kargen27 wrote: »

thegreatme wrote: »

Smaller homes might not be impacted much by this in terms of things like decorating (or might be, idk), but this would just automatically make me never touch a large or medium sized house ever again, which is a big deal because I don't even own "personal" houses, I own guild houses for my guildies to use. RP houses, specifically, which means having them set up a certain way and stable is a big deal, and having houses with a large population limit is an even bigger deal because unlike most other guilds there is a large emphasis on group gathering.

One of my bigger "guild hall" Notable homes took me 4 months of nothing but obsessive levels of gold grinding day and night just to get the base house at a little more than 1.2m gold. Actually decorating it took even longer and even more gold than that.

Even buying the one and only crown store house I've ever bought (and probably ever will buy), already-furnished, took me a month and around 1.5m gold to furnish to an acceptable degree, and that was with buying or crafting furnishings as cheaply as possible. And that's when owning and decorating my house isn't competitive.

Not to mention, where do you expect us to store all those furnishings for larger houses every time we lose a bid on our own residence? Even a mid-grade house WITHOUT ESO+ can easily store about 100 furnishings individually. What happens to my 700 furnishings in a large house? Where are they supposed to go? What about those of us that own multiple houses which all collectively have THOUSANDS of furnishings between them? I'm not even sure maxed out bank and bag have enough room for just those.

(And have you ever tried to get other people to contribute to helping you fund "your" house even if its a guild hall for them? Unless you're running a trade guild explicitly, don't count on it, when pitching the idea of everyone giving something stupidly low like 500 gold a week causes an outburst and people saying they'd flat out boycott it before you've even put it into effect, which means in most cases the only people who will be able to afford a large house in the game under the model you suggest at all are those who just happen to have people throwing gold at them left and right, or people who are in-game independently wealthy).

Just a quick reply. The OP isn't suggesting this to replace your own homes the way I am reading it. The idea would be in addition to. So you could keep your homes and also bid on a public home. That is one of the reasons the idea isn't good. Why would a player pay to utilize the vendors and craft stations in a public house when there is a great chance they are in a guild that provides all that for free?

Zurica wrote: »

Aion has a similar feature in which I enjoyed to a degree. The population is much smaller than ESO so bidding on homes isn't too painful, but nobody really uses the homes like they do here. The main reason why people buy the luxury homes is because they provide a buff that is greatly sought out from PVPers. However, once you buy your home it will not go back on up for auction each week as long as you paid your rent. If you failed to pay your rent you will obviously lose the home and it will reset to default, thus losing all the decorative work you put into it and allowing someone else to buy it.

I think you're forgetting that ESO is not your average MMO, so suggesting homes to go back up for auction weekly or monthly simply won't work here. The housing here is far more detailed and people spend a lot of time farming materials or saving up gold to craft / buy furniture, and don't forget the amount of thought put into decorating. Who the hell is going to want to spend that much time on housing only to lose it every week and forced to buy it again? Basically nobody. The only people I can see possibly enjoying this are the elitists wanting to show off how much money they have, and do you think they are going to actually redecorate their homes weekly? No, they're just going to throw all their storage chests, assistants and trophies/busts in there then call it a day. Ultimately this would make most of the player base lose interest in housing.

However, I do think it would be nice to visit other players homes without being in a guild scrolling through the roster & etc. Perhaps adding a weekly auction to our current housing set up would work better. It can give people the option to showcase their home in the current open world, this way when it resets weekly nobody will actually lose their home, the money they spent to buy it or the time spent on decorating it. To keep the competition friendly, fair and fresh a cool down period would be needed to keep elitists from excessively bidding weekly thus giving other people a chance to win and showcase their homes. It would indeed be nice to have a separate housing instance in each alliance to fill the need for players who want to live in a community, with the same auctioning method as I mentioned above I could see this possibly working and drawing the attention of people who are really into housing.

ErinM31 wrote: »

@Zurica, that was one of the features I didn’t like about housing in Aion when I tried it for a few weeks in 2016, that housing required rent, yuck! Inventory was also a pain. GW2 was the first game I played that had separate materials storage and I’m very glad that ESO does as well!

