[Housing: Home Tours] Improve visibility of listed houses

MotherOfMoss

I've come to like the home tours feature, if nothing else it makes it that much easier for others to find and visit your listed homes. I also greatly appreciate that house permissions can be adjusted in the home tours menu, without needing to travel to the house. And of course, I've seen a number of wonderful builds through home tours that I otherwise might never have noticed!

That said, I think the feature still leaves much to be desired in terms of discoverability. Here are a few ideas that come to mind:

- Add text search. Let's say I want to see what people have done with the themes of Maormer or Orgnum or anything related; I can't search for houses with this much detail.
-- Add a description field, or allow more characters in the house title field, so we could describe our builds in more detail and with relevant keywords; it would also be nice to make remarks like "there is a build on the first floor of Kelesanruhn, but the basement serves as storage", for instance.

- Currently, the only houses getting visibility are recommended houses. What follows is that unless you advertise your new build in guild chats or discord, you're not going to get that first recommendation and get seen at all. I'm a little lazy/shy about promoting homes, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. So maybe some extra sections could be added to help with that:
-- "By guildmates from guild [name]"
-- "Newly added by guildmates from [...]"
-- Or just "Newly added", but I find this less useful.
-- A more "out there" idea: add notifications for when guildies publish houses. These should be easily turned on and off per player preference, and per guild, and there should be an appropriate cooldown so it doesn't become notification spam like when GMs publish a new MotD and then need to edit it once or ten times to weed out typos Even with these safeguards, I can see this possibly being more annoying than helpful, but I can also see myself being happy to know whenever someone from my housing guild lists a new house.

On a parting note, while my suggested sections above are mostly about new homes, I would very much like a guildies section in the home finder, new listings or no. I find that prioritising only recommended, and possibly in the future also new homes, leaves many, many lovely builds out of the limelight. So, a guildies section + text search could help all these "hidden gems" be found more easily by everyone

Koshka

I agree. It would also be really nice if we could add descriptions or perhaps even could change the default picture with a screenshot of the house.
As it is now, the house tours feature is very limited. Even custom names allow fewer characters than the default house names for some reason... I had to shorten a few of them.

Northwold

Koshka wrote: »

I agree. It would also be really nice if we could add descriptions or perhaps even could change the default picture with a screenshot of the house.
As it is now, the house tours feature is very limited. Even custom names allow fewer characters than the default house names for some reason... I had to shorten a few of them.

Yes a screenshot would be everything. As it stands, you're clicking blind when you visit someone's place.

MoonPile

Agree. Lacking description is one of the top reasons I don't use the Tours for much more than free ports.
https://moonpile.tumblr.com/post/758180377760251905/the-trouble-with-home-tours-eso-u43

I enjoy visiting others' creations but for now, external, 3rd party platforms like Discord channels, Reddit, etc. are a much better way to find them.