Rift had voting in housing. It was HATED.

WolfCombatPet · July 4

The tension of visiting someone's house and have that player watch you NOT tick up the vote-count is not something I will ever miss about Rift.
It caused guild drama. It built cliques. It destroyed communities.

Rift's only hated housing feature... is ESO's big mystery hype update.

Why would they add a feature that players HATED in another MMO to ESO?

LunaFlora · July 4

the Favourite "rating" is according to the livestream like Favouriting your own collectibles.
i can imagine just using it for people's crafting houses or unique builds like mazes.
houses you would want to revisit maybe regularly

try it out on the pts on monday perhaps

Jaraal · July 4

LunaFlora wrote: »

the Favourite "rating" is according to the livestream like Favouriting your own collectibles.
i can imagine just using it for people's crafting houses or unique builds like mazes.
houses you would want to revisit maybe regularly

try it out on the pts on monday perhaps

Definitely voting. If you want your house featured, start stumping.

When you find a home that really impresses you, you can recommend it to others, as well as favorite it for yourself to visit later. You can even favorite homes you visit through other means, regardless of whether they are listed for Home Tours. There’s a weekly limit on how many homes you can recommend, but no limit on how many you can visit and enjoy. Your own home may be featured as a recommended home in the Activity Finder if it becomes popular enough!

https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/66331

LunaFlora · July 4

well that's alright then

SolidBeast · July 4

WolfCombatPet wrote: »

Why would they add a feature that players HATED in another MMO to ESO?

I'm guessing because they never paid any attention to Rift. If they had, surely they would have implemented some of its housing mechanics. Rift was an amazing game in its prime.

Aurielle · July 4

Jaraal wrote: »

LunaFlora wrote: »

the Favourite "rating" is according to the livestream like Favouriting your own collectibles.
i can imagine just using it for people's crafting houses or unique builds like mazes.
houses you would want to revisit maybe regularly

try it out on the pts on monday perhaps

Definitely voting. If you want your house featured, start stumping.

When you find a home that really impresses you, you can recommend it to others, as well as favorite it for yourself to visit later. You can even favorite homes you visit through other means, regardless of whether they are listed for Home Tours. There’s a weekly limit on how many homes you can recommend, but no limit on how many you can visit and enjoy. Your own home may be featured as a recommended home in the Activity Finder if it becomes popular enough!

https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/66331

I can see it now: guilds will try to heavily influence which houses are featured by participating in mass targeted voting. Don’t be surprised if people end up “buying” a featured house from guilds for the social clout. I don’t participate in housing, but am in a social guild that previously had a lot of housing clique-related drama, so this is vaguely triggering, haha.

Alastrine · July 4

I know I will never use the voting thing. I could see it being a challenge and a great thing for some, but not for me.
The last thing I need for a game I play to relax is to come on and see nobody liked my houses lol. It's a game and it's a small thing but yea, don't need that kind of feedback.
I love to decorate my houses and I have fun doing it, sometimes I get really creative, but it's all for my own satisfaction.

There are a lot of great housing suggestions that I do like though. Or - as I've posted elsewhere - the very simple thing of being able to decon crafted furniture... to clear space and to regain whatever small amounts of mats can be obtained from it. Still surprised that's never been implemented, with the cry for storage space and all.

TaSheen · July 4

The house rating thing in RIFT must have happened after I quit playing in 2016 - or I was just oblivious. I don't do housing to share with others....

I LOVED the housing in RIFT. SO much better than what we have here.

nwilliams2107b16_ESO · July 4

Rift = those with best macro wins

Jaraal · July 4

Aurielle wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

LunaFlora wrote: »

the Favourite "rating" is according to the livestream like Favouriting your own collectibles.
i can imagine just using it for people's crafting houses or unique builds like mazes.
houses you would want to revisit maybe regularly

try it out on the pts on monday perhaps

Definitely voting. If you want your house featured, start stumping.

