[Suggestion] What do you do with your house? "Usefulness" improvements!

Lilly_Elessa · February 2020

I love furnishing my houses, spending hours placing and adjusting decorations, until I have a very lovely home (or restaurant or shop or whatever!). This is satisfying to me! And yet, one of the frequent things I hear when I mention my numerous houses is "What do you do with houses?" Followed by others lamenting a lack of more functional features - Because sure, there are functions, but I will readily admit that most functionality in housing is best served by a "guild hall" and not perhaps through your own personal house.
With that in mind, I thought I'd share some ideas I and others have had of ways to improve the functional functions of our houses! Mostly our own houses, not something meant for one person to purchase and place in one mega-function-doom-hall, with their sea of (very useful!) crafting set benches.

In Home Wayshrines! - Have you ever purchased a large or manor home, only to be disappointed that on leaving it you have a lengthy ride to the nearest wayshrine? Or that it's just plain more efficient to teleport to another house that is near a wayshrine? An in-home wayshrine would let players avoid an extra loading screen, and allow us to port to our favorite houses to ... Well, to get somewhere else. Rather than needing ugly but prime real estate homes like Snugpod to be some of our most used. This particular idea would function best as a collectible - Every house only needs one, but it is a function that would be greatly beneficial to every house. Alternatively, just add a second option to all the doors... This idea could be restricted to only be used by the owner of the home, though I don't think that's necessary.
Home Fishing! - Have you ever looked out at the pond, river, lake, or ocean in your home and wished you could fish in it?! Home fishing would require a unique pool of loot for fishing in houses, to not make say the Grand Psijic Villa disproportionately more valuable than others. But this could include a few extra unique furnishings, as well as little bags of furnishing materials. This should be available to anyone visiting the home, since the fishing system does favor having a friend or two to fish with, but with the same loot in all houses this would be equally available to private homes as it is to "guild halls". (Note: The cheapest homes with in-home water are Medium. I think this is fine, those should be achievable for most newer players within a reasonable period, and they are easily obtainable for seasoned adventurers.)
Gardening! - There are so many ways to go about implementing gardening, but for any version of gardening I would like to see: 1. Accessible pricing. Plots should be obtained either in game through gold or writ vouchers, or else for no more than 1500 crowns per plot. Plots should provide multiple planting points, ideally around 6 or so, but 3 would be fine if the yield is high. 2. Garden plots should only function for the owner of the house. 3. Plants should be harvestable either at daily reset or better on a 20hr timer. Extremely long growth timers become tedious, but short growth timers could flood the market. 4. Speaking of flooding the market, plots should function similarly to the housing chests to prevent anyone having far too many of them. Collectibles with a finite number, that have a shared "inventory" in any house they've been placed in. With all that out of the way, what could gardening potentially grow? Any harvestable plant! So trees (woodworking materials), Clothing materials for light armor, or most alchemy ingredients (the plant ones of course). Personally, I would like the system to not work off of seeds. Not only to prevent item bloat, but it is far more simple to just plant one of the plant you want, and harvest more of it later.
Harvestable Nodes - The alternative to gardening, and a little more friendly to metal and runecrafting materials. These are a placeable node that gives a specific item once a day. I have seen several other MMOs take this route for being a more simplified system. Like my suggestion for gardens, these would need to be accessibly priced and only function for the owner of the home. And probably function similar to the housing storage chests as well.
Livestock - Naturally you saw I was going to round out all these material based suggestions with animal based products if you're reading this, didn't you? The most simple way to do this I think would be to have animal pens that you can set once a day to a specific preset, such as you could choose "Cows" and the next day you would receive leather (skill level appropriate), cheese, and red meat. Or you could choose "Mudcrabs" to receive poison solvent, Mudcrab Chitin, and decorative wax. That could end up with many options though, so there could be broader simple selections such as "Livestock" that would fill the pen with chickens, cows, and goats, and produce leather, cheese, red meat, white meat, small game, guts, and poultry; then have "Aquatic" for mudcrabs, clams, fish (the provisioning "food additive" item), and some of the bait items (ex shad); Only one more broad category would be needed, either "Skittery" or "Cavern", for poison solvents, beetle scuttle, butterfly wing, spider eggs, scrib jelly, torchbug thorax, and the 'bug baits' (ex insect parts). This suggestion does have some value disparity in the items, but I think those could be rounded out by adjusting quantity. Again, this would need to be accessibly priced (however if the 'broad categories' approach, I could see it fairly costing double the other suggestions as it would provide more), function for the house owner only, and have limitations.
