Houseboats

Houseboats, secured to piers might be one way to give more folk a chance to own a small type house with vendor. This would not clutter the landscape to much, creating a few fishing villages going out along the coast.

Just throwing this out there, since Im very concerned about possibly never being able to own my own place in the game. The mad dash to make as much gold as possible at release to own one of the remaining plots does not sound like a fun way to start playing a mmorpg.

 

I think they're trying hard to keep people from referring to SOTA as an MMORPG, but...

I do agree house boats would be a cool feature. Since housing is likely going to be instanced and whatever it looks like on the outside (a house, apartment, castle or a boat) shouldn't make much difference.

Would be a whole lot of awesome though... to sit in a chair and fish off the deck of my house boat...

 

I think that it will be hard to get coin together fast enough to buy a house before they are all gone because there are those that'll grind & poop dust till they get it, then the rest that are not playing 24/7 will slowly gain gold, over perhaps a few months they'll have gold to afford one but they will all be gone, then the 1st expansion happens & now there are many with the ingame gold & new lands available with new villages & towns & cities to buy homes in, the ones that owned in villages before will sell their village house deed & buy a town house deed, opening up even more village properties for the now rich masses..

This is a prophecy that I just made up. If it is found that I am right, you may all pay me 10 gold pieces for putting your mind at rest, if not, you can pay me 10gp for more training....either way, I'll buy a nice keep to study in.

 

I really hope they don't instance housing. Non-instanced housing is one of the reasons why UO housing was actually good. Sitting in your house and seeing people pass by who are either hunting or pvping was a lot more interesting than a dead zone.

 

I loved my boat in UO ... hope they consider this as well as land based housing !

 

Houseboats would have to be instanced, as far as the "cabin" portion of it. It would be way too expensive network wise otherwise. Though the question is...where can you leave your houseboat? I could just see a whole sea of boats with no one being able to move through. Other questions to answer would be: What happens if the boat is attacked? What do people on the interior see? Can the ship be sunk? What happens to all of the goods inside?

 

I think probably the best way to handle house boats is to make them just like any other house. You get a deed, find an empty 'lot' at a pier in a coastal town and there you go. If you want to move them it should go through the same process as moving a house. This makes it nice and simple for everyone.

While moving house boats would be quite awesome, I just can't bring myself to envision it happening any time soon.

 

Houseboats sounds like fun too, but likely not technically feasible given Chris' reaction to it -- at least not for mobile houseboats. However, it seems that they can do it as a static non-moving house that just sits on the water. Now, if real estate is already expensive in SotA, I can't imagine the cost of beachfront property

 

I heard an explanation in one of the videos that said it only loads items near you so as @Bowen stated, it'd be just like any other house and wouldn't need to be instanced.

I don't really care if the boat doesn't move, but to be honest, before we talk about houseboats, why not discuss camps/inns?

Those would be more feasible for the multitude of people that want some sort of house but don't have enough gold/$$ and just want a place to shack up for the night.

 

Yep, I would love to run an inn as well...but let's not hijack this topic and instead create a new one for camps or inns

 

Completely correct @smack. Wasn't really trying to hijack... I was just surprised THAT's what got mentioned...

But yes... houseboats... can you fish from them and get some sort of bonus? Aye, I know they're stationary atm.

 

If you can fish from a dock or shore you should be able to fish from a boat. House or otherwise.

 

My interpretation of houseboats is that the boat part of the houseboat moves with you and guests across the water - but logs out with you, disappearing from the world.

The door to "go below decks" to the house portion of the boat technically teleports you to the equivalent of your "apartment" in other games - your housing that is not visible to other players.

It's all just "user data" to the servers, not visible to everyone in the world.

Of course you can have various sizes of houseboats with different amenities like gardens, crafting decks etc. up to party yachts for the wealthy ... without impacting the available world real estate.

Oh, and cannons of course. For the pirates.

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gee, sorry for dups .. kept giving me an error!

 

The forum is still very much "pre-pre-alpha". and don't worry about the "page not found".. it lies.

The mention of house boats in today's hangout chat I found to be very interesting. It suggests they're seriously considering the stationary boat option to start with. We'll have to see how that goes.

 

The thought of a houseboat really thrills me. This is an excellent idea and I'm glad that it was brought up in tonight's chat.

 

I guess as more players are talking about it and are asking for it, they're trying to fit it in to the game's design.

As we know, the current house design enables us to have one crafting station currently, a garden in the back to grow things, and a vendor in the front to sell our goods. The interior will have places for us to either store or decorate with our loot and gear.

They could come up with designs to enable those things, but then you also get into different types of houseboats for each tier. Do citizens get small ones, lords larger ones, then baron and higher get like yachts? Hey, not gonna complain there, but whatever they do it needs to fit into the game's lore too, not to mention visual style.

 

They are looking at number of crafting stations too