You should be able to place your toons as NPCs in your home & swap toons by interacting with them.

Langeston · February 2020

Not only would it liven up your home, but it would make changing toons less tedious as well. Instead of logging out & back in, just travel to your home and you can select which toon you'd like to play.

It's a simple idea, but I think I would be a big quality of life upgrade. It would be cool to see my toons just idling about the house too.

TelvanniWizard · February 2020

We should be able, indeed. But I doubt ZoS could achieve such an awesome feature.

StormeReigns · February 2020

With all the murder hoboing that I do, I wouldn't trust my characters alone together...
Although, in all actuality, yeah be a neat QoL feature.

Hamish999 · February 2020

I wouldn't mind this, but only if we can also get daily crafting writ boards in our houses too.

MattT1988 · February 2020

Yeah this idea has come up quite a bit over the past year or so (including from myself). I think it’s a no brainer and makes gear management so much less of a pain. Really hope they do this one day.

TheShadowScout · February 2020

I said it before:

TheShadowScout wrote: »

solasub wrote: »

Our non-played characters waiting in our houses

Nah.
Those would not make sense for many people - why would my pact librarian have an covenant knight in his home? Why would my orc paladin invite a dominion criminal?
Worse, the system only loads the current character once you go from the selection screen into the game, so it would require some coding to bring in your alts too...

And it -still- makes no more sense to me then it did back then.

Langeston wrote: »

Not only would it liven up your home, but it would make changing toons less tedious as well.

...but to do it like That, they would need to keep ALL the characters data sets constantly loaded into the game client. Imagine having the total load time of ALL your characters together every time you log in, even when you only want to play one...

And it would mean they need to redo a LOT of their game code to make this possible, meaning a big investment without much of a extra profit for them, so it aint likely happening.

What we -could- use instead was a "servant system" for our homes... I actually had that idea a while ago, as I once posted:

TheShadowScout wrote: »

It would make sense for larger homes to come with special "NPC servant slots"... not to place your NPC servants as immobile furniture, but to have them a completely new category, able to move around your home, with varying animations... so, a cleaning servant might sweep floors (like some we can see in inns for example), a cook servant may move from one kitchen table to the other and do the "cooking" animation, a guard servant might patrol, a bard servant might sing for a while, then stop to get a drink, then sing some more, a dancing girl servant might dance, then stop to rest and idle a bit, then dance some more... etc.
There even could be special classes of homestead NPCs... for those who really want an NPC waifu? (or children who greet their parent when they come home from their life of adventure?)

It would open up a entirely new range of things to sell in the crown store for ZOS, servant NPCs in varying configurations (like, the cleaning servant could come in every race, from breton serf to argonian maid... and possibly even in several appearance "ranks", from lowly barmaid in threadbare apron to fancy noble servants in silk livery...)

The possibilities for servant customization are endless as well, could be as little or as much as ZOS wants to code for us to spend crowns on... we could have a whole "servant customization" tab, where we could slot different hairstyles, makeup, outfits and professions (for the animations they will follow while moving around our homes - like, guard servant, cleaning servant, etc. - there could even be advanced professions as upgrades with limited interactions, like the basic maid just cleans and ignored the player, but the advanced maid profession would also stop their cleaning and bow to their "master" when the player character passes them in the hallways, etc.)

They could even make the basic servant purchasable (well, hire-able, unless you are one of those telvanni slaver scum!) with gold, in varying regions (hire a dunmer dancing girl from a random selection in ebonheart's ebon flask, or hire an breton maid in the inn of wayrest, or a bosmer chef in the inn of elden root, or a nord guard in the windhelm tavern, or a redguard stablehand by the sentinel barzaar, or a altmer butler in the skywatch manor... etc.) or attainable from quests or achievements (save the breton damsel in distress, gain an ever faithful servant? Purchase a manor and find it comes with a butler?) and then just sell the customization options in the crown store for those who want to have their servants personalized (and let's be honest, we all would want that, yes?)

...and they could of course always sell extra servant slots in the crown store for those who want to have more staff for their home... and they could also put special servants in the crown store (like... hire the normal nord huscarl guard in-game with gold, but you can also buy the buff nord titanborn amazon guard in the crown store, hire the normal breton maid in-game with gold, but you can also buy the lusty argonian version in the crown store, etc.), or put their hiring locations into expansion/DLC regions to encourage people to get that, and so on...

It could be like the whole mount and outfit system bundled into one for sales, all over again!

SydneyGrey · February 2020

I would love that so much.

Grianasteri · February 2020

Langeston wrote: »

Not only would it liven up your home, but it would make changing toons less tedious as well. Instead of logging out & back in, just travel to your home and you can select which toon you'd like to play.

