Arguments for some simple Quality of Life additions for housing (with Crown Store incentives).

NightbladeMechanics

Here, I will make an argument for 4 quality of life features which would make houses more functional as central gathering hubs, like capital cities.

• They will require minimal development hours from ZOS.
• 2 will have indirect Crown Store incentives, as they are suggestions for enhancing the Banker and Vendor NPCs.

The problem:

• People want to use houses as central gathering hubs to do their daily business, but houses lack the comprehensive functionalities of capital cities.
• This causes players to still have to take special trips into town to do certain tasks every day when they might prefer to do said tasks in their homes, which many players chose, purchased, and decorated for this very purpose.

Houses are as permanent in our characters' stories and our gameplay as the cities which ZOS built. Players gather in houses to spend extended amounts of time dueling and socializing with each other, like cities. Players go to houses to craft gear and consumables, like cities. Players go to houses to vendor items and access their personal banks, like cities. Many players park their characters in their houses and operate out of them as a central hub, like cities.

Players use their homes as central hubs for their daily business, just like capital cities, except that currently, houses lack a few key features. I argue that it would be desired quality of life fixes for the following features to be added to housing:

1. Quick log out / quit, like in capital cities.

This is the simplest of my suggestions, so I list it first. Unless there are performance or server strain reasons for why we should wait out the 10 second timer when logging out or quitting from inside our homes, I do not see why we can't have the quick log implemented. If there are performances reasons preventing it, then that's fine.

However, it would be a relief to not have to wait 10 seconds each time we swap between characters when transferring gear, or simply when we're ready to log off.

2. Guild bank and guild store access from the Banker.
3. Gear repairs at the Vendor.

Bankers in houses are permanent NPC fixtures, like bankers in cities. Allow us and our visitors to access our guild stores and guild banks from bankers placed in homes. Players will love this because it will save us extraneous trips into town to restock our traders, transfer items, and search for items to purchase.

Gear repairs are a monotonous daily task and I feel a minor request for vendors placed in houses. They're as permanent as the banker, and it would save players the trouble of having to remember to repair at some point when outside of their houses.

3. Visitors fencing and laundering stolen items at the Fence.

Fence NPCs in our homes are currently only usable by their owners. This is their intended functionality outside of homes, but I argue that visitors should be able to use the NPCs placed in our homes. A home with a Fence is the lair of a master thief, after all, is it not? Why should the house be considered any different from a Thieves Den?

The only argument I can think of for not adding these features is maintaining a need for players to travel into the cities every day in order to maintain city activity and population. That's a valid argument, but I expect that we wouldn't see a marked decrease in city activity if houses gained these functions.

• Players would still travel to cities to access guild traders of which they aren't members.
• Players would still duel in the cities, as they still do.
• Players would still craft in the cities, as they still do.
• Players would still form PvE groups and a myriad of other activities in the cities, as they do right now.

I would be curious to see the impact of adding these features, though. Thoughts?

~ PS: Bonus feature that would take some development time!

• A working wayshrine from which to port out of our homes would be SWEET, just saying.

NightbladeMechanics

These features could even be tied to eso+ statuses of the homeowner or visitor. I'm trying to think of ways this can be worth zos' time. Lol

kargen27

Personally I don't mind going to the towns to do any of that stuff. Takes very little time or effort. I also don't care if others visit towns or not so for me these are all non issues one way or the other.

Going off on a tangent. I have more than one house and I would like there to be a way for people to visit all my houses.

Would also be kinda cool if I could tie a house to a character and then instead of having lackies send me goodies in the mail I could put those same skill points into being able to once a day visit my house (twice for the extra point) and gather the goodies myself. Basically you get the same stuff just at your house. Characters not tied to a house would still get stuff from hirelings

idk

First, Zos already stated some of the limitations was to SS show the serveds homes are on handle the losses. It's more than just your home. They said they're looking to make some adjustments.

For the most part the OP has already been stated many times. Some of it Zos has commented on. Also, the statement that it the ideas would take minimal development time, assuming the internet is to state they are easy changes, well Zos has also stated that many suggestions are not as easy to implement as one might think.

