February 2020 Furnishing Limit Status Update

ZOS_CullenLee

Howdy everyone,

One of the most frequent requests we receive in regards to housing is the desire to increase the furnishing cap. While we have touched on this before, we just wanted to reiterate that the upper-most furnishing limits are in place to avoid serious performance issues. While the core design philosophy behind housing is to give you the creative freedom to decorate the way you want to, we have to ensure that it is a stable experience for you and your visitors as well, regardless of anyone’s platform or hardware specifications.

That being said, improving performance is not a magic bullet solution for raising the furnishing cap in houses. “Performance” is a blanket term that encompasses frame rate, stability, memory usage, and other metrics related to how the game runs. Right now, setups that hit the minimum specifications can still struggle with homes that are fully decorated with relatively high impact furnishings.

We know that many of you have been hoping that our focus on performance improvements this year would directly result in an increased furnishing cap. We still have a lot of work left on the performance front and when it’s completed, we will reevaluate to see if we can increase the furnishing limits.

To address some specific questions and concerns:

• Different categories of furnishings generally have different performance impacts. Special Collectibles are more impactful than Traditional Furnishings, while Collectible Furnishings tend to have less impact than many Traditional Furnishings.
• We know not everyone is satisfied with the ratio between these furnishing types—these are set to strike a balance between the various needs people have. We could change this ratio, but any improvement to one group would negatively impact another group. We have no plans to adjust the balance between the different caps at this time.
• The number of guests in a home also impacts performance. At the moment, increasing the population limit would require reducing furnishing limits.

As always, we continue to strive to improve the housing experience. Moonsugar Meadow, for example, was created after listening to player feedback on the desire for more natural open spaces where you can express your creativity. We are always considering and tinkering with potential new housing features. As soon as we have something to show you, you’ll be the first to know.

Please continue to provide feedback! Letting us know what you like, as well as what you don’t like and why, helps us to improve. For many of us, logging into the forums and seeing your creations is often the best part of our day as your creativity continuously blows us away. The forums are one of many sources of inspiration for us, and request threads always factor into our decisions when adding new furnishings, planning new homes, and prioritizing improvements.

Thank you for reading this, and thank you for your passion.

Alienoutlaw

as mentioned in another thread by @RABIDxWOLVERINE could you add a function for guilds to set a guild residence?

MyNameIsElias

Thanks for this post. Can you look into adding a "Ultimate Attunable station" possibly? My house is filled with crafting stations for all the crafted sets in the game, and if i could infuse all the attunable sets into a single station, that would leave me with a whole lot more decorating room for my house.

Could possibly help with performance too.

Papa bless


EDIT: made this professional illustration to help explain my solution.

Kittytravel

Oh my god thank you thank you thank you for making this a pinned post. I've wanted this for quite awhile so that people can come to this forum section and see your current statement and stance on the furnishing cap.

Keep up the good work and thank you for the clear and concise communication on a pretty regularly brought up issue.

TheRealPotoroo

The Special Collectibles limit is my personal bugbear. There is simply no point spending a heap of money on a home where I cannot display all my pets and mounts. So I don't. Not. One. Cent.

VaranisArano

Thank you for this communication! I may not like the answer, but I am glad to have an answer instead of continuing in false hope.

NordSwordnBoard

I wonder if some players would want a high population/low furnishing limit house for guild meets and duels, as the property is more of a social platform. Also, a low population, high furnishing limit house would also be a viable opposite for pure housing enthusiasts. If that's the trade off, maybe its a possibility? Min/Maxing our housing lol.

Kashya_Vulano

I won't be buying any future houses from you guys now, but thanks for the clarification I suppose.

Maybe focus on smaller houses, and stop teasing us with gargantuan villages perfect for RP, if you're not going to bother raising the caps.

x48rph

OMG, Thanks for actually taking the time to acknowledge people on the forums. While your post pretty much says "Nope, sorry, we can't do that" it at least shows that you have heard us. So much animosity towards the developers could be significantly lessened if more such posts were made. A simple acknowledgement of "yes we heard you but we decided to do/not do <insert whatever for whatever reason>" goes a really long way. It's lets people know they weren't just ignored.

