First of all, will there be property ownership in Elder Scrolls Online and if not then do you think there should be? Personally I would like to see players having the ability to own not only houses (ie. Skyrim's home in Whiterun breezehome) but also shops, trading stalls, and more. Now I am aware that player to player trading will be in ESO but i'm wondering about actual structures within the game purchased by players for the purpose of that trade. I believe that shop ownership would benefit not only players who decide to level up their crafting abilities, but also players who require quick access to the crafted items, or for example players seeking a unique sword but don't have the ability to make that sword. An example would be a dragonknight with a low enchanting ability wanting a one-handed sword with a fire enchant, so he purchases it from a player's shop for a certain price or service. Of course location will be a factor since cyrodil will be a pvp zone, but I'm sure that won't stop everyone. Then there's the option to set up within allied borders and sell strictly to your allies. Please answer my question if possible and give me your personal input on the subject.

They may be considering player housing for a future update, it's not in at launch and it's been suggested many times.

In terms of shop ownership, nice idea, I remember Aion trying to do this and it didn't really work well, there was so many shops all the prices dropped so low, I don't think it will ever make it into this game, as they are focusing on store managing in Cyrodiil, but they may expand further down the line.

I understand what you're saying, but most of it can be achieved through the stores in Cyrodiil anyway, or just levelling crafting themselves.

Housing would be nice but the issue could be finding the place for millions of homes, especially if you can have more than one home.

Pretty sure if they did housing it will be instanced to a few certain areas, expanding houses across all the wilderness in Tamriel would be a horrible thing to do.

SWG did housing right in an open world.

It may have done, but this is Tamriel we're talking about, it's a lot smaller than a whole galaxy, I would hate to see hundreds of houses next to each other in random parts of Tamriel, instanced houses makes better sense, an instanced area where you, your friends or guild mates reside in would be interesting, as well as guild halls, may be as an extension to one of the cities, but I hope never expand houses into the open world.

It was also utterly horrendus.

Seriously, you get a mission and you head out and some dipstick managed to zone an entire player city over the spawn points so your target is under somebodies house.

Plus, since houses didn't disappear when maintenence wasn't paid (They just locked out) You ended up with loads of houses littering the landscape and about half of those where owned by people that hadn't played the game in months, maybe even longer.

Instanced at least stops the world getting choked up with housing.

I agree to some extent. However the SWG housing model failed because they didn't delete abandoned housing. The servers were filled with ghost town ghettos.

I agree that open world housing would be bad for TESO. But maybe they could allow for established towns to grow with the additions of limited player housing as a status symbol/reward?

Problem with that is so many people would complain, I'm all for having a selected area of housing, but truthfully it would have to be instanced to avoid overflow problems, many different people are into housing, some will spend the majority of their time developing their house, like in Skyrim, its a great gold sink, so it should be available to everyone, just as long as you have the gold, but maybe there could be certain items, like trophies, that you can display through other game activities.

Instanced housing, yes. Anything real-world probably wouldn't work well in this game because of its limited space. I don't want to see damned houses on every road I walk on, nor see hundreds of stalls in every city.