Beatiful Day in the [Janthir] Neighbourhood

Janthir is out in a few hours, and that's gunna be my focus for the next couple days. But there was something I forgot to mention in my Looking Forward to Janthir post: my hope that the homestead instance can evolve into something more down the road.

As things stand, the intention is for your homestead to be a personal instance. Other people can join it if they party up with you, much like the current home instances, but if you aren't online then your homestead stops existing.

That limits the types of social interactions you can have: essentially, only people you've pre-approved can join. There's probably limited reason for them to join too -- maybe this will happen a bit early on, but I suspect the homestead will become a lonely place after the first week.

Neighbourhoods

Final Fantasy XIV has a neat feature for housing: all of the houses are in districts of two or three dozen plots. When you buy a house, you're not just buying space to customize -- you're buying a plot in a neighbourhood. There will be people next to you, and across the street. They'll see your yard. They can wander into your sitting room, if they're adventerous.

This is cool in a few ways -- the biggest one being that players can pick a neighbourhood and go sight-seeing. The work put into decorating has to be visible to somebody for it to be meaningful, IMHO, and FFXIV makes it really easy for people to have low-key adventures just looking at all the fancy houses.

Some players have set their homes up as night clubs: dedicated social spaces, perhaps with a theme, where you can go be social. FFXIV & GW2 are both MMOs, so encouraging players to meet and be social is important -- especially in a low-key environment like this. Nobody is gunna get mad about screwing up the boss mechanics when you're just there to dance and liste to the DJ.

This approach has a major downside though: the neighbourhoods are pre-defined. There are only so many -- and consequently, there are only so many houses for players and guilds to buy. And in order to keep the neighbourhoods feeling active and populated, they need to tear down houses for people who aren't actively playing. This is all very, very frustrating for people who want to get into housing in XIV.

When WoW attempted to add "player housing" in Warlords, they created something closer to the GW2 homesteads. You couldn't decorate freely, but the instancing model is the same: you gotta let people join. I think there was a weekly quest to defend the garrison from invasions, but people never came to hang out in your "house". This led to a very sat situation where everybody was off alone in their personal instance all expansion. The cities felt dead and abandoned.

Wildstar had a great idea in between "personal instance" and "open world neighbourhood": you could form a community with a few people and put your housing plots together. I think I'd stopped playing before that got added, but players forming their own neighbourhoods is a good idea. Doubly-so if people can choose to visit it without needing an invite from one of the five homesteaders!

Guilds as Communities

Wildstar's community idea solves the "finite housing supply" problem from XIV, and the "everyone is alone in their instance" problem from WoW. I'd really love to see something like this implemented in GW2, so our beautifully-decorated homesteads can be opened to visitors, and I can keep up with what my friends are doing.

I think there's potential synergy with guild halls too: in GW2, you can join six guilds. Maybe this is how we build a neighbourhood: you pick which guild to homestead with, and your plot can exist on the outskirts of your guild hall, along with other members' plots. Wouldn't that be cool?

This would encourage people to use & help decorate the guild hall too, since it becomes a hub that people are gunna be visiting regularly. I dunno about y'all, but I use a guild hall once a day to harvest the nodes, and then I immediately leave -- so I'd appreciate more reasons to go there.

Showcase

Warframe has clan dojos as their version of guildhalls. These are freely-decorable and people build some ridiculous stuff.

Warframe's community team regularly visits dojos to spot the coolest builds, and when they find something they like, it's featured right on the map, where everybody is gunna see it and can click to go visit:

There is such a thing as the GW2 Art Showcase, but this isn't mentioned in-game. If you're not Very Online and/or a always on Twitch¹, you might not even know this exists.

But: wouldn't it be delightful if they could highlight some guild/homestead communities in-game and everybody could go check them out, instead of having this community aspect of GW2 hidden away in an irregularly-scheduled Twitch stream?