Rizi

I do think it's a bit of a pitiful excuse for the significantly smaller houses, but I can understand with the very large ones. This was a incredibly shortsighted move on your team's part, though. If you had never intended on raising the caps the entire time, and used this post to outright deny the justification of this, then you have a serious deprivation somewhere in your servers that you refuse to acknowledge, or you just assumed from the beginning that we would be content with a teeny item limit and player population capacity.

I'll never be buying housing from you guys again, but thanks for finally telling me after three years that I wasted my money buying homes in the hopes that you guys were actually going to stick to the promise you made in 2017 to raise the caps after you smoothed out performance issues.

BrantRecon

Well, I guess I'm glad that you finally have us an answer, but now I see why you waited so long. I feel bad for all the guild leaders out there that spent a lot of money on homes they wanted for their guilds, just to have this response basically nix any hope of it. And I'm sure this is going to impact overall sales of homes, especially the large ones, as people know that they can't even effectively hold all of their collectables, furnishings, and basically the other stuff they most likely sink money into.

Though in light of this, I can't help but think of a new question: How is performance an issue for instanced player homes if something as massive as Cyrodiil exists. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's a legitimate explanation, but I'm now very curious what that is.

Not that I want to make it the biggest deal in the world or anything, but this also pretty much cements ESO as the MMO with the worst housing in the business. Again, not to devalue the rest of the game at all, but the combination of a lack of features and now a total lack of potential expansion totally snubs the whole concept.

MoodyMayhem

I appreciate the answer, regardless of how long it took to get it.

With that in mind however, it's essentially taken me out of the running to purchase any larger home from now. A lot of current homes, and the newer ones being released, are far, FAR too large to properly furnish with the item limit as is. If nothing can be changed, then I see no reason to ever buy something that can't be properly utilized without blocking off 60-70% of the entire build.

I'm not sure why these larger homes are being continuously put out, if performance is such a major issue, and the item limit issues have been such a prevalent thing in the community for so long. We're currently three years into Housing, and Six years into Elder Scrolls Online, and it hasn't moved since launch in regards to this.

Perhaps it may be time to raise the minimum spec requirements for ESO. But as for right now, I'm just throwing a few thoughts out there.

Mandatory plug for eventual High Rock Kingdom Styles/Motifs.

FrancisCrawford

One change would make people much happier with the limits on a lot of houses -- double the effective cap on most houses by having separate limits for the indoors and outdoors. If this caused a long loading screen when passing between the areas, most people would see that as an acceptable tradeoff.

Obviously, there are some houses which this idea wouldn't change anything, because they're all outdoors or all indoors. But for the Hundings or Psijic or Linchal houses, it could be a big improvement.

Better yet is to apply the principle to all separate zones within houses, so that it helps the Orbservatory too, and does even more for the Psijic Villa.

Besides, if you started preloading the indoors as soon as somebody arrived at the outdoor part of the house, how long would the subsequent go-indoors loading screen need to actually be??

JHartEllis

This post is more irksome than helpful. Caps have only ever been talked about in broad strokes in relationship to performance. The question that ought to be asked is, "which caps could we increase with minimal impact on performance?" This dives a lot deeper, and when you look at the current caps, there are obvious places to make improvements.

Here's a rough visualization in % terms:

Rebalance the caps! Smooth it out! Throw us a bone, any bone! Increasing Collectible caps for smaller homes would be the obvious first step considering these are also the least performance intensive. Even a small increase in ANY of the other caps would be an above-and-beyond showing of support and give a sense of optimism.

VaranisArano

BrantRecon wrote: »

Well, I guess I'm glad that you finally have us an answer, but now I see why you waited so long. I feel bad for all the guild leaders out there that spent a lot of money on homes they wanted for their guilds, just to have this response basically nix any hope of it. And I'm sure this is going to impact overall sales of homes, especially the large ones, as people know that they can't even effectively hold all of their collectables, furnishings, and basically the other stuff they most likely sink money into.

