In my one year review of DarkFall, I mentioned that certain areas of the game are incomplete or not yet fully fleshed out, and I want to spend a few posts talking about some of those areas, the first one being Player Housing. Player housing in DarkFall has seen two major updates (the initial implementation, and the addition of player vendors and sea villages), and needs at least a few more to fully reach its potential.
As it stands today, a player’s house has two main functions; a secondary bind spot and the location of your player vendor (if you find/purchase that addition). The secondary bind spot is somewhat self-explanatory, but in a world the size of Agon, it’s a very important tool for both individual players and clans looking for quick transportation. Vendors can be a great way to sell your goods, but location and advertising is key.
The housing market initially was a complete lottery; if you were lucky enough to find a deed in a chaos chest, you either sold it for a fortune or placed it yourself and got a home. Many felt this was a somewhat unfair system and excluded too many from the chance of owning a home of their own. In addition to just the deed, all furniture, decorations, and additions (vendors, gardens, trees) to houses are also found in chaos chests, so again initially this was all a lottery.
Today however the situation has somewhat changed, as there are now two different markets. One is the placed house market, where a current owner sells his placed house to someone else. The buyer knows the exact location and size of the house, plus all of the additions that have been added. Currently prices for placed houses are very high, especially in the more desirable locations. The other market is the house deed market, were the buyer is buying an unplaced deed (cottage, house, villa, large villa, or keep) and they then must find an empty plot to place it. As spots are very hard to find (they become open if a current owner fails to pay his taxes), a deed is generally worth less than a placed house.
Since no one knows if/when Aventurine plans to add more villages, buying a deed today and waiting for a spot to open is a risky venture. Add in the fact that as more deeds are found, the overall price is likely to drop, and again WHEN to buy one is tricky. If you know a spot is going to open up, or just happen to come across an open spot, getting a deed and placing it is a very smart move. Risk/reward ratio, just like most things in DarkFall.
Originally I was not in favor of the lottery system, but now that the concept has matured a bit, I find it fairly reasonable. If you want top property, be prepared to pay for it. If you want to gamble, acquire a deed and hunt for a spot to place it. What will improve this situation as a whole is when Aventurine adds more villages, so more houses are being sold or lost to taxes, and the market overall is more active. Currently it can be almost impossible to buy a house if you are very location-specific.
But beyond the issue of availability and pricing, houses being glorified secondary bind spots and a potential spot to sell goods is cutting the concept short, as there is so much more Aventurine could add to make them more a place to live out of rather then a place to teleport to. Hopefully among all of the additions planned for 2010, housing gets further attention as well.
Hardcore Casual 
This crossed my mind recently after reading your post about the housing hunt. I also rediscovered Galad’s adventures in UO (most of which revolved around houses) and began to really hope Aventurine finds a creative way to beef up housing.
If these houses are in villages, whats the village like is it a safe place or just open combat, I just keep wondering if you leave your house can you just be killed outright if your not prepared. And what are the neighbours like.
They are open PvP areas like any other in DF. No towers or anything like that. As for your neighbors, I’m sure some people have worked out a ‘no PvP’ deal, but I’ve had a good share of PvP happen at villages as well (they are after all intended to be PvP hotspots)
So there is no way to assault or capture someone’s housing? It would be kinda neat if you had a ‘deed’ that there was some way to use that to destroy another player’s structure and then use your deed to place a new one.
If the owner fails to pay taxes for 2 weeks they lose the house permanently.
A new deed (of the same type) can/will be dropped at that location (all the accessories will be inherited) by the new owner.
If you think about it, that would kill the whole idea of housing.
Sure it would be fun to be able to turn up at some ones house at 5am slap knock the door down and take it over. But why bother?
All that will happen is in the middle of the next night someone will come along and take it back. It wont encourage PvP and will stop people wanting to upgrade their house.
While I am all for hardcore limited rules PvP, they made the right call in this case.
So I’m looking forward to a few things…
First – craftable items for houses.
The drop rate on most items is ridiculously low such that things like safes and silver birches are unattainable for most people with houses.
Resources like silver birches, gardens etc cause people to want to visit their houses daily (and for people to visit your house). I’d love to see an ore node added for that matter.
Safes were ostensibly to test out the waters of local banking. I’m unclear how they can do that if a majority of houses lack them (and will continue to in the future)? I personally think every house should have them by default or at least with a craftable item that takes say… 500 ingots to make.
As an aside Safes need a fix badly. Currently only the owner can use it. I think the correct fix is for “F” to be a common guess and ownder safe area (like clan bank) and “G” to be the owner-only area.
In the next expansion of housing spots I’d very much like to see remote house spots added.
While the villages are cool, it would be great to have some single spot locations on remote islands, deep in the woods or on the sides of mountains. While it wouldn’t directly add to immediate village based pvp it would add interesting spots around the world in general. I believe Aventurine implied or suggested that housing like this would be available but I’m too lazy to go find that ;)
At a larger level villages need -something- I can’t quite put my finger on.
To me I think villages need a reason for you to know, respect and cooperate with your neighbors even if they aren’t in your guild.
The only thing I can think of for this is some kind of resource’ish node that all house owners get automatically (so they aren’t killing each other for) but they lose the stream of if a non house owner/guest “steals” it…(bonus points for the resource being auto put in your house safe :) )
Not really sure how to flesh that out. Probably need a “village” chat, probably need to see village events in your system log etc.
Could they steal something from POTBS and their upcoming Port Governance feature?
Each village can vote on a mayor and he can do certain things to the village.