Music! - In home playable instruments! I hear this is a popular suggestion for the game otherwise. Putting instruments in-home as intractable items dodges the need to have some sort of inventory item or memento awkwardly do this, makes much bigger instruments more viable (pianos, etc), and keeps "noise spam" out of the open world (particularly crowded places like Belkarth or Vivec City).
Non-Combat Pet Upgrade! - Currently Fido only gets to stand at his dog house! Wouldn't it be so much more fun if we could play with our non-combat pets? Give them pets, treats, play a simple fetch game with them, toggle on their wandering around the house... This might be best done with select pets, mostly the older more simple ones like cats, dogs, and big cats, rather than all pets. To make this suggestion not a terribly massive project. (Or, you know, to make it not worse than just a base upgrade would be.)
Mini-games? - These aren't my personal favorite, but I have seen them be fairly popular in other games. Little objects you can interact with to play tic tac toe, checkers, a card matching game, pong, etc. They are a fantastic way to kill a bit of time while waiting on other people! Or maybe to just unwind from some vMA.
Survey Collectors! / Treasure Hunters - I love crafting. I love gathering. But after years of running around to the same survey nodes, after endless annoyingly placed Wrothgar surveys... I often wish for someone else to do them for me. Someone that isn't a person (or a bot, no nono's). Someone that's an NPC in my house! It's simple: Obtain NPC, place in house, feed them your various surveys and they send you a mail with the materials 20hrs later. Ideally feed them as many surveys as you have, since these are already account bound on acquire (and anyone who does writs with alts knows how many of these you can get a day...) I would super appreciate if this way could provide housing materials, as surveys usually can not provide housing materials, and I think a fair trade off for providing a tidy sum of housing materials would be if the NPC would not read your double-materials proc trait. Theoretically this NPC, or a similar one, could be fed the treasure hunting maps too. I know a lot of people vendor or discard their treasure maps because they're a bit tedious for a rather low payout. An NPC to do the legwork might help revivify those. Since I've already suggested values of some other things, I may as well with these: I think the value of a survey collector would be about the same as the summonable merchant/banker NPCs. A treasure hunter NPC on the other hand, I think would be significantly less, around 1500 crowns tops.
Better ability to teleport to other players' secondary houses. - Okay, this one doesn't exactly improve "usefulness", but does help wild decorators with many houses like me that want to be able to share creations with people easier. Or that niche of people with one primary house that would do others but don't see a point since they can't share them easily. It usually takes over an hour to escort someone around all my houses for a guided tour, and I would really like some better way to visit all of anyone's shared houses.
Functional Beds? - Other games, notably including other TES games, have some kind of a function when you sleep in a bed. I do not think that a large function would be appropriate for this game, but something small such as 10 more resource regen for a few hours, or +5% more dropped gold (remember that old useless gear stat that was removed?), or maybe even just a laying down animation with a "You feel well rested." message would be cool.
In-home Writs - Some friends in particular want this one, to be able to do daily writs with all those home crafting stations, or at least turn in master writs ... Well, where we're crafting them really. In a house with a sea of set crafting stations.
A real Fence. - It's nice that Pirharri the Smuggler is free... But she's also worth what she costs: Almost nothing. A fence without a fee, and more importantly that launders goods, would be fantastic. I don't mean for this fence to be summonable like Pirharri, that could be seen as making crime "too easy". But there are plenty of houses that are already a clear shot from the house into a thieves refuge, so as long as we can safely port to our houses anyways, let us skip a couple loading screens and have an in-home useful fence.
Adoptable Children? - This one's probably controversial because "Omg children!", but I've seen this request so many times because you could do it in Skyrim. But as a housing item they're not killable, and if they skip around the house or whatever you can avoid a lot of weird stuff people might do if they're stationary. And then they can have a function! They can give you little daily gifts when you talk to them, like a piece of justice system loot or some furnishing materials.

Anyways, while I doubt any of this will be, erm you know, anything, hopefully it was a fun read! Do you have any ideas for making housing have a more functional purpose?

Tigerseye · February 2020

Basically, all of the above.

I totally agree with everything you have suggested.

