The Mana World Forums

Maybe have it so players can have their own house or if this would be to much trouble maybe guildhalls where guilds can buy their own house where the members can port to at any time and where a bank could be and maybe some other stuff

any comments?

don't expect to see a bank

Player-owned real estates - in form of predesigned buildings or even empty plots that can be designed by the owner to some extent - are an interesting idea. But unfortunately the details leave a lot of room for screwup.

When real estates are added to the game then every active player will want one. You can assume that the number of active players is a lot larger than the number of people you see online simultanously. When every active player plays 2 hours a day then you can assume the number of active players to be ten times as many as the usual population online.

Where should all these real estates be placed?

One possibility would be to place them in the game world. But it would be impossible to scale the number of available real estates to the number of active players. TMW should be enjoyable for communities of tens, hundreds or even thousands of players. When you have too many real estates the game world would be full of unused ones. When you have too few a lot of players won't get any and they would stay a privilege for few.

The other possibility would be to instance the real estates. Every real estate is on its own map that can not be reached by traveling in the game world but only through some special way of transportation. This has the advantage that it is very scaleable as an infinite number of real estates can coexist without taking space in the game world. But here are two other problems. First the owner will usually be the only one who ever sees his real estate. So there is not much motivation to personalize it and few posibilities to integrate player housing into the mechanics of the whole game world. The second problem is that instancing stretches the suspension of disbelief a lot. When thousands of players own thousands of instanced buildings why can't they be seen anywhere in the normal game world? Where do these buildings exist? In some kind of parallel universe? You need some very good explanation here.


When anyone has a good idea how the problems of either method could be solved in an elegant way then feel free to post.

This could be solved very easily, how about every community is on a special map that can only be gotten to by talking to a nomad. The nomad then teleports you to this map where you and your friends have their house.

What you are describing is just instancing with the difference that multiple people use one instance. But all the problems I described above do still exist. The lack of interaction with other peoples estates would only be lowered slightly because you can only interact with the estates of a small fraction of all players and the suspension of disbelieve problem does still persist.

Oh, and with the word "community" I was referring to the complete community of players playing on one server (I assume that there will be a lot more independent TMW servers than just the official one one day).

I've never played a commercial MMORPG with a housing feature, so I dont know how they solved the problems... A free 2d RPG called Mystical Island had that feature and it had all the problems Crush mentioned... Houses are limited to a few people and therefor they were very expensive. Thats was bad!

I like the idea of instances but I cannot solve the problem of the disbelief too

non-instances and instances are both extremes. I mean the first needs a lot of space and is believable and the second needs no space and is not believable... So we need the best of both of them.

here just an idea (we don't want to spent too much space and it should be a bit realistic).

• every city should have a big map with houses. Some houses can have multiple doors too.
• there should be some houses outside of the cities (like in a cave, cave behind a waterfall, in the woodland, and so on...)
• every "door" symbolize (for example) 10 instances. (too much is not believable)
• If the player enters a "door", he sees the list of people who are living here. Now he can select a Name and he is warping to the instance (just one room!).
• of course there should be some kind of telephone-book to get the addresses of people.

Example: (10 instances/door)
Currently we have 3 cities (Desert, Woodland, Snow). Each city has a housing map with 20 doors. So just the cities could be the home of 600 people.

ok, I see thats also bad... (I post it anyway... maybe it helps someone to develop new ideas...)

Estates or housing may be available in real form, but only as an guildhouse, for guilds, with let's say more than 10-15 members and cost a hell of money... (this can lower the number of houses).

About the placing...I imagine that there could be 3 or 4 (more or less) predesigned buildings, which would be used by all guilds, assuming that it would work like irc channels.:

Example:
Leader of guild X buys guildhouse from City Mayor NPC... from now on members of the X guild can freely enter this estate. Like when someone creates the irc channel and our guildhouse is IRC Server...Wait! Here comes leader of the Y guild! And he's gonna purchase the same house as the X leader!
No need to panic, he just creates like another "irc channel" (->guildhouse) on our "server" (->actual estate)...so when different members enter the estate they are "warped" or "moved" or whatever to their respective "guildplace"->"irc channel"

disadvantages: it could look weird in the case of massive guilds gatherings, when players would see everyone around entering the same building, but come on.. it's just game, not reality
Also these estates should be far enough from each other, on the town edges, not centers to prevent creations of overcrowded areas....

my two cents...

Peacemaker wrote:I've never played a commercial MMORPG with a housing feature, so I dont know how they solved the problems...

Anarchy Online - a science fiction themed MMO - solved the problem with instances and "Hilbert Hotel Skyscrapers". There are highrise apartment buildings in the game with elevators. When you step into the elevator it brings you to the floor with your flat. Every floor is one instance. But because you never know on which floor you are you never know how many virtual floors the building really has. But this solution to explain instancing is not suitable as skyscrapers are quite misplaced in fantasy themed mmorpgs.

Another MMORPG that i used to play was the quite unpopular fantasy MMORPG Horizons. It had "player towns" placed everywhere in the world. All plots in the game were claimed by players but few were really used. So there were a lot of "ghost towns" consisting of empty but claimed plots.