NewBlacksmurf

NightbladeMechanics wrote: »

These features could even be tied to eso+ statuses of the homeowner or visitor. I'm trying to think of ways this can be worth zos' time. Lol

Simple.....remove subscription from all your ideas.
Replace it all with updates for DLC or a chapter

Then it's all fine and ppl can choose to sub for access (renting these things)
Or
Buy them via a non crown but just simple real money transaction

Tandor

Features that stop people from needing to use city facilities do indeed have an impact on those games where such features are included, whether the features are in private housing or guild halls. They destroy the cities and present an empty atmosphere to new players which is damaging to the impression they gain of the game's population and success. I hope that isn't allowed to happen here.

I don't think that defending it by arguing that people would still use the cities for dueling is going to win over many people !

Inquisitor_Wind

atleast let us sleep on our damn expensive beds

MarbleQuiche

Tandor wrote: »

Features that stop people from needing to use city facilities do indeed have an impact on those games where such features are included, whether the features are in private housing or guild halls. They destroy the cities and present an empty atmosphere to new players which is damaging to the impression they gain of the game's population and success. I hope that isn't allowed to happen here.

I don't think that defending it by arguing that people would still use the cities for dueling is going to win over many people !

The cities are pretty much empty of anyone not questing through the zone. Outside of those people, the only other reason to go to one of them is for guild traders, which won't change.

It's only the cities that have dailies in them that are truly busy, and that won't change. Those also have the most visited/sought-after guild traders. Only impact would be on the banks (or on crafting/banking cities - aka Shornhelm )

Sigtric

I don't necessarily disagree with your ideas, but this bit right here is kind of a headscratcher.

​The problem:
People want to use houses as central gathering hubs to do their daily business, but houses lack the comprehensive functionalities of capital cities.
This causes players to still have to take special trips into town to do certain tasks every day when they might prefer to do said tasks in their homes, which many players chose, purchased, and decorated for this very purpose.

If players chose, purchased and decorated houses for a purpose that wasn't in the design of the system (would wager that housing was purposefully designed NOT to include much of the functionality of cities), that's not really anyone's fault but their own.

As explained by @Tandor, it's to everyone's benefit (player and developer) whether they see it or not, that social areas/populated towns and cities remain as such.

Tandor

MarbleQuiche wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

Features that stop people from needing to use city facilities do indeed have an impact on those games where such features are included, whether the features are in private housing or guild halls. They destroy the cities and present an empty atmosphere to new players which is damaging to the impression they gain of the game's population and success. I hope that isn't allowed to happen here.

I don't think that defending it by arguing that people would still use the cities for dueling is going to win over many people !

The cities are pretty much empty of anyone not questing through the zone. Outside of those people, the only other reason to go to one of them is for guild traders, which won't change.

It's only the cities that have dailies in them that are truly busy, and that won't change. Those also have the most visited/sought-after guild traders. Only impact would be on the banks (or on crafting/banking cities - aka Shornhelm )

I don't know how you're defining cities, but I'm referring to the major cities in all the zones and they're all extremely busy (at least on my server, and I believe it's the same on all of them) with people running around all day, every day. If they end up shutting themselves away in their own little instances with their assistants and crafting stations as now, and you add in guild banks and stores, repair facilities, and fence NPCs then it is going to impact massively on the city populations.

I'm all for QoL improvements like being able to sit on chairs, sleep on beds, and exit housing more quickly (I'm not talking so much about logging out as simply leaving the house), those sorts of thing are fine. It's doing away with the need to leave your house in order to play any aspect of the game outside of adventuring that I'm against.

Duiwel

@Tandor I can also disagree with you because there will always be players who do not go to guild halls and will remain in the cities, currently cities also have various instances for example, if it REALLY does go down by so much there will always be one instance and then that one will not be barren.

You need to keep in mind that we do have a need that is not satisfied and that is Guild Halls, people want it, people desire it, many people would rather stand around in a guild hall than go to Wayrest, Mounhold, Daggerfall ect.

Many, however does not mean ALL.

You also need to keep in mind that you cannot steal new items in a Guild hall, you cannot pick up daily quests there, you cannot hand in or pick up writs quests so towns will ALWAYS remain relevant, whether you want to argue against this or not your argument is very murky at best because I just listed at least 3 reasons EVERYONE will still use towns.