I would, personally, like to add something more complex, as well, to make houses seem more interesting and alive, and to help compensate people for the amount of time, gold and/or Crowns they spend on furnishing.

Might have to be part of a housing DLC, or something...

That would be an ability to choose a business type for each of your houses, decorate them accordingly (how well you decorated could affect the profitability of your business[es]) and to then employ the relevant staff.

Customer/visitor/student NPCs (as appropriate) would then enter your house and wander around doing things appropriate to the business type.

That could include (but, not be limited to) drinking at a bar, eating at a restaurant, sleeping in a hotel (sometimes, all three, if your business is a combination of all of them), sitting at desks studying in a school/college, painting at easels in an art school, playing instruments in a music school, viewing things in a museum etc..

You would be expected to maintain your business(es), by logging on once a week, in order to receive your payment(s).

This maintenance would be via quests and could include, for example, paying staff and so on.

Not sure how feasible this would be, in a game like this, but it would add an extra dimension to housing, above and beyond adding basic functionality (which I would also like).

TheImperfect · February 2020

Any or all of the above. Anything that would add to making housing fun within the realms of possibility.

katanagirl1 · February 2020

Since I purchased Potentate’s Retreat, all I have wanted to be able to do is get in that big pool of water and dive down and swim around and explore it. It makes me sad that I cannot do so.

Kittytravel · February 2020

I'm not sure how I feel about wayshrines but I would absolutely love a free teleport to any major city of my pick. Perhaps it's an attuned wayshrine that can only send you to whatever major hub you chose but it is extremely annoying that porting to my house incurs a fee upon me as not all homes are near wayshrines.

For the survey NPC - I assume this would come with the forfeit of all harvesting bonuses? (The 10% extra possibility).

In-home Writs - Imo this should be added because it doesn't change anything about the game currently, the only difference is instead of running my alts through writs in Vivec I'll actually be doing them in a house I care about. This also gives more value to the merchant/banker for in-house depositing of Surveys imo.

Pirharri - It's never made any sense that Pirharri takes a "cut" of what you fence, in that case why doesn't Nuzimah take a cut of what you sell to her? I think Pirharri just needs the cut removed completely. She can't remove your bounty and she can't launder items; I feel like those two drawbacks are enough to make her the same as the banker/merchant drawbacks.

Functional Beds - Yes please already I'd like to E into my bed and get cozy.

kind_hero · February 2020

I agree with the following

In Home Wayshrines
Gardening
Music
Mini-games
Teleports
Functional Beds

The rest would transform the game into a single player experience, and the devs will not implement them.

There has been a lot of debate about wayshrines... That is one of the things I want most regarding houses. A typical wayshrine, or like suggested above, a wayshrine attuned to some town, but I don't see the point to this limitation. You can already teleport anywhere from the house anyway, the annoyance is in the gold cost. In house wayshrines save you the loading screen of going out of the house, and next the chore of traveling to the nearest world wayshrine.

For gardening, I would love to see some planters, where you could seed whatever plant you want. The planter could have a cooldown of several days, so you can't abuse the system and make your own cornflower farm. But would settle even for decorative alchemy plants. We have a voidflower plant, so why not others?

One of the things which could increase the fun and utility of houses is a teleporter. I see this as a way to shorten distances in large houses or to create mini-games, or create secret places.

Minyassa · February 2020

Any of that would be fun. As it is, I use my houses for socializing, mostly, and a couple of them for crafting. I really like crafting in my own homes, and not just because I don't have someone's annoying flappy in my face or guards being passive aggressive at me as I walk by minding my own business. It's just pleasant to do that in a space you've created yourself and made attractive and comfortable. I'd *love* to be able to do writs there. It's not like giving us the opportunity to do things like that in our homes would make us stop going out and about entirely, we still have go to to furnishing shops or out to go to dungeons.

Anska · February 2020

I am basically happy, that I can port to my homes for free, because it is wonderfully convenient whenever I find myself in the middle of nowhere with full pockets. I only wish I could quick-slot my primary residence.

What I very much agree with are the points about pets and functional beds (and barstools) though. For pets it would be much of an improvement if you could simply choose the idle your pet is to display, so you could for example have a dog always nap in front of the fireplace. As for the barstools and beds, I wouldn't expect some great rewards from it, it would just be nice to be able to use them. A bar without barstools looks empty but a bar with unuseable barstools isn't fun either.