I agree it would be great if they facilitated visiting homes for people who wanted to opt into that. SWTOR also had this feature as well as NPCs that could be placed in homes — both of which would be awesome in ESO but ESO housing is still way better overall for not having hooks for furnishings but letting you put stuff anywhere!

NolaArch wrote: »

...
P.S. 1st prize for worst idea of the year btw

phuein wrote: »

An issue that comes up a lot is losing the investment (furnishing) in the house after losing a bid.

Definitely makes sense that the house will stay the same after bids, so winners can simply make some changes. Or even the suggested idea about the insides of the house getting changed depending on who wins their bid; a rotating instance.

• Adjust the concept so players can put up a copy of their currently decorated home in the "public" version of the home. Doing so does not risk the instanced home.
• This could be done either by bidding or as a contest, lottery, etc. Method would depend on whether this is really something people would want to BID ON, as opposed to something that would be WON, as a reward.
• Change it so that all houses in Tamriel can be entered by everyone, and the instance one sees upon entering is the copy of the person who "won" the house for the week/month/whatever period is decided.
• Using interact-able items in the public home (crafting stations, bank, merchant, etc.) could potentially cost a small sum of gold which gets passed to the player who won the bid for the home.
• There is potential here for some new functionality, such as a personal guild trader or a trader that could represent the guild of the player's choice
• If the home becomes full, it could have a waiting list/queue, or maybe you could "pick the lock" of the house and eject other players. :P
• Players could still see empty and furnished versions of the homes via the Crown Store interface.

• Give people a chance to show off their beautiful homes and see them fully populated
• Provide some lively spaces for players
• Makes the artistic creations of some more easily accessible to others that are interested or looking for inspiration
• Possibly, depending on implementation, could be another way for players to have income in game
• Has potential for some other fun, social aspects... contests that reward special furniture, server-wide decorating themes, etc.

• Shows off homes and furniture as basically a free advertisement for their gold and crown sinks (luxury furniture vendor, anyone?)
• Adds another interesting aspect to Housing
• If incorporating bidding, adds a gold sink that may be needed

• Could reduce traffic in towns
• Demand/interest might not be high enough to warrant building such a system

phuein wrote: »

Benefits:

• Make Housing a part of the MMO aspect. Everybody has access to the houses; the owners reap the benefits and publicity.
• Gamify housing. Make it more interesting, more interactive, and more involved.
• Profit from housing. Not just quick access to stations and dummies, but also gain from the public using them: Fees.
• Accessible or beautiful locations can become hubs for social gatherings outside of the few active guild users at any given time. Dozens of players. (A house ban-list would be easy to implement against trolls.)

kargen27 wrote: »

Everybody has access to housing now. Along these lines though I would like to see another tab when you open a map that has the homes in that zone listed. You would then click on one of the homes and it would bring up several players who own that home. You click on a name and you visit their home. Should be able to sign a guest book while there. Players would have to opt into having their homes listed.

Jeremy wrote: »

phuein wrote: »

Instead of boring lonely instances for housing, we should have houses over-land that every week or month players bid on and compete over! (You can keep the instanced housing separately, too.)

Benefits:

• Make Housing a part of the MMO aspect. Everybody has access to the houses; the owners reap the benefits and publicity.
• Gamify housing. Make it more interesting, more interactive, and more involved.
• Profit from housing. Not just quick access to stations and dummies, but also gain from the public using them: Fees.
• Accessible or beautiful locations can become hubs for social gatherings outside of the few active guild users at any given time. Dozens of players. (A house ban-list would be easy to implement against trolls.)

Yesterday, at the 2nd week peak of the multi-bidding system, I saw [again] just how much impact an interactive competitive system has on the players. It's amazing! And this is what games are about. Anything that's static is not a game. I wholly support Zenimax in continuing to make curious changes to the game.

I don't like the idea of competing for a limited amount of houses. Final Fantasy 14 has a system similar to this - and what ends up happening is you just end up losing your house every time you take a break from the game - which really just has the effect of making me not care about their housing all together.

I do sympathize with your point about it being kind of boring though, due to them being lonely instances. What LOTRO did was have instanced neighborhoods instead of single houses. So that might be something they could consider I could go for.