[scandum]

One large advantage that hasn't been discussed so far is that housing makes a great money sink. On my own mud players had a percentage (set by their clan leader) of their looting money taken from them that went into the clan coffer, which in turn would be used to pay for rent and fees when using the olc engine to create / edit content.

A top 20 most expensive homes list is likely to generate some additional spending.

[Pymeus]

We solve the junk issue by having save pits instead of save rooms. You can buy permanent fixtures for any part of your house, like furniture, portals, fountains, and various tools, but any loot you want to store has to go in a special container that gets saved across reboots and crashes.

As far as poor quality, house building/alteration is carried out by staff members for exactly that reason. We want our players to exercise their creativity, so mainly we weed out spelling/grammar issues and the really major thematic conflicts. Players can and do get pretty creative with their houses. Town houses are somewhat restricted by the fact that they're in a city, but the manor houses granted to mid-tier nobles can be put almost anywhere and be almost anything; it need not resemble a house at all. Some are valleys, some are labyrinths, one is a tree, and there used to be a ship out by the coast.

[dasy2k1]

NWA now has player housing, at the moment has to be buillt by staff but after that its modified by a merchant.

hopefully soon merchants will be able to build houses as with ships too,

[plamzi]

It looks like player-owned houses are alive and well..., in the MU* world.

Houses were one of the first things I added when I took over as dev. I'm moving in the direction Lasher described - costly house expansions including storage rooms, in-house pets etc. - but I'm not planning to allow custom room descriptions (think MySpace). Hardly anyone reads room descriptions in my game but I still don't want the English language butchered on my watch.

Instead, I allow players to tell me what kind of atmosphere they want for their house or storage room, and I work with that. One neat thing with my MUD is the graphical iPhone client selects a background based on the room name. So if they tell me they want a castle on a lake, I just need to put 'lake' in the name of one room, 'castle' in the next.

Hmm, I should charge extra for lakeviews...

[atltais]

On Star Conquest, there are apartments, custom homes, and we're working on rolling out player-owned semi-permanent space structures. Plus, starships are also player-owned and consist of multiple rooms.

Player housing and so on is also very much alive and well on HellMOO, with player apartments/houses generally having protection from the police (and in situations like when you're logged off), but still vulnerable to anyone who is motivated enough.

[DonathinFrye]

Guild Wars is an MMO that still has its own for of Housing. It has a fairly impressive island/merchant/npc system. Supposedly, Guild Wars II will improve upon the system vastly, as well.

RPIs tend to have player-Housing, of course. You need somewhere to hang your hat.