Housing Suggestions

Novaesi

Hello, I've been tinkering with houses since Homesteads launch and I'd like to share some feedback and suggestions. I think the homes offered are some of the most beautiful and well designed I've seen in an MMO and the housing system overall definitely has potential to be one of the best. These are some thoughts that came to mind while working with my homes:

• Please increase decor item limits across ALL houses. After decorating a few homes it is not enough items to feel complete even though I have capped the limits. (This is with ESO Plus bonus limits)
  
• Ability to scale certain items. I love the interact-able furniture and the scale of the furniture pieces as is, but there are decor items, plants, trees that I would really appreciate an ability to scale smaller or larger.
  
• More control over the camera when placing items or an ability to zoom out. There are certain large items (giant trees and the wedding curtain immediately comes to mind) that are difficult to place because you can not see the top or the bottom of the item at the same time (maybe I am doing something wrong) and it is frustrating at times to place these exactly where you want them.
  
• Allow more than one home to be visited by other players while my character is not physically there or if I am offline. The Primary Residence is a nice start but when I have collected and decorated 40+ of these homes I want other people to be able to visit whenever they like as long as I have the house access open for visitors. Can we assign our favorite top 5 homes or something like this?
  
• When I or a guest press F5 to view information about my home can the name I've given the house be seen somewhere here in addition to what the default houses name is.
  
• Some of the homes are extremely dark inside, especially Dark Elf and Imperial homes, please look at the ambient lighting inside these houses, they could use a slight boost.
  
• Remove collision from the top of the canopy beds - to be able to /sit inside it.
  
• Would appreciate an item that removes ground foliage in a small area - would like to place a table/chairs or a rug outdoors without plants poking through.
  
• Interior wall pieces that match the current homes brick walls, one style with a door way and one that is just a plain wall to insert wherever.
  
• More plants and flowers.
  
• More blocks and wood pieces to build with.
  
• Fountains with running water.
  
• Stairs - short and long, narrow and wide types.

Anyone else that has feedback or ideas feel free to share here as well.

Since there is no Homestead sub-forum I am posting this in the Community Creations area, my apologies if this is not the appropriate place for this topic.

OmniDo

Novaesi wrote: »

• Please increase decor item limits across ALL houses. After decorating a few homes it is not enough items to feel complete even though I have capped the limits. (This is with ESO Plus bonus limits)

Couldnt agree more with you here, and I think thats the general consensus with most players.
The limits could easily be doubled, and for some of us who enjoy creating mesh decor, even that wouldnt be enough.

Novaesi wrote: »

• Ability to scale certain items. I love the interact-able furniture and the scale of the furniture pieces as is, but there are decor items, plants, trees that I would really appreciate an ability to scale smaller or larger.

While a nifty idea, that would be somewhat lore-breaking.
Can you imagine a "scaled" Human Skull to be so large as to fill a throne room?
Or a single candle with more size and light than even the brightest chandelier?
I doubt they'll implement that one, and if so, probably in very limited fashion.

Novaesi wrote: »

• More control over the camera when placing items or an ability to zoom out. There are certain large items (giant trees and the wedding curtain immediately comes to mind) that are difficult to place because you can not see the top or the bottom of the item at the same time (maybe I am doing something wrong) and it is frustrating at times to place these exactly where you want them.

This is a bit of a pain, yes.
Perhaps if they implemented a coordinate system for all items?
There is an addon that does precisely this, but even it requires practice to use it properly.

Novaesi wrote: »

• Allow more than one home to be visited by other players while my character is not physically there or if I am offline. The Primary Residence is a nice start but when I have collected and decorated 40+ of these homes I want other people to be able to visit whenever they like as long as I have the house access open for visitors. Can we assign our favorite top 5 homes or something like this?

Cant agree more here!
The single residence only is irritating, especially when I may wish to alternate between homes that I visit.
While theyre at it, they could also do with extended permissions for visitors.
I personally dont like coming home to find out all the lights and/or interactables have been turned off.

Novaesi wrote: »

• When I or a guest press F5 to view information about my home can the name I've given the house be seen somewhere here in addition to what the default houses name is.

Agreed.

Novaesi wrote: »

• Some of the homes are extremely dark inside, especially Dark Elf and Imperial homes, please look at the ambient lighting inside these houses, they could use a slight boost.

Cant agree with you here.
For me, many of the homes are simply too bright during the day, especially in locations where this makes no sense.
If Im a vampire living in my "Cellar" for example, there should be zero light down there that isnt artificially created.
Unless the rocks of Tamriel are magically transparent to lighting, the "Artificial" ambiance is already irritating where there should be no physics to permit it.
An alternative suggestion would be to introduce "hidden" lighting options, or lamps that are designed to be "brighter" than the standard candle.

Novaesi wrote: »

• Remove collision from the top of the canopy beds - to be able to /sit inside it.

Yeah, this would make canopy beds alot more appealing to us RP'rs, or screenshot junkies.

Novaesi wrote: »

• Interior wall pieces that match the current homes brick walls, one style with a door way and one that is just a plain wall to insert wherever.

