This week, I’m starting up a new miniseries called Playing House here in the Working As Intended column, and it’s entirely the fault of a tweet from Star Wars Galaxies Legends, which casually threw up a poll asking for feedback on apartment ownership in the game. I bought an apartment last year and have used it ever since, and it’s MMO housing, so you know I have opinions… a whole lot more than fit on social media.
The poll showed that at least among Twitter users, around half the fans don’t have an apartment and over a third didn’t even know about apartments. But the apartments are cool even if you don’t play Star Wars Galaxies, so allow me to explain if you’re in that third currently confused: Following the launch of the planet of Bespin back in 2021, the rogue server SWG Legends then introduced Cloud City apartments. The system allows players to secure one apartment in Cloud City to decorate per account, at the cost of manually paid rent (as opposed to ongoing maintenance).
Now, obviously, SWG is not the only MMO out there with apartments. Heck, Anarchy Online also had them more than two decades ago. What sets these apartments apart is that they function as an alternative to the existing housing system – and like houses, the apartments are in the open world. They are not instanced. That means nobody else in the whole game has exactly my apartment with its exact building, floor, and direction. And when I look out of my apartment windows, I am looking out into the bustle of the actual city. I see ships taking off and actual live players running into the guildhall along the streets far below me. It’s spectacular. You can see how it all looks in my apartment tour from last year, if you’re curious.
To be perfectly honest, I think the apartment system is a massive achievement for any MMO, never mind a volunteer-player-run server. I’m happy with mine and will keep it. But I also know the system has flaws, and I assume the devs know too, which is why they’re asking for feedback. And the biggest flaw demonstrated in the poll?
People aren’t using the apartments!
After zooming around Cloud City again this past week, I can tell you the game sees 20% occupancy for all of the apartments in the city (the two-lot Tibanna models fare much worse). You can tell the developers were not prepared for that low level of uptake because quite a lot of the apartments are flagged reserved – i.e., they won’t be released for renting until the others are occupied. And even then, there are plenty of open apartments available, even good top-floor apartments with views (two penthouses open in my building!) – so it’s not that there aren’t enough to go around.
You might say it doesn’t matter whether anyone uses them, but the devs put so much work into the system after players begged for years. Open-world apartments have the potential to be epic social spaces. That’s just not happening when they are and feel empty, which just seems weird on a packed server brimming with player cities (more than live!).
Now, I didn’t actually pick up an apartment myself until two years after the system’s launch, and I had a bunch of reasons, some of which were resolved and some of which I resolved myself. I think I have a decent understanding of what’s going on here. These are the three major issues right now as I see them.
The costs problem (aka the rent is too damn high)
To be clear, the money is not an issue for me. I am a fabulously wealthy crafter in this game. I have lamps worth more than the entire apartment fee. So I am not the average person in SWG Legends, and the game should not be aiming at me; the average person who is interested in a video game apartment for roleplaying or whatever does not have 25M credits to plunk down on an apartment license and then another half mil or so every few months in rent. Yes, there are some house deeds in the game that cost this much, but a basic small house is effectively free (and a good player city will pay your maintenance fees too to keep you as a citizen).
I understand the devs hoped to make apartments “luxury” purchases and thereby drain some money out of the game, but the upfront costs just keep out a large class of players who would otherwise be interested – the kinds of people new to the game who don’t even have a player city to call home yet. It’s just an audience mismatch.
On top of that, paying rent is annoying. In regular houses, you can put years’ worth of maintenance in and never think about it again. Here, you have to log in every 90 days and re-up your rent, and it doesn’t withdraw automatically, either. Your apartment can be condemned even if you log in every day and have a billion credits in your bank, if you’re forgetful (I literally have to set calendar alarms to remind myself). It doesn’t feel like a fun video game house; it feels like paying bills. And if you do forget, then on day 97, your whole apartment will be packed up into your datapad. To place it again, you’d have to unpack it into an identical unit for a 1M credit nuisance fee, assuming you can find an identical unit. Again, it’s annoying and punitive. People don’t want to worry about this when playing a rogue server MMO from 2003, not when the existing housing system is so much cheaper and more accessible.
How I’d fix the costs problem
I’d like to see the devs remove or drastically reduce the 25M fee as well as the current rents, retailoring the rents to be roughly even with costs for a small regular house and storage. And then I think they should institute scaling rents based on storage: Players would be able to pay more money per month in rent for additional storage in the apartment only, like another 100K credits in rent per month for every additional 50 storage spaces unlocked, all separate from the existing storage expansion system (so you could use your existing storage expanders but then also pay for more apartment-only storage via rent).