Though in light of this, I can't help but think of a new question: How is performance an issue for instanced player homes if something as massive as Cyrodiil exists. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's a legitimate explanation, but I'm now very curious what that is.

Not that I want to make it the biggest deal in the world or anything, but this also pretty much cements ESO as the MMO with the worst housing in the business. Again, not to devalue the rest of the game at all, but the combination of a lack of features and now a total lack of potential expansion totally snubs the whole concept.

If I had to guess, its simply that Cyrodiil as a zone is both massive and spread out. However, as soon as you bring a lot of particle effects into the same small area in Cyrodiil, players do start seeing performance issues. I see it particularly when I enter an area where the game has to render a lot of effects from large groups fighting. It's like I hit a wall and my game is like "Nope!" Crash to login.

In a house, there's nothing stopping me from taking 700 candles or something that's going to have a big performance impact and stacking them all right on the spawn point - essentially trying to overload my system or a visitor's with effects they have to render all at once in a very similar fashion as entering an area with lots of fighting.

Sure, that wouldn't be a "normal" house, but ZOS does have to account for weird edge cases like that.


Potential Solutions I'd like to see moving forward:
1. Instanced indoor/outdoor areas with their own item counts
2. Smaller houses with higher item counts so they can feel full
3. Housing items that are "pre-grouped" like full table settings, table/chair sets, grouped crafting tables, etc. so players use less item slots.

SantieClaws

Just to let you know this isn't appearing in the dev tracker no.

This one got her friends to translate the German version before we realised you had posted this here.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

Rizi

I'm more so amazed that you guys can't even bother raising the population caps. If you can do it in Cyrodiil, what on Earth is stopping you from doing it in housing?

Gilvoth

my feedback:
i need more room in the house.

ThoraldGM

What about using doors as separators between loaded and unloaded areas? So each portion gets max furnishing slots?

Example 1: Autumn's Gate becomes 2 homes (exterior, interior)

Example 2: Hakkvild's High Hall becomes 3 homes (crypt, exterior, interior)

Example 3: Hall of the Lunar Champion becomes 4 homes (main and 3 wings)

Also, I second the request for an "all attunable sets in one station" menu as something that would be a game-changing improvement.

Darkmage1337

MyNameIsElias wrote: »

Thanks for this post. Can you look into adding a "Ultimate Attunable station" possibly? My house is filled with crafting stations for all the crafted sets in the game, and if i could infuse all the attunable sets into a single station, that would leave me with a whole lot more decorating room for my house.

Could possibly help with performance too.

Papa bless


EDIT: made this professional illustration to help explain my solution.

So much this.

Ragged_Claw

I can't help but think it would be better to release smaller houses on occasion, instead of these absolutely massive things that can never be furnished properly. It's natural that people are going to keep complaining when they've dropped 80 quid on a virtual palace and can't fill it.

Gilvoth

Ragged_Claw wrote: »

I can't help but think it would be better to release smaller houses on occasion, instead of these absolutely massive things that can never be furnished properly. It's natural that people are going to keep complaining when they've dropped 80 quid on a virtual palace and can't fill it.

that! is exactly the problem!
well said, all truth.

and since we now speaking of this subject.
i please ask the following:

please let us have a 1 room, underground, hidden entrance home
not a huge house, something small is affordable for my wife and i because we spend all our time in pvp means we only have around maybe 50 to 100,000 to spend, [not millions, like for the large houses]
very small underground hidden home.

thetookybird

Thank you for the update!

I have to say, Housing is one of my favourite parts of ESO and it is what keeps me coming back. There are so many wonderful builds within the community! I also spend waaaay more gold and crowns on it than I maybe should... But each new Chapters furnishing designs are better than the last, and I appreciate the wild hard work the teams put into them!

Personally, I would much prefer to have a higher furnishing cap, especially traditional furnishings, than player cap. A lot of the time, I find myself sectioning off larger houses so I can even get that "lived in" or "cozy" feeling without having huge, empty spaces in the build. Also, landscaping. So many trees.

Thanks again for this thread, and looking forward to wherever Housing goes!