It's a simple idea, but I think I would be a big quality of life upgrade. It would be cool to see my toons just idling about the house too.

This absolutely should be a housing mechanic. It has been suggested in various forms a number of times, for years.

In exactly the same way we purchase & craft furniture, we should be able to "hire" (buy/craft) NPCs for our homes. So for instance, a stable hand, a cook, a gardener, vendours (not actual vendors, just the aesthetics) and guards!

These should be placeable as "furniture". They should have basic animations and voice acting just as the NPCs scattered all over ESO are. But they do not necessarily need to be interactable, though that would be nice. We can place the bank, vendor & fence, lets fully develop this now, it really is time ZOS.

This should absolutely be coupled with the ability to place our characters, say a maximum of 10. I absolutely love the idea of being able to swap character in and out via this system also. Even if doing so actually just carries out the log out/in function, itd be a nice wee bit of immersion. Imagine, my fellowship of characters all in one head quarters, wonderful!

Make it happen ZOS.

jecks33 · February 2020

great idea OP!

Recon4thCav · February 2020

No

Coppes · February 2020

Considering they couldn’t/can’t fix AC, I doubt it.

They’ll probably end up making two characters stats stack on each other. Raising the max DPS cap to 250k and making the minimum 60k.

And then make it into an intended feature.

NordSwordnBoard · February 2020

Yes, and I'd even settle for it using the same slots as pets or whatever as well as being purely decorative.

TX12001rwb17_ESO · February 2020

They are NOT called Toons, this is not WoW and if it were I would not be here.

kathandira · February 2020

Langeston wrote: »

Not only would it liven up your home, but it would make changing toons less tedious as well. Instead of logging out & back in, just travel to your home and you can select which toon you'd like to play.

It's a simple idea, but I think I would be a big quality of life upgrade. It would be cool to see my toons just idling about the house too.

Since it would still require a loading screen, switching characters by interacting with them wouldn't really change much.

However!! Simply having the option to place your other characters in your house as NPCs would be awesome. I'd love to position my characters in such a way that they look like they are living their lives in my houses.

lillybit · February 2020

What I'd love to see would be a variation of the servant idea - you set your alts with a place to appear and what pose or emote you want them to use and they'll be there whenever they aren't logged on. Ideally they'd work as mini bankers so you could access their inventories without constantly having to relog just to look for something.
I wouldn't even mind if they took it out of the visitor limit and/or limited each alt to just one house. It would make you have to think about how you used them.

idk · February 2020

Placing a replica of our characters in the homes is one thing, though with the detail they provide it would probably go into the very limited special collectables. Being able to swap characters just by interacting with them would be a very involved programming feat as it would require a complete overhaul of character selection and I doubt very much Zos would even consider the idea due to the very limited benefit compared to the effort.

RD065 · February 2020

Reminds me of Swtor a little bit where you could place companions all over the house.

KyleTheYounger · February 2020

TelvanniWizard wrote: »

We should be able, indeed. But I doubt ZoS could achieve such an awesome feature.

Of course they can. Bethesda achieved it in Skyrim upon which ESO is based. And ZoS has continuously plagiarized legally "borrowed" 100% of it's content from Skyrim (legally of course). And in the grayer areas of the term legally, ideas from the TES Skyrim modding community have been "borrowed" for ESO quest and lore content as well. Basically, single player Skyrim has been recycled and re-purposed for re-use in ESO.

Perfect example #1: A new chapter which groundbreaking location is based -- and yes you did correctly guess it -- in SKYRIM of all places . Complete WITH DRAGONS. LOL.

Perfect example #2: The artwork for Solitude in the upcoming new DLC as a perfect example of said recycling of single player Skyrim assets.

Conspiracy theorists say it appears ZoS hopes fan base nostalgia/obsession with the single player Skyrim to date will convert into monetary success by driving sales for ESO in their store.

So yes absolutely. ZoS can make this idling sandbox a reality for the fan base. Just like they already do exploiting fan base impatience and impulsive online spending habits with performance boosters like riding lessons and fast tracking research.

Just like you now do in paying for increasingly superficial, lightweight, vanity content like EMOTES, TATTOOS, CLOTHING, NON COMBAT MOUNTS/PETS, and other frivolous cosmetic items that add zero functionality to enhance the value of your game play.

So be prepared to access said ability to do so behind an overly expensive paywall in the store.