This would allow more people to get and keep an apartment, but it would still function as an ongoing money sink for wealthy players, who never stop hunting for more storage. (I paid 85M for another 100 storage in my diner over Christmas. I do this every time a character gets too close to the currency cap. I’d absolutely pay to rent more in my apartment, which is very large for a one-lot building and needed hundreds of items in deco.)
I also think that the apartments with the best views – for example, those on the top floors – should cost much more than the ones closer to the ground floor. Let the newbies have some cheap apartments! Come on!
Next, let us pay a year in advance after the first 90-day period – and maybe increase the grace period so it scales based on how long the player has occupied the apartment. That way you catch all the people who got an apartment on a lark and then quit the game, thereby keeping the rental cycle moving – without evicting long-term players.
Finally, I would at least consider making the Tibanna apartments one-lot structures. The math of lots and harvesters in this game makes one-lot structures significantly more appealing than any other building, regardless of their base storage, and the Tibanna apartments need all the help they can get.
The convenience problem
The costs didn’t actually stop me from renting for the first two years, but the inconveniences sure did. It was initially difficult to get from the starport to the apartment buildings, but over time, the developers added plenty of local landing pads by every building; taller buildings even have a landing pad near the middle floor. That helps a lot – just not enough.
The key acquisition for me was the Geonosian Solar Sailer ITV, which is essentially a device that lets you teleport directly to your declared home residence. If you declare your apartment your home residence, it deposits you in the doorway. I have one on every character. But they cost 5-10M credits apiece, which is not trivial for a new player, if they even know about it. I don’t like the idea that every apartment owner is expected to buy an obscure ITV to get to an inconvenient apartment.
You could also make use of the Snowspeeder ITV (also in the 5M-10M range now); these ITVs allow you to program any two waypoints and port almost anywhere. I use these for a lot of my structures and favorite player cities. However, while you can use the Snowspeeder to port directly to the front lawn of a house, for apartments you can use it only to port to the landing pad of the building. This means that everyone but the apartment owner – including your own alts – still must run into the building, click on the kiosk to figure out which floor to go to, fiddle with the elevator, and access the right floor to access the building (or in the case of the Tibanna platforms, all the running is concentrated in the hallways).
And that’s only if they know where they’re going! Customers won’t know, and they can’t easily access your landing pad – only the starports. And most of the apartment buildings are nowhere near the starports, so customers will have to drive, in some cases quite a long way through across the confusing multi-layered city map, in sharp contrast to the wide-open core planets with their ubiquitous player cities. Oh, and did I mention there are hostile mobs right by the starport, so you also might get incapped? Vendors on Bespin are essentially dead because customers won’t bother with that hassle. As I type this, there are six player vendors on the whole planet. And one of them is mine!
I can back this up with data: In the last 10 months, my Droid Engineer with a small shop in a Bespin apartment near the starport sold 15 droids to a grand total of seven customers – just a hair more than rent over that period. I opened that shop as an experiment to compare with my core business on Dantooine, which routinely sells out of the same droids at the same price so fast that I actually got burned out on restocking them.
The takeaway is that people simply will not go to Bespin to shop. If they see “Bespin” as the vendor location on the auction hall, they keep looking. They’ll even pay more for the product to avoid Bespin. They don’t want to fly blind into the Cloud City starport and drive across the huge city and navigate the apartment building just to find one vendor. It’s much easier to fly into a core planet and then hop to the nearest player city to shop. And if you can’t get customers to go there, Bespin is a non-starter for crafters; they have to maintain a shop somewhere else in addition to the house, eating into their lot count. (Granted, they already had to maintain factories elsewhere, in addition to harvesters and possibly a farm, which is another mark against apartments!)
So let’s talk about getting to that “elsewhere” because leaving apartments is just as much a hassle as getting to them. To leave, you (and your alts or customers) can’t just walk out the door and throw down an ITV; you have to reverse the process down the elevator and back out to the platform. It’s even worse for Tibanna apartments, which have no ITV platform at all; they just have starport access. You can bypass that by shelling out more cash for the ubiquitous AT-AT heads, which allow preprogrammed teleports from inside structures, but they are ugly and expensive for newbies – and again, we shouldn’t need to do that to achieve basic functionality.
