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Housing needs a good revamp
Comments
goldNX you can buy with the moneys you save on electricity.That's ok. I'll stick to the rules and keep 1 topic per thread if you don't mind
Your thread is also over a month older, with you essentially bumping it, and it has so much to look at in terms of what you want to see done. Arjune's is focusing on the financial aspect of housing like the costs of owning the house and the issue of space for selling vs decoration.
I do have other things but unfortunately, it is time for work >.<
I feel like the housing channel and homesteads, which both have houses, are redundant if they both exist. It's true homesteads are free, although this isn't entirely true; homesteads require PON to have fancy decorations and some resources which could play in nicely if housing and homesteads were merged.
VIP could replace PON (because I feel it's super dumb that we have PON) and allow players to build unique exclusives if they have the service. Also, it would allow a new depth option to homesteads; selling and listing items from the now merged VIP house in your homestead would be exclusive to VIP members, while decorating and the size of the house is based on the house level. (which could also play a role in how many listed items you could have/gold capacity?) This would in turn allow free players to be able to upgrade and decorate their house, while VIP players have the new feature of being able to sell items and store gold in their houses which are registered on the housing market.
I don't know too much about servers though and how it could be managed...But, I feel this can be worked around; If a player enters their homestead and then house interior, they would be switched to the housing channel. If they have a flier, they could be teleported directly to the interior of their house and thus switch channels. The entrance to the homestead house would act only as a means of teleporting to your housing interior in the housing channel.
Dunno, still up in the air... ^-^"
As long as housing is used for selling things, it's a bad idea to try to combine it with Homesteads. At best, it's just redundant. Of course, I wouldn't mind homestead houses being a thing at all, if we were to get the Auction House people keep mentioning, and if that were to replace the housing channel entirely (I don't know that it would, since I don't know how it works exactly). I just don't like the idea of homesteads being a gate to the housing channel. The only reason I could see for doing this would be moving homesteads to the housing channel for whatever reason, which a lot of players would probably be opposed to, and which probably wouldn't be done even if they weren't.
Now (at the risk of getting slightly off topic), that part concerning VIP and pon interested me, because I was thinking something similar earlier when I read what Falconade said. I don't necessarily like the idea of getting rid of pon entirely (not that pon is great, I just don't see any good reason to get rid of it), but it would be neat if VIP offered some of the things that can be obtained with pon, or something which compounds the benefits of pon items. As an example, I was thinking that if we did have things like mirrors, they could be used to 'store' some appearance options which would normally cost pon to select, and these could be changed at will, in game, for free as long as VIP is active (though it would make sense to require a one-time pon payment upon registering these options to the mirror).
As I pointed out in a previous thread, which is now locked:
For the most part on a very fundamental level, Homesteads are free and housing is not. For basic function without the fancy stuff, a homestead only requires gold and in-game resources, which are easily obtained, either through farming or through other players. To have the extra fancy/advanced stuff (outside of events), say Steam or Dry Oven for alchemists, yeah, you will be shelling out a real world currency converted to in-game currency (Pons), which brings us to the next suggestion.
Um, no. Pon is basically Nexon's way of rewarding an in-game currency to be only used with Mabinogi, nothing else. You can think of it as a fail-safe of sorts for events. Unlike rewarding NX and having it accessible in other games, Nexon introduced Pons as a means for people who do not have access to NX to be able to enjoy certain little changes or amenities that are usually left for those who buy NX regularly somehow, either through other players, or buying it themselves as Karma Koins, or even charging through Credit Cards or other means of eCommerce. Not a lot of people have some of these options, and for players to be able to somehow earn Pons through events is a very nice thing. Oh, and just to point out, when you charge a credit card, there are service fees that the company pays (Hence why some times there are minimums in some stores), which most of the time is a drop in a bucket for large companies, but when you charge it every single time for something that's only like a few cents (I think the rate is 1 Pon = $.09...? Correct me if I'm wrong on this), that service fee is gonna ramp up fast. So, Pons are actually a good thing for those with no access to company currency, especially if you just want to change a look or two (Better than the old way when you always had to buy character cards just to do that, which was quite a bit in the past). Not to mention it's just easier for Nexon to reward those during events as opposed to NX.
At best, as AlmostNotsuper pointed out, housing and homestead is more redundant than anything (Keep in mind, Homesteads were introduced WAY after the housing districts were, which was introduced in G3. Homesteads were towards G9+. This was Nexon's reply to having a personal space that you can actually control to an extent). At worse, you're mixing the idea of rental vs. actually owning, and to actually overhaul the housing channel to what you're proposing is a bit of a nightmare (I'm trying not to think about it on a technical level here). Also, to make Homesteads a gateway to the player's house is sort of self-defeating since then, you limit the amount of people who have access to your house by a LOT. Not to mention that this would also defeat the idea of visiting another house without logging out of the housing channel just to visit another house. You see where this is going? Oh, and another thing: While they are used to help players sell their wares/act as storage, the housing districts were also a gold sink at that time since those with VIP generally did end up making more gold than someone who didn't have services.
