Home, Home Again. I Like to Be There When I Can

My wife and I have two daughters, 6 and 3. They're cute, but surprisingly destructive. Our house always showcases their swath of carnage. We try to clean up after them, keep up with their awesome destructive powers. Err, ok, my wife tries to clean up after them (hey, back off! I clean the bathrooms, my plate is full). Sometimes, when I'm hiding upstairs, I'll peer down the staircase and see my wife putting toys away at the same time the girls are dragging new ones out. It's like watching one of nature's cycles, only with clutter--cue some Lion King music, it's the Circle of Mess.

I mention this because Turbine is adding player housing to LoTRO with it's Book 11 update, due out this November. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I think player housing sounds like a great idea. In theory. But in terms of practical gameplay? Hm, not so much.

First, housing is a bit of too much reality inserted into my virtual world. Sure, I love to score domesticated phat lewtz. Who wouldn't like to come home after a hard day of questing with a new armoire or wallpaper pattern? The problem lies in the fact that I don't enjoy decorating my real house, let alone a fantasy house set in Señor Tolkien's world. I just don't see myself exhibiting any effort to hang paintings and create living spaces in a fantasy shack. And since I won't take the time to organize all that decor, I'll start to just drop things wherever, and then the fantasy house looks all too like my real house.

I speak from experience. I played EQ2 and owned a virtual home. Being the penny-pinching bastard I am, I bought the cheapest dwelling available and then proceeded to stuff it full of tables and chairs and paintings and chandeliers that I either bought on the auction house or won from questing. At first, I made a good effort of hanging paintings on walls and putting chairs next to tables. But when I got a new piece of furniture, I found myself increasingly too lazy to make the upgrade swap. Or inclined to stack it somewhere in the room.

The room where there was no room. Remember, I had a shack (literally), you step in the door and there's your one room. Soon, the cramped one room apartment looked more like a rental storage unit than a place someone lived. And let me tell you, that's a sad place to come home to.

So I'm expecting some innovation from Turbine. Homemaking aside, I'd like to see player housing have some sort of practical impact on the game. Maybe buffs, for instance. If you log out in your house for a certain amount of time, maybe eight hours or more let's say, when you log back in you could have a buff that augments your melee or spell damage for a limited time. Or maybe your home could be a free hearth, with the industry standard one hour cooldown. Or maybe you could have increased crafting abilities, say improved crit chances, maybe a percentage or two, nothing too crazy. Maybe some bank space (EQ2 offered this). Perhaps a lawn you could virtually mow. And a home association that could fine you if you didn't mow it often enough. And if it got too long or full of weeds, Turbine could confiscate some of your best gear until you got your lazy ass out there and mowed.

Yeah, that's where the action is, virtual lawn mowing. Add some fertilizer buffs and I'm in gaming bliss.