When you find a home that really impresses you, you can recommend it to others, as well as favorite it for yourself to visit later. You can even favorite homes you visit through other means, regardless of whether they are listed for Home Tours. There’s a weekly limit on how many homes you can recommend, but no limit on how many you can visit and enjoy. Your own home may be featured as a recommended home in the Activity Finder if it becomes popular enough!

https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/66331

I can see it now: guilds will try to heavily influence which houses are featured by participating in mass targeted voting. Don’t be surprised if people end up “buying” a featured house from guilds for the social clout. I don’t participate in housing, but am in a social guild that previously had a lot of housing clique-related drama, so this is vaguely triggering, haha.

Let's not forget that paid house decorating is a rather lucrative in-game business. If a "professional" decorator can get their creations highlighted by a targeted popularity campaign, it can more than offset any costs with the resulting ability to charge more for the service. Entrepreneurs will most definitely be taking advantage of the new system.

Soarora · July 4

To be clear, it’s not really rating like 1-5 stars. There’s two options: you can favorite a house or you can recommend a house. Basically, you can save the listing or give the house your approval. I do wonder if it’ll reset quarterly like leaderboards though because I think it’ll just end up being all the popular Housing people and no one else because of their followings.

Toanis · July 4

In SWTOR homes are automatically rated by number of decorations the player has unlocked, multiplied by the percentage of decoration slots used in that home. Theoretically a neutral approach, assuming that you can't go wrong with visiting the home of a dedicated housing enthusiast, except that...

1) a big source of decorations is group content, you get 999 pictures of any raid boss you kill (per difficulty!), whereas the casual plebs are limited to a couple hundred cheap furnitures from vendors and stuff from the loot boxes you can buy on the auction house but not in the thousands.

2) there is (or used to be) a big motivation to get your homes 100% decorated, because that percentage also counts as a bonus to Conquest XP (a weekly guild leaderboard)

So of course the first pages of the housing lists are decoration dumps, with nothing but the same raid boss pictures over and over again. There never was a reason to list those houses, but players did it anyway. To dominate yet another leaderboard? To make fun of the players actually into housing? Who knows.

Recommendations, whether by votes or algorithm are easily enough manipulated on Youtube, Steam or Amazon, don't expect them to work in an MMO.

WolfCombatPet · July 4

Yeah. It's not a rating thing. You either recommend the house or you don't. That's exactly what Rift had.

Rift had AMAZING housing otherwise. The voting was the only thing players hated.

It wasn't even things like buying votes that were awful. It was the one on one interactions and the whole, "I thought we were friends. Why wouldn't you upvote me?" or "There's a guild event to upvote the guild master's girlfriend's house." etc. There were so many variations of drama resulting from this.

It could be someone you just met. They come to your house. They love it. But then you are afraid to tour their house. If you don't end up liking it, wouldn't it be awkward?? You have to sit there and tell them why you aren't upvoting it or feel the social pressure to upvote a house you don't actually feel deserves a vote.
So people started avoiding touring other players' homes while those players were present.

House tours became an anti-social thing.

WolfCombatPet · July 4

I really like guild events in ESO where we tour people's homes.

But now I will be avoiding anything like that. It feels heartbreaking to destroy something I once loved.

Players whose homes aren't upvoted at all are going to feel bad. Or false votes will happen.

"Useful" homes will be upvoted. Things like the home of someone advertising to sell dungeon runs for a weapon.

And with all of the strain of people using other's homes as teleport points, there go our chances to have furniture item limit go up.

Preemptive damage control for update 43:

[*] No recommending/voting on houses
[*] Load at the OUTSIDE of the house so players using homes as teleport points don't add to server strain

SilverBride · July 4

WolfCombatPet wrote: »

So people started avoiding touring other players' homes while those players were present.

This already happens here. I have 35 houses listed as open houses with the EHT community. A few times I have ported into a house to use the chests or log off to change characters and noticed that there was someone else there. All but one of them immediately ported out. The reason being that they just want to look around and don't want to have the owner start telling them about the house, or lead them on tours or feel like they need to compliment the decorating.

CrashTest · July 4

I hope there's an option to not be listed or added to favorites because the last thing I want is some random person popping into my house.

Also, what about the people you put on ignore or try to avoid? Can they just port into your house if they favorite your house or find it listed?

WolfCombatPet · July 4

SilverBride wrote: »

WolfCombatPet wrote: »

So people started avoiding touring other players' homes while those players were present.