Personally, an Auction House is great, but that should be a separate system of its own (Refer to World of Warcraft's Auction House system if you want to go deeper and get an idea of how it works. It's more of a guide on how to use it a bit more efficiently, but the first parts will give you a glance at the system. If you want me to go into the specifics of it, I'll be glad to explain it in-game. Just send a friend request to my forum name). Unlike housing, Auction House would be just item holding. There's no worrying about changing channels, you can actually set auctions for a small fee since you're still using the game to help list your items, and if an auction times out, items are just sent back to your mailbox, and EVERYONE has access to it. Simple, effective, maybe a bit annoying at times, especially for people who list single-unit items for things that actually stack (This is, by definition, a form of griefing and would probably warrant you an ignore by everyone. So don't be that guy and cause trouble for everyone). Probably the few things I would set as limitations is limiting single-unit stackable sales to only 5 units per item (So only 5 single-units of Holy Water can be listed while stacked items have larger allowances), limit of 10 transactions a day so as not to flood the auction house (VIP can probably have the limit set to 20 or even 30), and there must be at least 5 or 10 gold difference when it comes to trying to compete with other auctioneers (I hate it when people undercut by one gold just to get a better listing. At least do better than that... Come on...).
Think that's all I have for now. Too big of a wall already.
For your first paragraph, I would like to mention that I'm simply trying to find a way for non-vip players to have features that are exclusive those fortunate to have housing: the ability to decorate interiors. I personally would love to do this, as I'm a huge fan of games like The Sims, but I'm not a fan of having to decorate a homestead (which only takes PON for many aesthetic items) AND needing VIP and GOLD (which only takes NX) to decorate an interior. This makes things very inaccessible having to purchase NX which purchases pon and having to use NX, pon, and gold to be able to decorate my homestead and house. And I'm not the only person who would really like to decorate interiors: take Darkpixie99's poll which voted that the most desired revamp was interior decoration in homestead houses!
For your second paragraph, I also would like to mention why I feel PON is/was a terrible idea. You mention that a company loses money with each microtrasaction with eCommerce while at the same time supporting a microtransaction. Pon is a microtransaction within a microtransaction which defeats the purpose of it saving money! I feel it would be much better if pon were removed, and the features you could buy with pon were instead exclusive to VIP since it allows 1 day - 90 day transactions. People could just buy VIP for one day which grants them the ability to build things in homesteads and change their appearance for 24 hours or however long they pay with the added bonus of VIP services.
And onto your last suggestion! I love the idea of having an auction house like WoW, but I couldn't think of how it would fit in with the idea of having two redundant houses...So I thought of a sort-of radical idea! Why not make the housing channel a trade hub where people could go and trade? This could include an auction house, player-built/rented shops (old houses), and a castle which oversees trades! I would also love if shops could be upgraded from a merchant stand to possibly a multi-level trading guild which would require building materials similar to the guild-castle. This of course could be exclusive to VIP, while non-VIP could still use Dunbarton/Belvast...Or the auction house as a means of selling goods!
There's a ton of cool ideas that could be added to make it even more exciting, but it's clear these features need to be cleaned and improved; since housing did come out in g3 and are just really early homesteads with less features...but, you can sell items that are heavily taxed! so that's good? ^-^"
Yep. You're definitely right about this.
Look a little closer. The reason Falconade cited for microtransactions being expensive was the service fees - which are exclusive to charges from a credit card, and not an inherent part of the microtransactions themselves. Once Nexon has converted our moneys into NX, they can do whatever they want with it, whenever they want. The only way that fee could possibly be affecting PON is if people are buying miniscule amounts of NX via credit card whenever they feel like buying PON. I don't even know if that's possible, since I've only ever used the credit card option here once, but most services have a minimum amount you can charge anyway, as Falconade mentioned.
Anyway, while you could say the PON system is more complicated than it needs to be, the pros it gives (more customization without the cost of a character card primarily, but also the ability to give it out in-game for free) outweigh that con. Not to mention, any simplification would probably be meaninigless - all I can see them doing is displaying costs in tiny amounts of NX instead of PON. This is why I said that, while I'm not a huge fan of the pon system, I don't see any good reason to get rid of it. I see no reason not to give VIP players some amount of pon benefits for 'free', but there's no reason to remove pon from the game and make it exclusive to VIP either. It would only limit most players more.
Bleh. I hadn't thought of it as a literal auction house until just now, when I read both of your comments. That irks me a little for some reason, but what we do now with party ads is basically an auction anyway, so it'd be nice to clear up the party chat channel I guess. People would probably flood it anyway, but maybe they wouldn't bother to AFK just to do so.
I like your ideas in this paragraph, it kind of clears up the rest of what you were trying to say in your other post. With this in mind, your demand for a more elaborate personal housing system in Homesteads makes more sense. I agree that changing the housing areas into market areas is a good idea, since people pretty much only use them for that anyway. I could see a bunch of stalls being set up in place of most of the houses, and the auction house could go in the center. The stalls don't even all have to be VIP only (more people=more effective goldsink with lesser taxes), but VIP should get you some sort of benefit.
While you're at it, might as well improve the guild aspect. Maybe turn some of the largest houses into guild shops/halls (not just a literal guild hallway, which is what we have now). Make the guild castle more interesting, and DEFINITELY do something with the housing dungeons. I could see them being an instanced raid kind of thing for guilds. I can even imagine some lore to go along with this... I'd better stop before I slip into rant mode.