Lastly in house gardening would be great but I'd probably be very happy with decorative items which look like harvestable herbs too.

Cireous · February 2020

Lilly_Elessa wrote: »

[*] Survey Collectors!

I

the survey collector idea. This would make me so happy.

JumpmanLane · February 2020

Mini games would be nice. Outside of crafting or dueling most visitors are itching to leave after a “what’s new, aww cool” tour.

chuck-18_ESO · February 2020

It's a hard spot, because I'm firmly against houses being in any way "Pay to Win". I love the idea of actually gardening and fishing in my house and being rewarded for my effort, but I -don't- love the idea of people with multiple manor houses getting waves of free mats every day with zero effort. The economy would be screwed.

As for children, how would it work? They would have to be a furnishing item, otherwise they would get in the way of players or just constantly walk into placed furnishings, and frankly I don't want to see a child furnishing in the hands of the majority of players.

I love housing; it's the main reason I play ESO. I would love to see housing improved! But I often find myself having to play devil's advocate in these kinds of threads because I can so easily see why suggested improvements haven't been implemented.

The best improvements are also the ones most easy to implement, IMO: more furnishing variety and more functional pieces of furnishings.

drakthir · February 2020

Not sure about farming but the fishing is a good idea, don't see it as a bad thing if someone fishes in their house than outside in the 'real world' It's gonna be exactly the same amount of mats either way.

Lilly_Elessa · February 2020

chuck-18_ESO wrote: »

It's a hard spot, because I'm firmly against houses being in any way "Pay to Win". I love the idea of actually gardening and fishing in my house and being rewarded for my effort, but I -don't- love the idea of people with multiple manor houses getting waves of free mats every day with zero effort. The economy would be screwed.

I'm not a fan of p2w either (though I do recognize the need for the game to produce a profit), which is why I kinda bumbled around suggesting things should be (mostly) obtainable in game (with a crown option), much like the house storage chests that we have are obtainable through writ vouchers, tel var stones, or crowns. Also like the chests that we do have where the storage is attached to the collectible "item" rather than per house, I suggested farming features should not be per house.

chuck-18_ESO wrote: »

As for children, how would it work? They would have to be a furnishing item, otherwise they would get in the way of players or just constantly walk into placed furnishings, and frankly I don't want to see a child furnishing in the hands of the majority of players.
...
The best improvements are also the ones most easy to implement, IMO: more furnishing variety and more functional pieces of furnishings.

Child "furniture" is tricky because of those concerns, but I included it because I see people talk about it so often (as I said). This is one that I honestly never expect to see, but hey, thinking of how something like that could work is fun! So why not? Part of that is definitely because "proofing" them against players would make them much more complex than just adding, oh say a fire breathing statue.
But ignoring that for a second, remember how the children you could have in Skyrim would run around your house? They would play tag or hide and seek with each other, they'd run up to you, I think they sat in various chairs around your house? Sometimes they did get in your way, yes. But most of the time they wouldn't stay still for long and would be off to the next thing. So aside from being extremely difficult for players to do weird things to, that kind of active behavior makes your house feel alive.
Of course, pets could wander your house and make it feel alive too, with models that already exist in the game.

Tigerseye · February 2020

chuck-18_ESO wrote: »

It's a hard spot, because I'm firmly against houses being in any way "Pay to Win". I love the idea of actually gardening and fishing in my house and being rewarded for my effort, but I -don't- love the idea of people with multiple manor houses getting waves of free mats every day with zero effort. The economy would be screwed.

This is a fair enough point and I tend to agree that it would be a little unfair for people to be able to farm more than a certain number of properties.

Perhaps the max number you could farm should correlate with the max number of ones you can buy with gold?

Not, necessarily, leaving out the Crown purchased ones, but you would have to choose which ones you wanted to use, up to a max number, in total.

However, where, then, do you stand on the subject of people buying multiple accounts and/or extra characters to do endless crafting writs on?

They are farming those accounts and chars for easy gold and crafting mats (as writ rewards and from hirelings) and they can purchase as many accounts and characters as they like (or can cope with!) to do that.

Are you not worried that them doing that ruins the economy, too?

Tigerseye · February 2020

I just find it interesting that someone would be so concerned that housing shouldn't be Pay2Win, when I personally know people making multiple millions, per week, simply by logging on and doing crafting writs on all their chars, across all their accounts, every day.