CasgarTheSomnolent

NordSwordnBoard wrote: »

I wonder if some players would want a high population/low furnishing limit house for guild meets and duels, as the property is more of a social platform. Also, a low population, high furnishing limit house would also be a viable opposite for pure housing enthusiasts. If that's the trade off, maybe its a possibility? Min/Maxing our housing lol.

I came here to mention the high population/furnishing option, but you already beat me to it. That would be very nice for guild events.

That said, I imagine factors such as population size vs. number of furnishings probably are not even the same sort of problem. They may share the same basic resource pools on people's hardware, but they're probably attacked in very different ways from a development standpoint, and thus it's not as simple as a theoretical slider between high population vs high furnishings.

I do wish we could get more insight from devs into how these sorts of challenges do and don't intersect each other, but I understand that they probably can't reveal much about the actual inner workings of the game for a lot of different reasons. I appreciate the update even if it's mostly to say "we're trying but it's not easy." As an engineer, trust me, I get it.

spartaxoxo

If it's not possible to increase performance size, can we have at least have more cheap and plentiful furnishings designed specifically for saving space?

Common cobbles that routinely take space are

*Nicer ovens
*Sinks and Bathroom appliances
*Bookshelves with various clutter in all different sizes
*Banquet tables with various meals already on them
*Aquariums
*large walls of various material
*lawns and gardens
*cluttered shelves designed around different rooms

I think furnishing in these categories that were reasonably cheap and easy to get would drastically reduce the need for higher furnishing

For example this is a sink I have. I don't expect anything this elaborate. But you see the shelf above with the baskets? The baskets and fruit could easily all be a shelf as one item. A look that simple instead requires 6.



You could also have consolidated versions of existing items. The mages guild books for example could be sold as stacks with all the stories as one long continous book.

So if I wanted the Trial of Eyevea, I could have one item of 4 books stacked neatly in a row that was one long document instead of 4 individual books.

Kashya_Vulano

How I feel about the fate of Player and Item cap improvements right about now:

Brandathorbel

ZOS_CullenLee wrote: »

Howdy everyone,

One of the most frequent requests we receive in regards to housing is the desire to increase the furnishing cap. While we have touched on this before, we just wanted to reiterate that the upper-most furnishing limits are in place to avoid serious performance issues. While the core design philosophy behind housing is to give you the creative freedom to decorate the way you want to, we have to ensure that it is a stable experience for you and your visitors as well, regardless of anyone’s platform or hardware specifications.

That being said, improving performance is not a magic bullet solution for raising the furnishing cap in houses. “Performance” is a blanket term that encompasses frame rate, stability, memory usage, and other metrics related to how the game runs. Right now, setups that hit the minimum specifications can still struggle with homes that are fully decorated with relatively high impact furnishings.

We know that many of you have been hoping that our focus on performance improvements this year would directly result in an increased furnishing cap. We still have a lot of work left on the performance front and when it’s completed, we will reevaluate to see if we can increase the furnishing limits.

To address some specific questions and concerns:

• Different categories of furnishings generally have different performance impacts. Special Collectibles are more impactful than Traditional Furnishings, while Collectible Furnishings tend to have less impact than many Traditional Furnishings.
• We know not everyone is satisfied with the ratio between these furnishing types—these are set to strike a balance between the various needs people have. We could change this ratio, but any improvement to one group would negatively impact another group. We have no plans to adjust the balance between the different caps at this time.
• The number of guests in a home also impacts performance. At the moment, increasing the population limit would require reducing furnishing limits.

As always, we continue to strive to improve the housing experience. Moonsugar Meadow, for example, was created after listening to player feedback on the desire for more natural open spaces where you can express your creativity. We are always considering and tinkering with potential new housing features. As soon as we have something to show you, you’ll be the first to know.

Please continue to provide feedback! Letting us know what you like, as well as what you don’t like and why, helps us to improve. For many of us, logging into the forums and seeing your creations is often the best part of our day as your creativity continuously blows us away. The forums are one of many sources of inspiration for us, and request threads always factor into our decisions when adding new furnishings, planning new homes, and prioritizing improvements.

Thank you for reading this, and thank you for your passion.

