World Put housing access in more relevant places

Housing and its current uses and applications:

Recently I have gone back into building my eh "house", if you could call it that, which I started last year. I actually really like housing even if there is the rank building restrictions and the weird resource scaling mechanics. However, there's literally no reason to go to your house (or in general own a house) because the balloons are put in the most worthless places ever in most situations, and when they are in a place that seems ideal, they are still rather inconvenient to get to. The only reason why you may use it over a town is better functionality for crafting since you can let junk items pile near a blacksmith and sell them without moving from your crafting station. Also, DPS dummies exist, I guess.

Most balloons currently are in towns. If you haven't guessed the problem with that, it's that usually a town will have everything you need, excluding a trade market and LE merchant (do people still use these anymore?). This isn't bad but given most of your functionality is in the town already, you're probably not going to the balloon, as it is far slower to get to.

Now let's talk about the few balloons that aren't in towns and could be useful but are just a pain to get to:
- Realm of Light: Of all places it's right next to the entrance. About 93% of players go there to do NOL and probably like 7% of people go there to loot chests, gather ingredients and potentially mine diamonds.
Now given this, I think the balloon or something else that can be used to access housing should go near NOL.

- The Void: If you go here, it's probably to get voidstone, ingredients or loot the few chests that tend to stockpile with items. Now one thing to mention if you are doing ingredient gathering (t0 ingredients etc) it is far faster to go to Ahmsord (via the crane lift) than the current balloon location. It might be me, but it would probably be more beneficial to put it near the mining locations rather than in the complete opposite direction to them, because I usually end up going to Ahmsord instead after mining.

- Legendary Island: Now this is one place that does housing really well, but doesn't really need it, because you only go there to do, well you guessed it: the Legendary Challenge, and/or fight Yahyabot for some reason. Since it only serves that purpose, it tends to be rather pointless.​

The suggestion:

Anyways here's the suggestion. Could we have housing go in more meaningful locations where the player would actually want it? Houses have the potential to be more relevant but aren't because no-one is going to want to go to their house, if it doesn't serve some other use that most towns already have. What shouldn't be mistaken about this is that I don't care to see more locations added to have your house float above, simply just more locations to access it. Current housing locations shouldn't have to change or be removed because of this.

A good spot would be near TCC. For example, instead of having to climb your way through that annoying hole in the wall to go back to Kandon Beda every time you get a t3 material, which significantly disrupts the flow of doing the raid for your team, you could instead go to your house (you also could just remove death penalties from the raid like they did with TNA). Also on a lesser note: there was a whole transition from the housing island to TCC in the Gavel Reborn trailer, I can't help but see a missed opportunity.

For NOL it would be nice to have an item identifier nearby, making the player go to the portal and slog over to their house or scroll over to Bucie (the closest town) doesn't really make it that great, maybe make an access point to housing nearby.
Same could be said for other raids, and even potentially dungeons where you don't tend to have access to item identifiers for any of the falling drops (not that too many people use them).

Putting house access points in the wilderness would also make them more appealing to use as well. A few places where I see this useful is probably in the sky islands, upper molten heights and potentially canyon of the lost. Obviously, they don't have to be put in these places or anything like that as it might be "overpowered" to some extent, though this is just another suggestion. Anyways the key takeaway here is I would like to see housing have more of a use to the player than simply being something that was added one day and doesn't do anything for the average player, aside from potentially looking cool, and I believe this would be a step in the right direction.​

 

big rainbow balloons break immersion

 

I mean no one says that big rainbow balloons have to be added to indicate it. The rainbow balloons could instead indicate housing spots that you can actually place a house, and maybe use something else for an access point.

I do think after some consideration, putting them in random complete wilderness areas might be a little too weird, because yeah seeing one randomly placed somewhere would break immersion. Maybe making them as quest rewards or something would remove the immersion breaking factor since it's now not just randomly visible there to begin with, but you instead unlock it as you progress through the world. Though I am still on the fence about this one, since it probably wouldn't work well, being more one of those things that sounds good on paper but looks rather poor in execution.

But still, I think in areas near raids (and maybe dungeons, not sure about dungeons though) wouldn't be that bad, instead of having this really annoying amount of travel that tends to make running them over and over again rather annoying (TNA doesn't tend to have this problem because RIP Dernic, and people tend to only care about LE from it). I think houses close to raids like TCC would be better as an unlockable reward for completing the raid, (same could be said for NOL). The reason being, that while the canyon colossus remains undefeated and is still said to be a threat, I don't think housing should be able to be accessed near it. If you have defeated it however it makes sense that now a balloon or again something else (doesn't have to be a balloon) could now be near it, as well you and your team defeated it by mastering its incredible Naughts and crosses board (minus the Naughts).

These housing points should work like the bridge and portals to NOL, in that they are only visible to the player after completing the objective that unlocks them (in the case of housing, completing the raids or unlocking some key or whatever would work). In bringing up the unlockable portal for NOL, thinking about it - stuff like portals, void holes and other thematically fitting ways of travelling to your house or just to a balloon elsewhere wouldn't be that bad of an idea in the event nothing but a rainbow balloon can be used to indicate a way to access housing.

And anyways there are plenty of things that are put in the game that break immersion in general. Anyone ever question how the blacksmith seems to be more powerful than you and appear in every raid before you have even entered? Hell, he is even impervious to your attacks, run for your life! Or anyone questioned how a housing balloon travels through the ceiling of Rodoroc to get to your house above it or below it, or how it even gets in and out of the Light Realm (maybe it travels through the portal?). I mean hell, the fact that Greg seems to have a whole Truckload of LE just randomly in some convenient chest area at the end of every single TNA raid, surely doesn't break immersion. The reason why they are there is for better fluidity in gameplay obviously. Basically, one of the sole reasons I suggested this is simply to make housing be more relevant to the player, right now your house doesn't even feel like a home, it's just a place you build or put merchants down or ignore in its entirety, because towns tend to be more relevant to most players. Putting them in or nearer to more relevant places (in which most cases people are doing raids in late game), would probably make people use it more and make it more fluid with current gameplay.