Was this a good time to implement housing into the game?

jpeter88

A lot might disagree with me here but this game obviously has balance/game issues. It seems a lot of effort was put into adding housing to eso. dont get me wrong its a "cool" feature but with as many balance and bugs this game has i think it would have been a better idea to try and fix some of the major lag issues and making more class balances since that is what the majority of this game is. If i wanted to play house dress up id play sim farm! The main point of the game is dungeons, trials, questing, pvp, etc. I just dont understand why we have to add housing to the mix when all that time and effort could have gone into making a better overall, playable game. I mean we get a massive housing patch and then we get basically 1 change to each class.

i might be in the minority here but i just thought id share my opinion on the matter, i guess most people will play sim scrolls until the next attempt at game balance in a year.

MLGProPlayer

The team that works on balance is different from the team that handles infrastructure which is different from the team that designs cosmetics.

Sigma957

Well its been nearly 3 years so yeh this time is as good as any to implement housing.

Danikat

You could say the same about every single new thing they've ever added (and people have).

This game has had bugs and balance issues through it's entire existence. They put out long lists of fixes and changes with each update and there's still more. If we wanted for them to fix all the bugs and perfectly balance the entire game so everyone is happy with it (which would never happen) before anything else was added we wouldn't even have Craglorn yet.

They've got to balance the desires of the people who want everything we've got working perfectly with the desires of people who aren't that worried about bugs unless it's literally game breaking (as in every time the bug happens the server crashes) and either accept that balance will never be perfect or just don't care, but who do get frustrated and bored when there is nothing new to do because they've done all the existing stuff (sometimes more than once).

Guild Wars 2 very briefly tried alternating new content + bug fix updates with purely balance + bug fix updates - because people kept complaining that they were so obsessed with making new things that they never bothered to fix anything already in the game. I think they did it once and found they got just as many complaints about ignoring bugs and balance when the patch was literally nothing but fixes for bugs and balance, and then got people complaining there was nothing new, so they went back to their usual approach of doing both and letting everyone claim they didn't care about whatever that person wanted to see added/changed.

Turelus

As others have said the teams designing Homestead are not games balance developers.

The balance team have been working on balance as evidenced by the changes coming to the game.

Qbiken

Implying that housing ever was a great idea.....

Mojomonkeyman

Turelus wrote: »

As others have said the teams designing Homestead are not games balance developers.

The balance team have been working on balance as evidenced by the changes coming to the game.

Oh please, that doesn`t impact the fact, that budget allocations were favoring the "crown store" and "content" side more than the "balance" and "bugfixing" side. Those decisions are usually made on yearly basis, so yeah, there was indeed at some point the question into which project they want to put more ressources in.

Any midly responsible studio would`ve just increased the balance/bugfix team(s) size long time ago after realizing that the current one cannot keep up with workload instead of pumping cash into housing. They let an entire aspect of the game rot and die, while designing pretty houses and dresses.

Your argument is actually no argument.

Vaoh

Fantastic concept. Great feature. Beautiful detail.

......but simply terrible pricing implementation.

They basically created this feature for a small portion of players who will even bother with it because the pricing is disgusting (both gold/mat-wise and crown-wise) and you cannot even store items in your home.

Unless you have hundreds of dollars or tens of millions of gold to spare, you will never get to decorate a house to your heart's desire. Let's not forget that they also cut out half of the furniture count allowed to be placed in a house and reserved it for their $15/month ESO+ subscription as well

Personally I'm leaving this feature to my rich GMs and staying at their homes. I'll never have even nearly enough money to put up with ZOS's ridiculous prices for Homestead.

jpeter88

Turelus wrote: »

As others have said the teams designing Homestead are not games balance developers.

The balance team have been working on balance as evidenced by the changes coming to the game.

what exactly have they been doing then?! the balance changes in this patch look like they were whipped up in a day or 2 just to have something to complement homestead. ive never really bashed ZOS because i know there is more to it then what we see as consumers, but EVERYTHING that they have implemented in the last 6 months is just one big money sucker, balance just seems to be an afterthought.

I really wish they had a more active community manager that would give some updates on what they are working on and if they are listening to the stamina problems in end game pvE.

Sugaroverdose

jpeter88 wrote: »

A lot might disagree with me here but this game obviously has balance/game issues. It seems a lot of effort was put into adding housing to eso. dont get me wrong its a "cool" feature but with as many balance and bugs this game has i think it would have been a better idea to try and fix some of the major lag issues and making more class balances since that is what the majority of this game is. If i wanted to play house dress up id play sim farm! The main point of the game is dungeons, trials, questing, pvp, etc. I just dont understand why we have to add housing to the mix when all that time and effort could have gone into making a better overall, playable game. I mean we get a massive housing patch and then we get basically 1 change to each class.

i might be in the minority here but i just thought id share my opinion on the matter, i guess most people will play sim scrolls until the next attempt at game balance in a year.

Press and hold HA sims, is current ZoS plan, so don't expect anything reasonable, most of zos doesn't even know what they're doing and where they are -_-

jpeter88

Ive said this about other games like CoD to but i think the deves making "balance" changes need to log X amount of hours on the live servers a month. They should have to run trials and pvp each other, it seems now all they do to test something is go kill a pack of zombies in greenshade and be like "yip, its all good, ship it!"

Taleof2Cities

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

The team that works on balance is different from the team that handles infrastructure which is different from the team that designs cosmetics.

^This.^