How I’d fix the convenience problem
The easy solution here is to simply make it much easier to get into and out of apartments. I realize it runs the risk of making apartments pocket houses, but rich players can already do that, and it’s not like we’ve got a shortage or anything. *taps the 20% occupancy sign again*
So first, I would grant all apartment owners and alts of apartment owners a new ITV that goes directly to the door of that account’s apartment, baked into the rent itself, and good only for the duration of the apartment. You lose the apartment, you lose the ITV. I would not make it contingent on declaring residency – more on why in a sec.
Second, I would add starport functionality for every single landing platform so that customers and friends can fly directly from other planets to the right building. This would give vendors in Cloud City a much-needed competitive edge. All six of us. (This would also require adding the landing platforms to the maps, which is a problem right now, as it’s often hard to find the nearest one when you do leave a tower.)
Third, on every apartment floor by the elevator I’d install a special permanent terminal that offers predetermined ports like “travel to nearest starport,” “travel to nearest landing platform,” and “travel to your declared residence.” This ensures nobody needs AT-AT heads crowding their apartment, although you certainly could keep using them too (I would). (Alternatively, SWGL could take a page from the Ultima Online playbook and give players a macro to immediately eject themselves from whatever structure they’re in. Frankly, we could use that anyway.)
The citizenship problem
Finally, we really do have to address the fact that Bespin housing exists entirely outside the existing robust player city system, which is a key social driver in the game and even got a massive upgrade last year. Every player who buys an apartment must choose between accessing it conveniently (with a Solar Sailer ITV) or becoming a citizen in a player city. You can’t declare home residence in both. This immediately counts out any character who is or wants to be a mayor, for a start, or anybody in a guild that really needs the loyal citizens to keep a city slot. Granted, you could still declare residency in a town and just not have the fast apartment teleport, or you could just declare in town with your other four characters, but either way, being forced to make that choice does have an impact on player willingness to engage with the apartment system.
Compounding that is the reality that living in a player city isn’t just for fun; cities grant huge bonuses to crafting and other gameplay types, bonuses that increased with last year’s player city patch. Anyone who needs those bonuses will have to opt out of a Cloud City home.
I don’t live in a player city currently (I ran some on live and I’m tired), but I would be intrigued to see all of the apartments in Cloud City incorporated into one permanent player city with an elected mayor (subordinate to Baron Administrator Calrissian, natch). Such a mayor might be more limited than on other planets, being without placement tools, but he/she could at least set city-wide expertise bonuses. In fact, turning Cloud City into an official player city – similar to permanently installed player cities I’ve encountered on much smaller rogue servers – could actually be reimagined as a newbie experience, whereby new players are funneled into cheap apartments to get a taste of what living in a player city could feel like before breaking for the city frontier on the core planets – without the risk of Cloud City imploding with drama or disappearing overnight.
As an aside to all this, I admit I don’t see a good solution for the Tibanna apartments here. Even if the devs did everything I just outlined, I don’t think the Tibanna homes would take off in popularity. There’s a good reason only 10 people in the whole game currently own one: They are dark, maze-like warrens that are hard to access, confusing to navigate, and annoying to leave – all the same problems as regular apartments but even more expensive (in terms of both rents and lots) and even more of a pain in the ass. They look extremely cool, but they fail on functionality, and they would probably need a much larger structural do-over, one that is not worth the devs’ time.
Conclusion
I want to stress again how much I love the apartments for all their faults and appreciate that the developers built them for us. I still love my apartment! It feels private. I have an amazing open-world view of Cloud City. It’s a huge space I was able to decorate into rooms without losing my views. I live very close to the crafting grindhall, the spaceport, and a player-owned ITV center. It takes up only one lot, consumes negligible funds, and can easily be accessed with ITVs. I can port between it and my home base and factories and shop on Dantooine with minimal effort. It’s gorgeous, and since I have plenty of currency to smooth out the annoyances, it works for me.
But I want it to work for everyone! It’s an epic feature in the MMORPG genre that is clearly going underutilized because it lacks sufficient perks and utility to justify its costs and (largely travel-related) drawbacks. I look forward to seeing how the team tackles it going forward!
The MMORPG genre might be “working as intended,” but it can be so much more. Join Massively Overpowered Editor-in-Chief Bree Royce in her Working As Intended column for editorials about and meanderings through MMO design, ancient history, and wishful thinking. Armchair not included.