In Ultima Online players are able to construct buildings everywhere. Here you can read why this is a bad idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issues_Fac ... ne#Housing
(Btw: the rest of the article is also an interesting collection of design traps you can step into when creating an MMORPG)

I like the Tent idea I read about in the Ultima Online article. Perhaps the Nomad can take you to a "camp site" where there are levels to the forest, like the skyrise buildings, and each area is a new instance.

Ask a man to bring you to your very own house? Nah
I was thinking of handeling real estates like this:

There's a part of the city (drawn out) that you can walk around in. The other part is where the real estates are. If you walk down that street you will be asked who you'd like to visit. Of course that could be your own house or any of your buddies/guildmates/partymembers that own a house in that town.
So it would be like the skyscraper idea, only the skyscraper is a neighbourhood.

im kinda liking your idea. Modanung in a way that how i thought it would work best as but never know

My idea would be the following (instanced approach)

Housing only for guilds.

Every guild can buy a guild headquarter. What headquarters can be bought by a guild depends on their fame. Fame can be awarded in guild versus guild fights or through other guild-related game elements. Guild headquarters range from campsites and caves over mansions and towers to prosperous strongholds and castles. Every guild headquarter is in a separate instance. There can be infinite guild headquarter instances but every guild can only own one at a time.

To reach the guild HQ instance every guildmember got an item that teleports it to the guild HQ. Every guildmember that is currently on the guild HQ map leaves a teleporter back to its former location in the real world. Guild members can also return to the real world through the teleporters of other guildmembers. This allows to gather the guild for dungeon rushs and other events quickly.

The guild HQs offer various services to the guild. Depending on the type of guild HQ it has some of the following facilities. Guild HQs can also have multiple of each of these facilities:

-Store room A shared item storage space for the whole guild. Everyone can put items in or take items out of the store room.
-Store room with door Like the storeroom but the guild leader can give permissions to deposite or permissions to withdraw items from the store room to individual guildmembers.
-Store room with guard Like the store room with door, but the guild leader can view a logfile that says who deposited or took what items from the storeroom and when.
-Treasure chamber A shared bank account where guild members can deposite or withdraw money.
-Treasure chamber with door Like the treasure chamber but the guild leader can give permissions to withdraw money from the store room to individual guildmembers.
-Treasure chamber with accountant Like the treasure chamber with door, but the guild leader can view a logfile that says who deposited or took how much money from the treasure chamber and when.
-Library A place where documents about metagaming or background information can be read.
-Training room A room where PvP is allowed so that guildmembers can test their strength against each other.
-Illusionary training room A room where monsters can be summoned for training and testing in a controlled invironment. The monsters are just illusions. That means that they have infinite hit points and the damage they inflict is shown but not deducted from the players hit points.
-Dorm A place where guildmembers can rest for free
-Private room A combined store room and dorm that can only be accessed by one specific guildmember. I think it might give some conflicts in guilds over the question who deserves one of the private rooms and who doesn't.

I know that in EQ2 it would create a privet map for everyone who bought a home at that building.....

so an unlimited amount of people can live at the same building in town.

I don't like the whole teleporting thing. A building should have a place in the world. Which could be an area like a forest, a neighbourhood or a cave. But it should be accessable on foot. Or... hey. Here's an idea:
How about there are roads in cities (or other area's) with semi-dead ends. You can't walk further, but there's a taxi/riksia/boatman/map/whatever that you can ask to bring you to a place you know of. In the example of the boatsman this could be the other side of the lake or a hideout somewhere at the shore.

And I think if a single player is as rich as an entire guild I think he should be able to buy his own house.

what we need is the projects ...

no but seriously, i like each idea a little bit (except the teleport idea).

here's my take. start small and move to big. you want to build a house first you gotta buy a tent. and once you have a tent set up on a plot of land (anywhere, but you should choose to put it somewhere safe like behind city walls and i'll explain why later), you can find an npc who will convert it to a house for a fee; different npc's make different types of houses: masons make brick/stone ones, lumberjacks make wood ones, etc. a house has a certain amount of upkeep and when you build it outside of city walls, it degrades faster. so if someone builds a house and stops playing within say 30 days that house will be deleted. think of it as property tax on the server. housing instructions can be stored on the clientside in a format that combines with the map format (they are separate so when the house is deleted it doesn't affect the original map) and the housing instructions have an expire date that gets updated somehow when its upkept by the owner, and after it expires the client knows to delete the file. the map file would also have some kind of permissions for whether a tile can be used for building or not so you can't build your house on a tree or something.

also only a house can be turned into a guild hall by being upgraded, a guildhall doesn't need upkeep until the guild is disbanded. the server should also remove inactive users from the database automatically. so if a bunch of inactive players form a guild, their guild and property are deleted so something else can be built there. the server should send somekind of simple update string (maybe like an rss feed, whats changed since last login) to the client when he logs in and this string can be used to delete old housing, update map changes (not to the base map).

p.s. - seperating map changes from a base map could be used for alot of things. say you got a statue that you can look at to get healed and there is a server generated enemy surge near the statue. the statue could become broken for so many days after the surge (during those days maybe some npc's can appear around it like they're fixing it). this change could be stored on the client seperate from the main map file and can have an expire date when the client will delete it. these changes could be used to say mark a shop as closed while the shopkeeper is on vacation in another city. it's got a lot of potential.