Yolokin_Swagonborn wrote: »

For a post that has gotten 25 Insightfuls 53 Agrees, and 27 Awesomes, I would expect a little bit more developer attention. I understand that most of us posting in this thread agree in some way with OP so there is not much discussion to be had but I really hope the development team has had a change to look at this.

I would really like to hear their thoughts on the 11 issues presented here. They could do it in the same way they are now giving rationales in the balance changes.

You're new around here, yes?

I expect that they saw these 11 items the day they were posted, talked about them internally within a day or two, and have already decided what to do, or not do, for each of those items. While I hope that the new Communicates More ZOS comes in to let us know, my expectation is that the old Silent ZOS will wrest control back and things will return to normal.

Personally, I don't care about a number of the items. My primary interest is in what they intend to do about:

3) Properties are Lifeless and Dead - This leads to dioramas.

4) All Animals are.....Lifeless and Dead - Just having them wiggle on occasion is not enough. Disney has been doing that for decades with former presidents, time to step up the pace.

5) Price Too High....w/Limited Functionality - They really need to add more than the ability to drop furniture, build crafting stations, and sit on chairs. I am not talking storage, either. I am talking about figuring out how to tell the difference between a guild hall and a personal home, and treat them differently so that guild halls can function as guild halls. I think they should look at the idea of having a merchant/trader outside the house that can sell a limited number of items (~5) from every player who owns that house so that there is some commerce competition with the guild traders. I am talking about QoL stuff, like "rested bonus" for being in the house and offline for a certain amount of time, being able to log out immediately from a house, etc. They really need to find a way to have more than 25 people in a manor at one time, and they need to do it through server and client optimization, not by rearranging the deck chairs by reducing the number of items, etc.

6) Can't Sell Old/Unwanted Real Estate - obvious omission and obviously something they did not want to deal with.

7) More Inventory Nightmares - they should have a furniture tab, like with the crafting bag tab, for storing furniture. All furniture should immediately go into it, and it should be unlimited in capacity. This should be account wide, since the houses are account wide.

10) Hardly Any 'Found Items' Are Furnishings - Duh. Many people are lugging around these things, and housing is a perfect place to show them off. Even if they decided that Homestead would be Diorama Online, these are perfect diorama items.

11) Massive Gold Sink and Crown Store Push - When we see how cheap Houses are in the Crown Store, compared to Gold, it will be clearly obvious that they wanted to make Housing a Crown-only thing.

MornaBaine wrote: »

I, like everyone else, wold love to see stolen items become ACTUAL items in game. But this will require a LOT of man hours for the art staff modeling these things and making sure they work in the case of useable furniture.

Yes. That's why they have to start doing it ASAP. No excuses acceptable. We're the customers, they're the providers, we help them with our ideas, they should code them. So easy.

willlienellson wrote: »

It's not really coding so much as modeling and texturing. The items we steel have no physical 3d presence in the game.

They should. They should have been working on this all along. But apparently they haven't been, and if that's the case, I can tell you there is no way they are going to produce those models by Homestead going live.

This is what confuses me so much. Several updates in a row they put in changes to the stolen items, categorizing them, expanding the amount of them, distributing them across appropriate sources, labelling those sources: why? Only to accommodate the Thieves' Guild dailies that require you to steal 10 of a certain type? Large effort on items that are ultimately only serve as stuff you sell off, for dailies that after 3 times people wanna finish asap for a chance at motif pages, not because they are actually great content.

I was sure that all of that effort was a set up for future purposes of these items. Either way, if all of that effort was put to make the Thieves' Guild's quests and thieving in general more interesting, diverse and realistic, I applaud ZOS, and urge them to put as much effort in making Homestead equally interesting, diverse and realistic by integrating Justice and Housing.

willlienellson wrote: »

Yolokin_Swagonborn wrote: »

I really like some of the smaller houses for RP reasons and I don't want to be pushed to buy a larger house that I don't like the look of just for that reason. There has to be a way to enjoy my smaller house with more items and give ZOS the crowns they want at the same time.

Sadly, it's not better with larger homes and manors. If anything, it's worse.

So, lets say you want to place 500 items in House of the Silent Magnifico, but the limit for your classic home is 400 (with ESO+).

This inspires you to instead buy Hunding's Palatial Hall, where the limit is 600 items (with ESO+). Now instead of being 100 items over the limit, you are 100 items under the limit which has increased by 50%.

Except the inside of Palatial Hall is at least 300% larger than Silent Magnifico. Furthermore, Silent Magnifico has no outside, where Palatial Hall has huge grounds that are probably 300% larger than the home itself.

Congratulations. You have 100 more item slots to decorate 12 TIMES AS MUCH SPACE.

....let's flesh this out even further.....

So, you think to yourself, I'm way better off trying to stay under the cap with a smaller Classic home. Except with no functionality in Homestead, it serves no purpose. Nobody will ever want to come to your property (unless you're roleplaying) because there is no space to build an arena. No space to build a jumping puzzle. No space to build a maze. No space to build whatever you might creatively use as a reason for the place to actually exist.

So, then all you have is "decorating the space" for your own enjoyment to "look at", except then you starting thinking about the STAGGERING cost of furnishings in this patch.

At least when I was going to pay up for a large house or a manor, I could see it being used as a guild hall, arena, etc. I could envision actually playing the game with people there, even if it was sparse.