This already happens here. I have 35 houses listed as open houses with the EHT community. A few times I have ported into a house to use the chests or log off to change characters and noticed that there was someone else there. All but one of them immediately ported out. The reason being that they just want to look around and don't want to have the owner start telling them about the house, or lead them on tours or feel like they need to compliment the decorating.

Yeah. This 100% happens.

But I'm in housing guilds. We already host house tours.

Now when someone's house doesn't get upvoted... it will feel bad for the creator and for those who aren't upvoting. Or people will feel bad about pity-voting or feel cornered into it.

I don't want to go to those events now, and home tours were events I really looked forward to.

It's going to feel really discouraging for players new to housing to constantly see numeric facts about how little their home was loved or to wonder how many of those votes were legitimate.
Imagine a new player being really happy to show off their creation, but then the person they show it to doesn't upvote their house. Imagine all the players who stop wanting to share their creations because of the added stress of, "Will this be upvoted or not?"

katanagirl1 · July 5

I sure hope they will change housing permissions so other players can use doors but not turn off all the lights before this happens.

TaSheen · July 5

katanagirl1 wrote: »

I sure hope they will change housing permissions so other players can use doors but not turn off all the lights before this happens.

Yeah. Among other things....

SeaGtGruff · July 5

WolfCombatPet wrote: »

The tension of visiting someone's house and have that player watch you NOT tick up the vote-count is not something I will ever miss about Rift.
It caused guild drama. It built cliques. It destroyed communities.

Rift's only hated housing feature... is ESO's big mystery hype update.

Why would they add a feature that players HATED in another MMO to ESO?

How would the owner know that the visitor hadn't visited on a prior occasion and up-ticked it then?

SolarRune · July 5

As a PC player, the housing feature is disappointing mainly because this functionality is already in one of the most popular housing tools. For console players or people who don't use add-ons, it is a gain.After the teasing of this being some sort of huge game-changing feature, for PC players, it doesn't deliver on the hype.

aetherial_heavenn · July 5

from announcement

"When you find a home that really impresses you, you can recommend it to others, as well as favorite it for yourself to visit later. You can even favorite homes you visit through other means, regardless of whether they are listed for Home Tours. There’s a weekly limit on how many homes you can recommend, but no limit on how many you can visit and enjoy. Your own home may be featured as a recommended home in the Activity Finder if it becomes popular enough! "

I have no issue with privately favouriting houses for later visits, and to show others, and even having a (voluntary to sign) guest book like the current EHT/Housing Hub has. I enjoy visiting people's houses and I like to see who has seen mine. That old EHT system seemed designed as co-operative rather than competitive. ie it has been the equivalent of 'come see this great band/piece of art I found' because there were no rewards other than sharing our favourites.

I do NOT want a ranking/recommendation/visitor count/vote system that inevitably will draw the most attention to individuals in huge guilds, funded streamers, and commission builders by incentivising self promotion, which will then create an even smaller clique of self promoters so that those builds, which may not even be original or the 'best' builds, become the only ones showcased through the activity finder.

Being able to copy paste builds without asking is bad enough*, but to change the system so housing becomes a "buy bums on seats to get publicity to get in activity finder to get money for commissions" is going to cause more shenanigans than selling trials carries ever has.

Housing has always been more art than commerce for most of us. It seems typical of the current marketing driven climate that even that joyful creative space could now just become another gold/crown driven enterprise/industry for a few, while excluding the creative many from any recognition. Just like the music industry has

*Please by default limit the use of F5 inspect in open houses. I have no issue with people I give decorator permissions to, being able to inspect my cobbles, but that function should not be available so any random can copy a great build, pay their mates to visit it/rank it and then get promoted in the activity finder. This would be a recipe for disaster.

LunaFlora · July 5

CrashTest wrote: »

I hope there's an option to not be listed or added to favorites because the last thing I want is some random person popping into my house.

Also, what about the people you put on ignore or try to avoid? Can they just port into your house if they favorite your house or find it listed?

you can already ban people from your homes so just ban people you want to avoid or ignore.

ZOS_Icy · July 5

Greetings,

With there already being a thread opened on this subject here, we're going to go ahead and close this one down.

Thank you for understanding.