Prof_Bawbag

I found an excellent use for housing. I bought Mathiisen Manor day 1, put a test dummy in it and that was where my interaction began and ended. However, just the weekend past, I spent 1.5m on items and used about 750k worth of mats to make other items. My 9 year old daughter spent hours kitting the manor out over the weekend whilst i caught up with some work. Best item I've purchased in the game for that reason only. It's impressive looking and better than anything I could have done.

She's now wanting ESO on her Xbox 1 so she can do her own house up. Erm, no. I'll buy another large house with gold and let her do it again next time I need peace and quiet to get on with work. Won't cost as much this time as I have a lot of mats and all the plans from my previous large purchasing spree. She loves housing. Says it all really.

hydrocynus

Two others that I would love to see in my home:

5) Ability to place inactive toons in my home and allow my active character to trade with those toons directly. There is a workaround for this already by way of using our bank to transfer between characters and people do it regardless even with the large effort so why not allow us to do it directly? If ZOS want to make some money they could sell character placement nodes in the crown store. 1 character can be placed on a node once you place the node in your house and could wander within range like an npc. I thin this would be an awesome addition to make our homes more lively.

6) allow us to craft/buy and place writ notice boards in our homes to initiate the writ dailies. Not so important really as this being in cities means that we still will visit cities but would be a nice to have.

Saturnana

A thousand times yes! @NightbladeMechanics for president.. emperor?

MattT1988

hydrocynus wrote: »

Two others that I would love to see in my home:

5) Ability to place inactive toons in my home and allow my active character to trade with those toons directly. There is a workaround for this already by way of using our bank to transfer between characters and people do it regardless even with the large effort so why not allow us to do it directly? If ZOS want to make some money they could sell character placement nodes in the crown store. 1 character can be placed on a node once you place the node in your house and could wander within range like an npc. I thin this would be an awesome addition to make our homes more lively.

6) allow us to craft/buy and place writ notice boards in our homes to initiate the writ dailies. Not so important really as this being in cities means that we still will visit cities but would be a nice to have.

5. I really like this idea. Take out the crown store *** of it and your pretty much on the money. Don't even need to buy a node, if you log out of your alt at your house then they become an NPC in your house, walking around interacting with the environment, maybe even do things that suit their personality, like your Mage character sitting in the reading area with a book, your warrior character practicing their sword skills outside, etc etc. Most importantly, you'll be able to trade gear with them, people are going to say this is going to be a game breaking feature, it won't be. All your doing is saving you a bit of tedious time dropping stuff off at your bank and picking it up again. No big deal.

6. Yeah but I would only have a crafting dailies board available. (I'd also like to be able to turn any crafting writ in at any city) Still need to visit the city to get the other dailies like undaunted.

hydrocynus

MattT1988 wrote: »

hydrocynus wrote: »

Two others that I would love to see in my home:

5) Ability to place inactive toons in my home and allow my active character to trade with those toons directly. There is a workaround for this already by way of using our bank to transfer between characters and people do it regardless even with the large effort so why not allow us to do it directly? If ZOS want to make some money they could sell character placement nodes in the crown store. 1 character can be placed on a node once you place the node in your house and could wander within range like an npc. I thin this would be an awesome addition to make our homes more lively.

6) allow us to craft/buy and place writ notice boards in our homes to initiate the writ dailies. Not so important really as this being in cities means that we still will visit cities but would be a nice to have.

5. I really like this idea. Take out the crown store *** of it and your pretty much on the money. Don't even need to buy a node, if you log out of your alt at your house then they become an NPC in your house, walking around interacting with the environment, maybe even do things that suit their personality, like your Mage character sitting in the reading area with a book, your warrior character practicing their sword skills outside, etc etc. Most importantly, you'll be able to trade gear with them, people are going to say this is going to be a game breaking feature, it won't be. All your doing is saving you a bit of tedious time dropping stuff off at your bank and picking it up again. No big deal.

6. Yeah but I would only have a crafting dailies board available. (I'd also like to be able to turn any crafting writ in at any city) Still need to visit the city to get the other dailies like undaunted.

It would make me happier if 5 wasnt linked to crowns. However if it was related to crowns I would still buy it.

Jimbullbee85

Yup I love it! Would also like to have a wayshrine outside. It's free to travel In but not to travel out. Having the writ boards would be awesome too.