So, you are left with the final glaring option: Buy the smallest house (or free apartment) add a couple of things that might be useful occasionally and be done with it. It's sad.

And it is even worse for non Eso-plus members. There is no point of buying large houses or manors..

willlienellson wrote: »

petraeus1 wrote: »

From today's PTS patch notes:

"Increased the chance to receive furnishing-related rewards from criminal activities like pickpocketing and murder."

So there's that. First steps.

I don't know what that means, but it isn't doing anything for my PTS testing this evening.
I spent 1 full hour doing nothing but picking safes and picking pockets. Not a single item could be used to furnish a home.

EVEN ITEMS CALLED FURNISHINGS were still not furnishings.

Treasure Type: Furnishings.
Laundered and completely useless...inventory clogging junk called a "furnishing" FFS

LOL. Yeah, ZOS should do something about that.

Considering what they did to Hammerdeck E... I mean Hammerdeath Bungalow (what Orc would buy a freaking 'bungalow'?), they might just change the name of that specific category of stolen items and call it a day...

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

lordrichter wrote: »

11) Massive Gold Sink and Crown Store Push - When we see how cheap Houses are in the Crown Store, compared to Gold, it will be clearly obvious that they wanted to make Housing a Crown-only thing.

That's not how you make money. The houses are going to have a steep crown price too. If someone can't afford a house with gold, they will pay any price ZOS asks for in crowns since they don't have any other choice.

This is what I want to happen, but I suspect that something entirely different will happen.

The marketing people have to carefully balance the gold price of a house with the Crown price. The gold price has to be high enough, and the Crown price has to be low enough, that a good number of people choose Crowns over gold. It does no good to sell a Crown house for lots of Crown if the gold price looks cheaper to everyone. The Crown price needs to always look cheaper. This is how they get Crown revenue, and what allows them to say things like "we are selling them in the Crown Store for convenience".

What I think they will do is set the Crown price so that, even if you can afford to pay the gold, you will seriously consider paying for it in Crowns.

If a studio cannot make a game that can generate revenue, they have to make a game where the cash store can generate revenue. Keep that in mind when evaluating new MMO games.

willlienellson wrote: »

Not a single issue has been addressed by Zos in any way.

That's not entirely accurate. Item #4 on your list (Animals are lifeless) was partially addressed to allow idle animations for pets and (most) mounts, albeit from a stationary position.

Ongoing issues and/or aspects specifically made worse since the first iteration:
- None of the other items on your list have been addressed
- If the lighting proximity issue isn't a bug but a feature, then it is horrible. I REALLY hope it's a bug.
- The infamous exodus of Colovian furnishings
- In addition to the itemization caps you've mentioned, the social caps have been revealed and they're really low (some good reasoning behind it has been speculated, along with some great suggestions to make instance hosting dynamic due to the likelihood that housing population is likely to be either nearly empty or spike for events)
- Still no mount access in outdoor areas of the housing instances
- Furnishing raw materials aren't dropping from Surveys (save Alchemy), and have been widely criticized for their abysmal drop rates in the world nodes.
- Decorator permissions remain very limited

Improvements that have yet to hit the target issue:
- Master Writ legendary material issues. We now have a higher chance of spawning "easier" writs that aren't really worth doing, and any attempt to normalize the Writ Voucher payout to the required task seems to completely ignore the economic implications of the requirements
- While crafting materials required to make housing items have been somewhat reduced, they are still vastly illogical, thematically baffling, and still considerably overpriced.
- Hammerdeck End's "clever" fix to substantially truncate what could have been a great lot
- Ebonheart Chateau's tower is better than no tower. Maybe. It has poor visibility and eats up the small yard
- Blueprint drops from criminal activity have allegedly been improved, but many players report no observable change despite rampant criminal activity
- While Covenant Banners aren't the default for all instances of bannered things any longer, the Covenant still insists on leaving its mark in unwelcome places

Legitimate improvements:
- Easier to access initial quest to open the housing system
- Preview of crafted furnishings (hypothetically with a background demonstrating scale)
- Daggerfall's Tower (not only does it now exist, but it is also finally accessible)
- New targeting skeletons to focus on different play areas, with DPS reports

Polarizing changes:
- Standard crafting stations can be purchased in the Crown store, improving immediate availability but substantially mitigating the potential gold market for these (and a fair reason to consider completing the already questionable Master Writs)
- Locking some furnishings behind AP, which depending on your perspective either incentivizes PvP players to play the housing market somewhat, or locks (presumably) inherent PvE content behind a PvP wall


So it is a mixed report card. Changes are happening - some good, some bad. Many other arguably necessary changes have yet to be addressed at all.

At this point, I expect Homestead to be a wildly popular patch for a few weeks, and then lose momentum HARD once people realize the scope of the grind relative to the actual value received for their efforts. But I also expect that it should be a popular target for expansion through future patches, and over the course of the next year, it very likely could grow into the system that most of us expected it to be at launch. Like many systems, enjoy it for what it is worth and then move on when you chew the flavor from it (all mileages vary), and hope that ZOS continues to give us great reasons to return to these systems as the game continues to evolve. Homestead has the potential to be one of the greatest auxiliary features of this game, but it is a loooooong way from reaping that potential in this current iteration.