up since I don’t have a raid group and will probably just be doing LFR, but I do want to get at least enough of an ilvl where questing isn’t too painful. As a fresh 120 disc priest the world quests aren’t horribly difficult, but it does take a long time for me to kill things.

I also want to start working on my crafting skills a bit now. I’ll need to find a good place for farming cloth, and send my druid through the intro quests so she can start picking herbs. I wish I had leveled with someone who had double gathering so I could have been selling raw materials all along, but my priest has alchemy and tailoring. They will be expensive to level right now, but should pay off nicely once I have a steady stream of bags and potions to put on the auction house.

Right now most of my friends are still leveling, so I’ll be focusing on getting my emissaries done every day and then branching out into whatever I feel like at the moment. It’s a good time to start working on alts for crafting and for seeing the alliance side of the story. I’m also looking forward to running some dungeons and/or islands with my friends this weekend, and hearing everyone’s reactions to the different zone stories.

 

Pug tales volume 4

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So I haven’t actually messed with my baby priest (who was level 48 at the start of this set of dungeons) since BfA launched. But the backlog of pug stories will continue to pad my Blaugust post count while I’m busy enjoying all the new stuff!

As a side note to the dungeon running, I really enjoyed the world level scaling. Since I’ve been getting most of my XP in dungeons, I’ve been able to cherry pick my questing zones and focus on the ones I enjoy. So far that’s been Ghostlands, Silverpine, and Hillsbrad. I really like being able to completely finish a zone without the quests turning gray on me.

Maraudon: The Wicked Grotto: This dungeon was relatively fun, even though things went to hell. You know you’re off to an ominous start when the pally tank zones in and immediately says something along the lines of “you’d better try to keep up.” Things were mostly fine until we got to the first boss. We had tried to skip a bunch of trash but someone who was lagging behind the group pulled. We ended up with the boss and about 3 packs worth of trash. The warlock died but everybody else made it through. Amazingly the tank even complimented my healing. Which of course wouldn’t have been necessary if he’d have kept an eye on the group. In however many years I’ve been healing, trying to skip trash has led to dungeons taking longer way more often than not. Anyway this tank ended up bailing after the satyr boss, but the rest of us kept going to kill Celebras. It was honestly easier without the tank, since we took our time and everyone looked out for each other.

Razorfen Kraul: It feels weird that this one is stuck in the middle of the three Maraudon dungeons. I obviously haven’t run this one in a long time, because there are changes that I do not remember at all. Where did the pig boss go? Anyway I had a pally tank and a solid group. They were mostly quiet but the tank pulled at what was probably the perfect pace for me. We kept moving, but they didn’t pull tons of packs at once. This was a breeze to heal.

Maraudon: Foulspore Cavern: I had another reasonable pally tank for this one. Healing is always more fun when the tank’s pace matches what I’m comfortable with. This dungeon is so short that there isn’t much to say about it. The only rough patch was the area where there’s some ambient damage on the group. It was a little tricky to deal with since I didn’t have all the tools I would like for aoe healing.

I finished off at level 52. At this point almost all of the vanilla dungeons are open to me, and there is no way I’m going to get through them all before I hit 60. I’m not even halfway through them yet! Sadly this is all I finished before BfA, and it will probably be a while before I get back to this alt.

The good news is that this mini-project definitely helped me get comfortable enough with disc healing to try maining it for BfA. It has ridiculous survivability in questing and has been pretty fun in dungeons so far too.