Recommendations to improve Home Tours

lei.aili_ESO

Regarding the new Home Tours feature; I love this new feature and am glad it was added to the game. However, I would like to suggest a few things that I think will improve this feature.

Firstly, I'd suggest the option to search for a house by the house nickname. This would help make it easier to find a certain type of build that there may not be a tag for. Along those lines, it would be nice to be able to have longer nicknames.

The ability to add a brief description would be much appreciated. Just a short paragraph to tell your story, explain your vision, or share hints about secrets. This would add so much more to the immersion and roleplay aspect of the game that so many of us love.

Lastly, and most importantly, the way the recommendations are currently set up favors people with a lot of in-game connections. But there are many of us who are into the housing aspect of the game that don't have streams or large guilds or whatever other connections to really promote their houses. Only having a "recommended" tab, even if it does cycle through different batches, will still inevitably keep the promoted ones promoted, while leaving all the rest buried in an awkward-to-navigate and incredibly long list consisting of literally all the houses submitted. Once it's no longer new, it's pretty much impossible to find without actively searching for it.

I don't know if there's any way to completely solve that problem, but I do have a suggestion to help mitigate it: add a category of "never recommended." Or add a filter to search by number of recommendations in either ascending or descending order. This way you can help promote those hidden gems that might otherwise stay hidden.

Basically, just please give us more ways to search for houses besides just a username or a handful of tags (many of which don't quite fit what we're going for anyway, at least for me).

tsaescishoeshiner

Something like "Never Recommended" is a really nice idea! Although that sounds like it's never gotten a single Recommend vote, too. Maybe it could be phrased a bit more constructively, like Under the Radar or Unfeatured or Never Featured.

The listing notes could be expanded to include New (listed the past 24 hours), Fresh (Listed the past 1-2 weeks), Returning (re-listed after a certain time since the last listing), stuff like that, in addition to the user-set tags.

Also, a "port to random" from browse or search results would be nice. Make some spontaneous finds.

lei.aili_ESO

The "port to random" is a great idea! Or even just a way to shuffle the listings could be nice, so you can get a mix of popular and not-so-popular houses.

Thee_Cheshire_Cat

a guest book would be nice too.

Necrotech_Master

the recommended list is honestly a lot larger than i was expecting it to be lol, the length it is doesnt make a huge amount of sense

its like the full list is 1000 listings and the recommended is like 50-100 of those

i think for your own listings you should be able to see # of visitors, supposedly can see # recommendations already but i dont think ive gotten any yet on my house, but i dont know if anyones even seen it yet considering the insanely large list lol

i think ive seen others mention things such as if you have already visited or recommended a home

Buffy121

I think the number of recommendations you can give each week should increase. Ten per week is a very small amount when you consider the number of houses available to view. I think it should be at least fifty.

anjasa

Thee_Cheshire_Cat wrote: »

a guest book would be nice too.

I've had people sending mails about my homes and that's always really exciting, but having a guestbook would help encourage feedback.

I also love the idea of having descriptions and/or a custom screenshot of the opening or something so that they stand out.

katanagirl1

anjasa wrote: »

Thee_Cheshire_Cat wrote: »

a guest book would be nice too.

I've had people sending mails about my homes and that's always really exciting, but having a guestbook would help encourage feedback.

I also love the idea of having descriptions and/or a custom screenshot of the opening or something so that they stand out.

I’ve been sending and receiving mail messages about the houses and that’s great, what’s not so great is how difficult it is to search for the player on PSN when I can’t see their name and have to try to remember it. I’d like a button added that says “message this player” to make it easier.

LikiLoki

Many owners of good houses complain that they do not have visitors. The problem is that guests now go only to recommended houses and leave their recommendations to them - this is a vicious circle - an elite circle of eternal leaders. We really need the function of visiting a random non-recommended house.

Buffy121

I like the idea of a random house visit function.

spartaxoxo

We need a grab bag of houses where we can see random stuff that hasn't been recommended lately.

And also a way for someone to leave feedback for a home they visited, regardless if they recommended it or not. Not necessarily their own text but something like being able to select from a few phrases like, "liked," "spooky," "cool," etc.

An easy way to view other homes made by the person who created the house.

LikiLoki

Ah, you know, there are heated discussions about artificial intelligence on the general forum. never mind... So, if the list of recommendations included houses that were recommended by neural networks in several pieces and with a special mark-recommended by algorithms...In addition, there may be houses-winners of previous contests and houses recommended by the TESO team.

davidtk

lei.aili_ESO wrote: »

The ability to add a brief description would be much appreciated. Just a short paragraph to tell your story, explain your vision, or share hints about secrets. This would add so much more to the immersion and roleplay aspect of the game that so many of us love.

That's what annoys me the most.
They are trying to implement things that are handled by already established addons, but for example EHT and PTF have descriptions for houses. I don't understand why Home Tours here can't have a description for a house. I have two that need descriptions, well one house in particular desperately needs it, because I had to make at least some lore-friendly help on how to walk around in the house and how to use it.

MotherOfMoss

Very much in favour of basically everything here: random house, newly added houses, and some additional means of finding those houses that no one has found. And I think the keyword search would be great; I like building lore-friendly stuff and naming it accordingly, and I'd love my builds to be discoverable based on their specific content, and to discover other builds similarly. This could be achieved by text search or by adding a LOT of more tags to describe your build in more detail.

(Hedging the text search request a bit as we still don't have that for guilds, either, even though it would plainly make the guild finder so much better. Maybe there's some reason it doesn't exist...)

I'd also really like being able to provide a brief description, as the nickname can only tell so much about a place and only allows 20 characters. But I have to say I was surprised we got even publicly visible nicknames – I can sadly imagine people giving their houses less than wholesome names just because they can. So I think the descriptions may have been left out to avoid needing to moderate them. However, it would be great if we could use some more words to tell visitors about our houses, if possible