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Originally Posted by Aradune
1. We go in ahead of time and zone the world like a modern city does. If an area isn't zoned for, say, houses, you can't build there.
2. Houses will likely have an upkeep, but they are also in a sense non-moving persistent pets. They have HP, they can big configured, they have an inventory. And so they can die too. NPCs will attack your house if you build it near a dangerous area. And if you never pay your upkeep, my guess is something similar will happen. But that's where crafting comes in -- just a cleric rezzes your corpse, the crafter fixes your house, making it accessible again. Now, what if you leave for a year... obviously, there are some restrictions we'll be forced to place.
3. The plan is no instancing, even with player houses. Think SW:G in this case -- the houses are really there in the world.
4. It's hard to answer that. The general answer is that no content in the game is guaranteed, including owning a house. We'll have to see in beta how well we can accomodate people. But also keep in mind that you aren't supposed to keep your house forever -- you'll abandon it when you outlevel the area. Also, the world is BIG, so lots of room. And finally, if a group of people form a little town, while they can keep you out of their residence, they can't keep you out of their city (speaking about PVE servers). And cities come with publicly accessible buildings, crafting stations, places to bind, banks, etc. So even if you don't own a house, you will be able to take advantage while traveling of other's towns when you come across them.
As for whether they will feel like a ghost town. Well, first you'll be able to set up offline merchants. You will summon an NPC merchant, give him the items you want sold, set prices, and when you log off he will stay there. Also, we hope to spawn other NPCs doing their thing too (this gets into city building and I don't want to get detailed as I don't know how much of our lofty goals and plans we'll be able to realize by release). You'll likely also be able to hire guards to protect your house from NPCs.
Lastly, if we make having a house or a town compelling and an important part of gameplay, then people should be there. We certainly do not want ghost towns that are just storage units visited once a week by their owner.
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