Feedback:User/Alexarcano/Home Sweet Home

First off, as a long term GW1 player (my main got his 6th birthday present a few months ago) I'm really looking forward to seeing first hand the end result of your hard labour after so long in development, so far it looks like an excellent, nay, Epic game.

On to my suggestion for the Home Instance (or somewhere else entirely), which may be challenging to implement in full but could be made into an interesting quest, or alternately a purchase with in-game currency or even made available through a micro transaction or indeed a combination of all/any of the above.

We've seen the home instance in the demo with the human noble, so I'm guessing there is probably an equivalent for all the races and walks of life. Perhaps you start with a home instance befitting your station in society (maybe belonging to your parents, or in the case of the sylvari a nice tree)?

So how about expanding on this concept?

Almost everyone likes a place to hang their hat, sword, wand or miscellaneous bludgeoning weapon of choice, right? I for one would love to have my own 'place' in the GW2 world to call my own, storage for all those pesky long term items that you collect over the years from festivals and quests, have no real use for but are loathe to get rid of, things that you want to keep but are not much use in your inventory.

Now you are making your way in the world so what better than your own home? Making a real home for your character with all the trappings and mementoes of your adventures. Maybe you would like a lodge in the country, a mansion or a townhouse in the city. You could buy a template/design or even be able to create your own home by purchasing blank 'virtual real estate' and creating it from the ground up.

This could be implemented using a simplified (micro-transaction purchased maybe) external design programme or with simple building blocks in-game allowing the player to design their own place, then purchasing or finding in-game the materials needed to build it and the contents to fill it (portraits from print screens anyone?). Perhaps even hire, rescue or dragoon NPC staff such as traders, weapon smiths, Xunlai storage (if they exist), and so on. Once the building has been created you could invite guests, host parties much the same way as you could with the Guild Halls in GW1.

Maybe you could even be called upon to defend your home from time to time.

However... If you decide to implement this or something similar then how about a property market for buying and selling in the (for lack of a better term) 'auction house'. I doubt this would be directly player to player transactions but you could sell your current home (perhaps getting housing 'tokens' which can only be used to purchase housing or house related items instead of gold if purchased through micro transaction) and buy another one via a trader. It may be possible to use this as a way of keeping in-game currency in circulation or as a money 'drain', although I don't pretend to know how your game economics would stand, but something along these lines could prove useful.

The same principle could be carried over to Guild Halls if they are made available in GW2.

Whew. Long winded, but I think the basic idea is sound and it will add another level of immersion to the game so that the character becomes more than the (admittedly dratted heroic) wandering vagabond of the first Guild Wars.

Thanks for your heroic efforts guys, hope you find time in your busy schedule to read this.

EDIT: A (perhaps somewhat insane, you decide) thought occurs after a few days of writing the initial proposal. Taking this concept to a bit of an extreme, I know but.... How about a user generated community. A town/state built more or less (perhaps with only the centre of 'town' and the surrounding landscape pre-made by A-net) from the ground up by us. Our houses, in our town. A persistant area in which to build our homes rather than just a private instance, a place to trade and for all our characters to 'live'. It would probably become a hub for player interaction (mini games/arena?), a meeting point (pub anyone?), a place where all species, regardles of social and political background, can come together without fear of prejudice and work together towards the betterment of all sapient creatures (OK, now I'm sounding a bit free-love and hippy. Time to change tactic), or maybe just to be the biggest badest most heavily armed bastion of a dragon-privates-kicking place in Tyria or anywhere else in the world. This may seem a teensy bit 'Second Life' but hey, stranger things have happened, right? Seriously though, I probably spent as many hours actually just hanging around in Lion's Arch and Shing Jea chatting with other like minded people and messing around as I did actually playing GW1 as intended, so I do see an opening for a place that players can go to socialise, arrange times to game together and actually do something constructive that is still in-game yet out of game at the same time. Maybe there is more to this idea than just the random etchings of a GW2 starved nut case. Perhaps this could be an expansion pack option or an in-game puchase. Or all of this may just be a tad too difficult to impliment, in which case feel free to ignore the random-nut edit.

--Alexarcano 21:57, 5 July 2011 (UTC)