Honestly, just a place to display cool stuff instead of letting it gather dust in my 93% full bank...
Un-Instanced guild housing.It's simple, to avoid ghost towns, make houses have a property value.All houses that's not owned or used by NPC's, can be added a door and some rooms.Some are small, some are big, some are in the back alley, others on the mainstreet.Make the guild bank pay the rent and if u can't pay u get evicted. Simple?
We talk about this all the time on the WrA forums. Probably at least twice a year. Here's our latest post:https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/player-housing-again/1800351
I think Palia did a cool version of player housing. even warframe dojo's are fairly good. an Un-Instanced locations that can be purchased that expands the size of starting areas and cities would be cool, along with smaller quest hubs like outside the graveyard of duskwood, or a house near Karazan
I have seen many housing system in MMOs and similar games. I think the main issue is that people expect their house to be relevant in the world and even for a game of the size of WoW the world is too small. Ultima had this and it felt great to be able to put down your house in the spot you liked. But all other people did the same thing and the world was full of other peoples houses which was very annoying. Think of Rust housing without the decay system and server wipes every 1-3 weeks. In short, it's a "you think you do, but you don't" situation - but this time, it's true.That said the system MUST use set world locations for a finite number of possible spots. You could do it like FFXIV - but in WoW this would be like dropping the most toxic nuke over Azeroth. RMT, raid/arena/rbg carries for accommodation, corruption, virtual prostitution :) and any of the seven deadly sins. Housing has to be shared so everybody can get any of the available spots. This creates a situation which is similar to WoD housing with one major difference: WoD housing was only relevant for the WoD expansion.Such housing systems exist/ed in ESO, SWTOR, Wildstar, New World. They are/were all somewhat unique, some of them have some good pros but all of them cause player fragmentation: If there are no reasons for other players to frequently visit other players houses, houses will be used to do things in your private space which really should be done in the open world to make it appear alive: AH, bank, warband storage, transmog, etc. When you go to your house to shortcut travel, you disappear from the game. When you go to your house to access to the auction house, you disappear from the game. A guy hopping on their 5M gold auction house dinosaur mount creates more value for the community than player housing. The only good aspect of all of the above housing systems that I can see is guild housing. A fully customizable instantiated space for guilds to meet and do stuff together. This is what the game needs. I very much like SWTORs approach of guild flagships where players can contribute collected decorations. The very best feature of SWTORs guild flagships is the ability for guilds to work together and control a certain region of the game. It really feels good to enter a certain area and read "this region is controlled by guild XYZ". The way its implemented in SWTOR favors larger guilds, but WoW wouldn't have to make the same mistake and leave some breathing room for smaller guilds and let them have regions that can only be controlled by smaller guilds. If this feature is important enough, it would work against guild fragmentation and be a compelling reason for micro guilds to merge with other micro guilds into a guild which has the critical mass to do real guild activities such as raids, etc. TL;DR:I don't think MMOs are the right game genre for player housing. Go play the sims, minecraft or similar games. Guild housing can be great, if done right. That is, if Blizzard doesn't use this feature as a gold or RM sink. My concern is that they would want to try....
Housing in WoW is irrelevant to me personally, I could take it or leave it. Since Microsoft has acquired Blizzard thus WoW, I have yet to see any positive links/comments to possible or wishful Microsoft contributions to WoW's development from Wowhead commenters, especially by the WoW pro-Housing community, since Microsoft has experience with developing player-housing in MMORPG.Prior to WoW being released in 2004, Asheron's Call was the MMORPG to play in my opinion. Developed with Microsoft's extensive assistance, had a type of player-housing desired one way or another by most of the WoW pro-housing community as I see it.You had to do some quest or two to acquire some items to get a charter to buy an available house in a random neighborhood of houses located in random parts of the world.You acquired items from questing/rewards, crafting, or from vendors to landscape, furnish, decorate, display or store via hooks/storage space. Though limited, you had some control over placement such as positioning of some items.As the house owner, you could lock your house, meaning other players can view the items in house only from the outside or through windows to see inside. You could unlock your house to players you listed (or all?) to grant temporary or permanent access to enter the inside of your house, but I believe that also allowed them to place, replace, or take items from your house. You could view contents of any house you came across from outside or through windows if you did not have access to enter. You could not see into basements, storage boxes, around corners or anything without direct access or a reflection (mirrors, glass, etc.) to a windows line-of-sight.Each neighborhood had one central portal-out, hearthstone-in point, you had to know the location or appearance of your specific house from the others in the neighborhood. Or you could stumble across a neighborhood through your journeys. Some neighborhoods may have been in or adjacent to a town or city, but neighborhoods did not provide any town or city functions (banks, vendors, etc.).I'm not sure if you could sell or trade your house to relocate, you could only have one at a time and you could lose it by being inactive and/or un-subbed for a period of time.I'm not being pro-Microsoft or pro-housing in WoW, but for those who are, I can see how the Microsoft-Blizzard merger could possibly be beneficial to the cause. Although there would be some form of limits, I'm sure, everybody will not be happy or satisfied if anything where to be implemented with any type of player-housing in WoW. Anything could be better; everything cannot be perfect.