Be careful for what you wish. You just might get it......

ghastley · February 2020

So the idea is that you can have a house act as the character selection screen? All your characters under one roof, with the instance running (off-line) on your own machine, and when you select the one to play, then they get loaded on the server? That could be feasible. I can see issues with the client code growing a lot to make it possible, and you'd have to be able to download the house configuration from the game periodically to update it. Probably not worth the effort involved, though.

KyleTheYounger · February 2020

^^
Basically yes. I'm 100% behind this. But like I said, be prepared to part with an eye, arm, leg, or even the family jewels for such an insightful, practical game immersion feature. Something like this would be paywalled to ad infinitum in the Store. They might even temporarily loose their sanity and lock it behind Crown Crates.... LMAO

emilyhyoyeon · February 2020

This would be great. I would even be satisfied with character placement in houses that doesn't even do anything

Gilvoth · February 2020

would be an awesome feature.

NotaDaedraWorshipper · February 2020

Do you want (more) lag and bugs? Because that's how you get lag and bugs.

It also sound more complicated than just logging out to the character screen. And it doesn't make any sense for my characters to be in the same house. But placing npcs in our houses, now that's something I want.

devaneiosonho · February 2020

Won't happen. Ever. Still, why would you travel to your house just to log on another character, instead of just logging out?

Banana · February 2020

I like it. My house would have some purpose

Kelces · February 2020

That would be really nice, but I doubt the part with the interaction-switch would work. At least not without some new "feautures".

XxMissAlycexX · February 2020

This is an awesome idea!

Reizak · February 2020

Sounds good to me.

RPers, this would be optional. If you don't want slimmy members of the EP lounging around your tower, then don't place them.

I can't imagine the increase in resource loading would cause an issue, especially if it's only character inventory management.

Even switching characters in and out via npcs in your house shouldn't be anything to worry about. Rather than making two separate server calls (one to log out, the other to log in), and having the client update your pixels accordingly, they're instead bundled in to one... The issue would be character placement. Do you log in in the house (which would make seemless sense), and if so, could this be abused to get out of trouble, save time to make gold faster, be used for greifing, etc.?

I like it, but can't honestly see it ever being a thing. It's a couple of days worth of work, and doesn't result in any extra income... Unless they sold the player "slots" for houses in the Crown store, then I can definitely see them running with it.

SteveCampsOut · February 2020

TheShadowScout wrote: »

I said it before:

TheShadowScout wrote: »

solasub wrote: »

Our non-played characters waiting in our houses

Nah.
Those would not make sense for many people - why would my pact librarian have an covenant knight in his home? Why would my orc paladin invite a dominion criminal?
Worse, the system only loads the current character once you go from the selection screen into the game, so it would require some coding to bring in your alts too...

And it -still- makes no more sense to me then it did back then.

Langeston wrote: »

Not only would it liven up your home, but it would make changing toons less tedious as well.

...but to do it like That, they would need to keep ALL the characters data sets constantly loaded into the game client. Imagine having the total load time of ALL your characters together every time you log in, even when you only want to play one...

Actually they wouldn't have to load your alternate Character's data sets every time, just their appearance. The rest of the data set could be set to be loaded when you swap characters from within the game through interacting with them. It would be as simple as a zoning loading screen. Wouldn't they ever do it? Depends on what it's worth to ZOS to do it. It's not a game play issue, it's a QOL issue for the players not having to log out and back in again and ZOS isn't known for giving much of a damn about QOL time savers for players unless there's money to be made like crowns for personal assistants and storage....

Langeston · February 2020

NotaDaedraWorshipper wrote: »

Do you want (more) lag and bugs? Because that's how you get lag and bugs.

It also sound more complicated than just logging out to the character screen. And it doesn't make any sense for my characters to be in the same house. But placing npcs in our houses, now that's something I want.

There's no reason why this idea would introduce any more or fewer bugs than any other feature ZOS has implemented or decides to implement in the future. Not sure why it would increase lag either.

As far as it sounding "more complicated," I don't see why — any time you travel to your home, the game would load your other toon's data into memory along with the home's assets. (I wouldn't imagine it would be more than a few megabytes each.)

While you're in the home you can swap toons at will, instantaneously (something other games have been doing this for years if not decades.) This would have the added benefit of making inventory management, crafting, banking, etc much simpler while you are there. Once you leave, the other toon's data is then removed from memory.

This wouldn't replace the loading screen, it would supplement it. So if you're in the gaming world & you want to change toons, you could either go home or log out/back in like you do now.

As far as it "not making sense that your characters to be in the same house," uh...well don't place them there then. Problem solved.

Commandment · February 2020

Sorry wouldn't want this, this will promote people to make and use up good name slots someone else who actually wanted to use it, from using it.

Now people will just make toons to make their homes seem more lively.