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All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.
Playing Warhammer recently has made me think of more features that WoW could add in order to create a better roleplaying experience. Far and away the most important one, to my mind, was the Tome of Knowledge. WoW players really need an in-game resource they can refer to as a standard for information about the Warcraft universe, and having this at hand, roleplayers could do a lot better than they can today.
Knowledge is the most important thing, of course, but there are other features Blizzard could add to the game that would help roleplayers too. I'd like to address a few of these things, and see how much they could really do for us. Player housing is a possible feature that gets talked about a lot, but I have my doubts as to whether or not it would really help roleplayers all that much. Another issue is one that is more important to me personally, and is another feature inspired by my trial with Warhammer Online: looking at interactivity between characters.
Player Housing
A lot of roleplayers seem to want player housing, but I have my doubts as to how well it would actually work out. On one hand, it would be nice to have a place in the game that we could actually make our own, and customize to some degree. We could go there and have private conversations open only to people we want there, so we wouldn't have to worry about random people wandering by and trying to annoy us.
On the other hand, I fear that player housing wouldn't get much use among many players unless there were really clever tricks that could connect it intimately to the rest of the game world. If Blizzard just put in some extra instance doorways in a city, where a designated portal just led you to your own guild's special house, people might show up there for guild meetings, but most of the time they would want to be out in the world doing things, questing, crafting, or fighting in PvP. It could be nice to use the guild house as a place to hang out when you're just chatting with friends instead of adventuring, but if it's too far out of the way then people would never bother going there.
In order to make it work, every guild house would have to have some sort of private portal mechanism, so that people could easily go there when they want a break from questing for a few minutes. If they make it like the PvP Battleground queue so that whenever you open a portal from a certain spot you can just portal back to that spot whenever you want to leave, then it could really be the sort of place people meet up in on a fairly regular basis during their play time. They could go there to get items from a personal bank, guild bank, or even trade items with one another and then go back to their other activities.
There are a lot of other issues involved in player housing, such as whether the customization scheme will be interesting, and what actual function the space is designed to serve. Those of you who have seen player housing work well in other MMORPGs, feel free to speak up for whichever system you think WoW should try to imitate, if any.
