[Housing] Why go to YOUR plot?

A friend of mine and I are relics from SWG. In that game, there was a reason to go to a players house or a player city whether it was for a specific vendor who sold the highest quality mineral or the closest shuttle port to your destination.

Our concern however with Wildstar Online is that while you can set your house/plot to public, what reason is there for a random player to visit your house/plot? My friend and I discussed potential reasons why people would visit/return to your plot, but none of them made sense in the long run. As a side note, I have excluded friends and guild mates as a reason because they are not random players -- you know them:

• Rare Plugs (Raid portal, crafting station, etc): While they may be rare at the start of the game, eventually many people will have them giving no reason for others to visit your plot because of a rare/expensive plug.
• Aesthetics: You might be the best interior decorator or have the rarest house item that only drops from a month long spawn, but again this is not a lasting reason people will return to your plot
• Server Popularity: I know this sounds silly, but if you are popular on the server for either being the best PvX player, a known troll, or otherwise popular for any other reason, there is a chance people will visit your plot. Again though, this would only apply to an incredibly small population of players making this pointless for the majority.
• Gathering Resources: We know from Carbine that friends will be able to go to your plot and harvest minerals and other raw materials for a cut of the reward while you are away. We don't really know the extent of this system. It is quite possible you must be on the owners friends list and/or granted special permissions. For this reason, I am ignoring this option.

I would like to know what you guys think on this topic. Do you think there will be a reason for random players to visit your plot? Has there been any official word on this topic? What do you think there is a system that, if added to WSO, would encourage players to visit other players houses?

I am a firm proponent of having Vendors on our Housing Plots. It is the absolute TOP thing I want for Housing. I want to be able to sell my wares and possibly turn my house into a storefront. I too played SWG and loved that option.

It doesn't have to mean no Auction House, but perhaps where the Auction House takes a fee, my personal vendor wouldn't, meaning I could offer lower prices. There would of course have to be a separate search tab on the AH or some other terminal/interface.

Thanks Myrrdhinn, but I've seen that video. The social aspect of housing is obvious, but I address that in my post saying that this excludes friends and people you know. I'm talking about incentive for random people to visit your house out of the thousands of houses that will exist.

Other than to show off my decorating skills why would I want people to visit my plot? If there is a way to make money off of it, I would do it but otherwise I don't see the point

I would love to sell stuff on my housing plot. I'd like to visit others as well...we could find some great treasures that way. In fact, I would make sure that my vendor occasionally sold something that was a 'treasure'.

There is the bounty mission, and they can harvest the crop. The other thing is, if you build a really cool house or a jumping puzzle, others can visit it too.

Other than that, I don't see the point for the visit.

I hope there are very few reasons for people to spend any significant amount of time in housing. This feature has the potential to draw an insane amount of people out of the regular world. It would be a different story if housing itself were in the open world, but I think we all know it's unlikely.

I thought I heard that your friends gain experience for going to your farm and harvesting what ever you farm etc.

I dont want you anywhere near my house, get the hell off my lawn.

@Deimos

Again, I'm not talking about friends or guild mates. I'm specifically talking about random users -- why would they want to come to your plot/house? Should/could there be incentive for those players?

This is the second time you have mentioned this, surely you yourself have some ideas, why dont you at least offer a few of them, so that people understand where you are coming from.

@convicted

I did. I listed potential incentives in my main post, but I can't think of anymore. Rare plugs, aesthetics, and so on are reasons to go to a plot, but not a lasting reason as mentioned in my OP. If I knew the answers, I wouldn't be asking.

At hope at least housing will provide the place for people that want to E-RP....
Don't want to see a new Goldshire!

Personally I'd rather not have a reason why some random person should visit my house. Adding in incentives for people visiting random plots means those who don't want to open their house to the public could end up losing out for having done so.

Wildstar seems like its going to have the best housing system in any MMO I've played, so that alone will get me to at least buy the game. But there doesn't need to be a reason why people should visit random plots, because now you're start to lose out on features you can make use of at your own home.

Ok I see, I had thought you had other ideas specifically because you didnt count those yourself, but I get it now.

My outlook on this is sorta conflicted. On the one hand, I don't think randoms having no reason to come to your plot is a bad thing. I mean, I feel like the point of housing is a place to hang out with your friends and invite people over. Incenting players to visit random people's houses is a little weird in that light.

On the other hand, I think rare plugs could do a very good job of providing and incentive to visit other players houses. First, though, expensive is not rare. Expensive plugs everyone will get eventually if they're worth anything, rare plugs will be sought after and acquired by a few. Tie them into raiding and higher rankings of PvP or even hard solo content and they become actually rare. Or even really low drop rates like some non-combat pets (welplings, anyone?) from WoW.

Yes, you could go get them all if you have the skill (or patience in the case of very rare drops) to get them, but few would have the ability (or desire to farm) to get them and they would stay rare. I think some things need to behave this way, anyway. Things like raid portals that should require items from that raid to make on par with strong crafting items from that tier in order to prevent them from becoming the default method of travel to a raid as well as make them feel special.

I guess my point is this: I don't think it really should be incentivized, but I suspect there will be plenty of incentive.

Most likely random people AREN'T going to care about your house unless they're already inclined to be tourists and just enjoy seeing other people's houses and how they've set them up. And probably a lot of players will keep their houses friendslist-only (I know I plan to).

I don't see a point to encouraging random people to visit random houses. Why? What does that really do for the game overall? As you've pointed out, eventually most people will go to their friends/guild/community house that's equipped with all the incentives like a raid portal or crafting station. What's wrong with that? "House exploration" will probably just be a fun pastime for certain circles in the community.

I wanna see activities at houses... I wanna be able to play some ball in my to-scale Miami Heat stadium. That way I can have randoms enter my house and I can posterize them like King James.

I think that 455 space drive, and 80085 bouncing zone will be the best locations for this!