Home Tours: Shown Selection List - some tests and some thoughts

AnduinTryggva

I did a few experiments and I feel that it is broken or needs significant improvements.

I have two homes published and they both have at least one recommendation by other players.

Now I did following tests:

I went to the category "recommended" and selected ONE filter that I have applied to the home with the higher number of recommendations. On the right side of the interface a list of houses appear. I scroll through it but my house does not appear. Ok, maybe they only show a certain number of them.

So my next step was to unselect the previous filter and apply another one that I know I have used for that specific house. I scroll throught the listed homes and: Nada!

Now the curious thing is: that depending on the filter I use the list is sometimes SHORTER. And despite that my home does not show. So my conclusion is: The list is not capped depending on a max number of homes shown. At least not in the case of houses I searched for.

I now came up with the hypothesis that they apply a sort of threshold of number of recommendations. Presumably the threshold is fixed dynamically depending on the average or other statistical value of recommendations. If this is the case it is really really bad decision to sort houses in this manner because homes that received only a few recommendations will be drowned by homes with a lot of recommendations irrespective of these homes were recommended by guild mates.

As a final test I entered my user name (still in the "recommended" category) but removed all filters. Now ZERO home is shown. This is somewhat contradicting my previous hypothesis that a sort of dynamic threshold is applied. It may be however a fixed threshold.

Now I combine this with an observation from yesterday. I have published my highest recommended home the day before yesterday so two days ago. I received yesterday 2 recommendations. And guess what happened? Yesterday my home showed up in the preview without any filter applied but within the category "recommended". Today however it is gone from that preview. So my new hypothesis is that there might be a time window taken into consideration. Or probably more likely a threshold based on recommendation per time.

There is another curious thing that I observe. During my experiments (see above) I found that several homes of the same account where shown in the preview. What was really weird was that these homes were depicted side by side. This is strange and I may be mistaken but this gives me the impression that some accounts benefitted from some collective voting here.

So what to make out of it?

First:
I think if I put a user name in the field in the category "recommended" and if a home of that account has received one recommendation or more it should imperatively be shown. I know I can search these when I use the search category. But that is not the point. ALL homes with more than zero recommendations (1+ recommendations) should be listed that way.

Second:
The principle by which houses are listed in the preview area of the interface is either badly setup or broken. It should definitely NOT be sorted by passing a threshold on recommendations per time or within a time window because this clearly benefits and incites to collective voting. A guild can always arrange to pass many votes within a given time space and 10 votes per person is quite a lot if this is organized well.

Third:
Having a threshold on number of recommendations is bad, too. Really BAD within the "recommended" category. It will eclipse new homes that only had little time to receive recommendations and who don't have a guild that do collective voting to push their guild mate's content.

Fourth:
I suggest the following:
- Have a "featured" category that shows up first when opening the interface. This will showcase on a pure random way, irrespective of number of recommendations or whatever, homes that were published with a very slight nudge for new homes and homes with low number of recommendations. It might be perhaps interesting to have these homes filtered by ONE filter and this filter will change let's say every day. Today it could be homes with "gardens" attribute, tomorrow "magic" etc.
- Reserve a percentage of the shown homes in the recommended category that were recommended but did not meet the threshold whatever it is if a threshold shall be kept.
- If applicable remove any listing on recommendation per time period.
- Open to debate: Make recommendation vanish with time.

Necrotech_Master

if you were in the recommended tab, its also possible your homes were not selected for the recommended list that week

just because you have recommendations does not mean they are automatically in the recommended section

i have 2-3 houses listed as well, and to my knowledge, only 1 of them has ever been selected for the recommended list (i had a notification on login that one of my homes was in the recommended list, only way i knew it was even there at all)

as far as im aware the way recommended works is it randomly selects a number of houses each week (the rotation seems to happen on tuesdays), it doesnt just grab homes which have recommendations

LunaFlora

you get a notification whenever your homes get added to the Recommended list.

i believe recommended resets Tuesdays, the number of recommendations you can give resets then too. every week you can recommend 10 homes.

AnduinTryggva

Ok thank you for the explanations.

Today it is Tuesday but I still see some of the houses there that I saw yesterday on Monday...

Could be of course pure chance that the same houses were picked twice...

It would be great to have a clear description by ZOS how these are selected.

Necrotech_Master

based on what i saw, the selection for houses to go into the recommended list is more or less totally random

the only clues they gave to us is that the selection would include both homes with and without recommendations, so in essence its going to be more or less totally random

i think they said a portion of the selection would for sure include homes with lots of recommendations, but would also include homes with few or no recommendations (which is why i imply that its basically random)

i dont know the total number of homes selected for recommended either, though it feels like quite a lot more than i would have expected for such a thing, but also still only a fraction of the total homes listed

AnduinTryggva

If they really have a mix of homes with low recommendations and high recommendations shown on a random basis in the "recommended" category then it is similar to what I had in mind. I would however also strongly suggest to not forget the houses that neither have low number of recommendations nor high number of recommendation. Otherwise we might create a gap that is impossible to pass for houses that are too popular but not yet popular enough to be shown in the preview list.

I also would like to suggest to rename the "recommended" category to something else. Could be something like "Weekly showcase" or "featured homes" or similar.

AnduinTryggva

I've checked the "recommended" list again: A LOT of the houses featured in the preview list have been there during last weekend.

Either the pool of homes that meet the criteria to get into the pool of homes with recommendations is just very very small or something is broken provided that it works as explained by @Necrotech_Master.

Necrotech_Master

you dont need any recommendations to get into the recommended list, thats why i was figuring the selection was almost entirely random

i had at least 1 home featured in the recommended list with 0 recommendations (it got at least 1 recommendation while it was listed so people are using the system lol)

katanagirl1

Thanks for mentioning that you can search on username. The option is buried in the submenus where I expected a search window at the top of the main page, and when there wasn’t I assumed you could not do that.

AllenaNightWood

i have yet to have anyone visit my homes i think the system is neat but has flaws that need to be worked out

Necrotech_Master

AllenaNightWood wrote: »

i have yet to have anyone visit my homes i think the system is neat but has flaws that need to be worked out

its hard to tell if people actually do visit your homes if they dont leave a recommendation lol

to date i know ive only had 1 recommendation on 1 of my 3 houses listed (likely because it was on the recommended list for a week), but i have no idea how much any of my other houses have been visited (or if they have been visited at all)

KinzokuRyu

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but I have multiple houses posted in house tours. One thing I had noticed is if your house has NEVER been recommended before & NEVER has been on Recommended list... if you get 1 recommendation or more, the next day it will end up on the recommended list. I've tested this with three houses now.

It would be nice though if they would just add a visitor's count along with or instead of the current recommended count.

Necrotech_Master

KinzokuRyu wrote: »

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but I have multiple houses posted in house tours. One thing I had noticed is if your house has never been recommended if you get one recommendation or more the next day it will end up on the recommended list. I've tested this with three houses now.

It would be nice though if they would just add a visitor's count along with or instead of the current recommended count.

i dont think thats how it works

i have 3 houses listed, and had 0 recommendations until 1 of the houses showed up on the recommended list (during which time it received 1 recommendation)

i have yet to have anything else appear on the recommended list since then lol (even the one house with 1 recommendation)