Agreed!
Although, if item count were less of a problem, makeshift walls work quite well.
I managed a few myself that are "believable" using the base stone blocks and wooden orc tables, but they dont perfectly match the interior walls and/or race-specific architecture.
Simple matching walls, floors, and ceilings would be nice, and preferably those that are straight, not like the current "plank" that is so irritatingly crude that not even a rug can sit on top of it without the wood "clipping' through.

Novaesi wrote: »

• More blocks and wood pieces to build with.

Yup, more variety, and a also perhaps a 'snap-to and group" feature, allowing us to move groups of items at once instead of individually.

Novaesi wrote: »

• Fountains with running water.
• Stairs - short and long, narrow and wide types.

Stairs definitely.

Ajaxandriel

You made an awsome summary of this

Novaesi wrote: »

[*] Ability to scale certain items. I love the interact-able furniture and the scale of the furniture pieces as is, but there are decor items, plants, trees that I would really appreciate an ability to scale smaller or larger.

Absolutely agree regarding trees and shrubs

Novaesi wrote: »

[*] Allow more than one home to be visited by other players while my character is not physically there or if I am offline. The Primary Residence is a nice start but when I have collected and decorated 40+ of these homes I want other people to be able to visit whenever they like as long as I have the house access open for visitors. Can we assign our favorite top 5 homes or something like this?

This point is just what prevented me to invest more in the feature (and in the game in the end)

Novaesi wrote: »

[*] When I or a guest press F5 to view information about my home can the name I've given the house be seen somewhere here in addition to what the default houses name is.

The basis of immersion ! thanks for reporting this suggestion.

Ajaxandriel

Up !

These ideas definitely deserve more consideration from ZOS.

ShedsHisTail

I want to be able to place my alts in my home similar to how I can place my assistants.

Would love to come home to see my healer sitting by the fire reading a book, or my tank slaving away in the kitchen.

Ajaxandriel

Two other ideas came to my mind :

• Allow a kind of "GM Fly" mode for the owner in Edition mode. It'll be useful to spawn things with a relevent point of view, and to take pictures from above, etc. (Perhaps, to avoid the "god-mod" looking, the fly mode would be unusable any time someone else is into the house.)
  
  
• Add guild banners. It would be like regular tabard, just spawnable into houses.
• To go further we could even have a way to craft our own motif on a blank banner, using options similar to the tabard creator.

OmniDo

ShedsHisTail wrote: »

I want to be able to place my alts in my home similar to how I can place my assistants.
Would love to come home to see my healer sitting by the fire reading a book, or my tank slaving away in the kitchen.

This is actually possible to a limited extent in SWTOR.
Although you cant place your alts in your strongholds (their version of "housing"), you could place your companions from all of your alts there.They would appear as holograms when on an alt, and actual NPC-ish characters when playing your characters who had them.

I'd like to place my alts in my homes, and set them to do various actions like reading, writing, sitting down and reading, sitting down and writing, kneeling and fiddling with a chest/trunk, using any crafting station with the associated animations that apparently only we can see, or just standing with a various /idle animation.

Though I doubt they would implement the option to create "paths" for your alts to walk, that would be an awesome addition to immersion.

SunnyBunny

To be able to have portraits of toons to be able to hang in the houses, I would be willing to part with a few pieces of gold for that option and maybe the ability to gift them to people. I could see how this would be a nice thing for couples.

It comes to mind in cold harbor you can't open certain building until you finish certain quests or find NPCs. that would be a nice thing to be able to do. You save so many people/mers I'm sure one would like to come and stay at your home.

There is a rumour about having a real tub like you see in Vvardenfeld, I have yet to see that.

Why can we purchase Wells but not be able to see water in them? The one well I have I filled with seaweeds to hide that there is no water.

Lack of birds or bugs or even butterfly's in the houses with yards.

We can put our pets in the house, I would like to be able to duplicate it. I have a netch baby I adore, and would like to be able to put 2 or 3 in the house to sort of do their thing.

The new beds are crumbly and unmade, I cringe when I see them. Can we have an option to have a made version of this please?

If we're talking floors and rocks can you do the red tiles like in Vivec city? Those are really nice. A few more color options would be good. The vivid blue is also to die for.

Walls and arch ways are a good idea as well, although I doubt you will do that.

Berret

(Since quote broke for me) On scaled items:

We actually already had things like this in Oblivion, where there were some GIANT scaled items in the palace basement. TBH scaled can easily be explained with magic. Of course I doubt that we'll see something like this >.>.

Decoration limit REALLY Needs to be at least double or removed, you can hardly decorate a house without hitting the cap, especially the smaller ones. The fact that small items cost as much as the bigger items is bad too.

I would like something like SWTOR for the furniture, basically you click on them and they get added to a 'wardrobe' of sorts and don't take inventory space, you can have up to 999 of each item and can just plop them out when you're decorating. It's simple and easy to use without having the furniture clutter up space in your inventory.

SunnyBunny

Yes the item clutter ugh, I just put a lot of things in one of the free rooms. Which in a way is good and bad since that is not supposed to be the purpose of the room.

Viglin

Other then the obvious missing storage options,
Fishing and resource harvesting, on a timer.
Gardens to tend and harvest
More assistants to place(stable master,chef,bard,etc)
Quest Daily Board(crafting,mages,etc)
City type NPCs, like servants, visitors, residents going by their daily lives
Just a few ideas to bring some life to our house.