"Moonsugar Meadow, for example, was created after listening to player feedback on the desire for more natural open spaces where you can express your creativity"

1. and everyone and i mean everyone said to get rid of the rock in the middle because it took way so much of the open space and what did you do? - you ignored them.

2. Why can you immediately increase large homes to 700? if it is based on item limits in the zone you have no excuse to not do that other than it will hurt the sales of your stupidly large and overpriced noble homes.

3. Noble homes. Why can you have two instances. ONe for outside and another loading screen when you go inside. I think people would have no problem with those.

its great you say you listen - which the whole player base knows that this is not true, so please respond to my three points - if you truly do listen.

Olauron

ZOS_CullenLee wrote: »

• Different categories of furnishings generally have different performance impacts. Special Collectibles are more impactful than Traditional Furnishings, while Collectible Furnishings tend to have less impact than many Traditional Furnishings.

I propose a rather simple change: if a player have placed all the Traditional Furnishings then it is possible to place more at the double cost of Collectible Furnishings. The same can be done with Special Collectibles using Traditional Furnishings at the same exchange rate. If the rate is figured to be not enough for the performance, increase it to 3 (triple cost).

Brandathorbel

Gilvoth wrote: »

Ragged_Claw wrote: »

I can't help but think it would be better to release smaller houses on occasion, instead of these absolutely massive things that can never be furnished properly. It's natural that people are going to keep complaining when they've dropped 80 quid on a virtual palace and can't fill it.

that! is exactly the problem!
well said, all truth.

and since we now speaking of this subject.
i please ask the following:

please let us have a 1 room, underground, hidden entrance home
not a huge house, something small is affordable for my wife and i because we spend all our time in pvp means we only have around maybe 50 to 100,000 to spend, [not millions, like for the large houses]
very small underground hidden home.

to me this is the biggest problem and just proves they dont really listen.

Normally, a smart thing to do would be build around your limitations. Zos doesnt do that. They know about the limitation, Cant fix it so they think a best thing to do would be build massive houses where the limitation is front in center.
WHO DOES THAT?

They would make more money designing large homes, make them 700 limits and people would be ecstatic they would sell more homes, in turn, more furnishing packs and more crown store purchases and locking people into eso+

so i have to ask. Zos, who makes your decisions because you are losing 100s of thousands of dollars continuing this ridiculous trend.

Mix

Item slot saving furniture, such as the filled bookshelves (more variants with greater clutter variety would be appreciated).

I also like when we get place settings for tables. This could be expanded on further with more filled dishes, breadbaskets, meat platters etc. Yes, we have things separately if we want to customize more, but if we are looking for a place to save space, this is often a good one.

Collections of clutter also work well, like hair brush, hand mirror, fan as one item to place on a vanity table.

For outdoors, some plant arrangements of several bushes/flowers as one item. We can add others in to customize but having several plants in one saves slots!

For farming builds I could also see "rows" of plants being very useful. A row of corn or tomato plants, carrots/beets/radishes already get planted individually but a row of them for a farmyard would be great too.

Ideally we would get a "merge item" feature but I think that might be very complicated to do. I will put it here anyways though, so for example you take a table, dishes, food, candles etc and set it exactly the way you want it. Say 30 items worth of dining table setup. Then you would "merge items" and those 30 items (with 30 collision boxes etc) become 1 item (irreversible) with a single collision box. This wouldn't work for interactable objects like chairs and books and I could see some issues with people regretting merges and wanting to unmerge, but it is just an idea

Salix_alba

I have noticed that a large percentage of items placed in some of my houses are lighting some houses have hundreds of lighting items can we get the option to increase the light levels on lights so we can reduce the amount of lights used thereby freeing up spaces for other furnishings?

I don't mean simply making all lights brighter automatically some people with meticulously planned out houses might get mad if they are all the sudden blinded but if we could make them brighter like the way you can change the color of the dunmer salt lamp at will I forget its real name atm that would help so many.

currently there are only a few options to brighten spaces like sinking lights inside objects or overlaying the same type of lights onto themselves to intensify the light etc.