Player Housing

I want player housing! I want it in SW:ToR, and horror of horrors, I want it in WoW. I know that many consider this no more than "waste of time fluff," but honestly, why else do I play games except to waste time. I want to be able to create my own domain and set it up the way I want. I want to have to collect items for my home from drops, or I want to be able to craft those items through a laborious yet rewarding crafting system . . . or both. I want to be able to place stuff in my home where I want it and make the place uniquely mine. I want housing!

I have always wondered why this isn't a priority for WoW and now also for SW:ToR, but I guess when you have over a million players (many more in WoW's case) without it, do you really need to fix what doesn't seem to be broken? But, I love housing.

I've played a few games with player housing, and every time, I find myself spending a lot of my in-game time on decorating and redecorating my home, not to mention the time I spend acquiring the items I use in this decoration. One game I've played with pretty decent player housing is Wizard101. This is very much a "kid-centered" game. At best, I can say that the combat is "cute;" the characters are "fun," and even the housing is not the end-all of how housing should be. However, even here, I have spent hours setting up my house to my liking.

Of course I had to choose the "Death" house as the perfect abode for my Necromancer, and I have worked hard to acquire all the requisite skulls, tombstones, and skeletons to make it appropriately "death-y." It is amazing how often I have repeated content, something that I'm not usually very keen on, simply to get a purely cosmetic drop for my home. Having a house motivated me to play this game long beyond the point when I would have quit otherwise. Even now, when I no longer have an active account and have no desire to reopen one, I still pop in occasionally to check out my house and bask in my decorating abilities.

Of course, anyone who has played Skyrim has had some experience with player housing as well. Yes, I'm aware that one can't really place items as he would want within the house since leaving and returning or logging out and back into the game must produce a high level seismic activity with the fault-line directly under my home, thus depositing all of my well-placed items into a heap of so much rubbish in the middle of the floor; however, I still enjoy having a place to call my own.

In fact, I've gone so far as to buy a couple different homes in Skyrim, and I use them both. I spend so much time moving things around, storing them in containers within my home, and organizing to my heart's content. I'm not even very picky about how player housing is implemented . . . as long as I can have a place to call my own and I can decorate it as I would like, then . . . then, I'll be happy!