That's even if we accept that making a bit of extra gold constitutes Pay2Win...

Especially, in the case of housing, as the gold price of these houses and furnishings (and/or the mats to make them) leaves you deep in the hole, with no housing-related way out, currently.

Not only that, but furnishing is one of the only activities, in the game, that awards zero gold per hour.

All those months you spend (in total) decorating your houses could have, otherwise, been used to do something that actually made you gold, rather than just losing it.

Housing is way more expensive than the cost of levelling a few chars to do crafting writs on; which is negligible, if any.

Whereas, housing people are some of the most gold-poor players in this game...

So, if those poor housing people want to make some of their lost gold back, via housing (rather than writ-spamming!), then God only knows they should be allowed to do so, in my opinion.

RD065 · March 2020

I love decorating my home. My favorite Grymharth's Woe in Windhelm (I love the location) is in the middle as far as decorating. I spent two hours just to get my fern in the right spot :-). I love the floor on the main floor, that's what caught my eye. The one negative, right outside my front door is a clothesline. Why do I have a clothesline attached to my home :-)

Functional beds would be nice and a wayshine but only if its small and can be attached to the wall since I have no outside.

bayushi2005 · March 2020

Tigerseye wrote: »

I just find it interesting that someone would be so concerned that housing shouldn't be Pay2Win, when I personally know people making multiple millions, per week, simply by logging on and doing crafting writs on all their chars, across all their accounts, every day.

LOL yeah, this. The main source of funds for my "20 mil per house" favourite activity. One account here, but still, quite a chunk of gold.

Elo106 · March 2020

Alt characters as "furniture"
If I could place my characters in my house and open their inventories like a crate. The character currently used would vanish ofc.

No more logging between characters just to get 1 item and it would make our houses less empty.

SpaceElf · March 2020

I like the idea of being able to swim underwater on properties, at least, that have enough of it. It's certainly possible as it's a mechanic that's seen in older MMOs.

The next thing I would want it something that probably cannot be done, but I can dream. So here it is: If someone really doesn't want a house they bought or earned for whatever reason, it would be nice if they could sell and transfer it to another player.

I really really really want to get my hands on that Psijic Villa.

ZoS seems to not want my money in that regard, however.

ThoraldGM · March 2020

Excellent ideas. I'm currently using EHT to make the NPCs in my tavern (merchant, banker, cat, etc) move around (teleport) every few minutes to give the illusion of activity. It would be nice if NPCs sandboxed like Fallout 4 settlers (walking, using stations, sitting, eating, etc). Bonus if we could change their appearance by "importing" our alts' cosmetics.

katanagirl1 · March 2020

@SpaceElf the Villa will probably go up for sale again during an anniversary event. That’s the way those limited time notable houses usually work.

katanagirl1 · March 2020

@Minyassa I just have to say how I keep hearing your comment about “someone’s annoying flappy in my face” in my head every time I stop in Riften to do crafting. It’s so true.

I like to do crafting in my house too but don’t want to go there every time I just have to decon something.

Minyassa · March 2020

katanagirl1 wrote: »

@Minyassa I just have to say how I keep hearing your comment about “someone’s annoying flappy in my face” in my head every time I stop in Riften to do crafting. It’s so true.

I like to do crafting in my house too but don’t want to go there every time I just have to decon something.

@katanagirl1

Twilights are like cats, they gotta get right IN your personal space and show you their stuff while you're trying to do something. That's why they sing that ridiculous little song, that's their "I'm about to get up in your eye" song. I bet sorcs wake up with that thing right on their face suffocating them.

katanagirl1 · March 2020

Minyassa wrote: »

katanagirl1 wrote: »

@Minyassa I just have to say how I keep hearing your comment about “someone’s annoying flappy in my face” in my head every time I stop in Riften to do crafting. It’s so true.

I like to do crafting in my house too but don’t want to go there every time I just have to decon something.

@katanagirl1

Twilights are like cats, they gotta get right IN your personal space and show you their stuff while you're trying to do something. That's why they sing that ridiculous little song, that's their "I'm about to get up in your eye" song. I bet sorcs wake up with that thing right on their face suffocating them.

If only that were true @Minyassa !

Those things are in your face because they are so far behind the sorc that they forget all about them.

I wish ZOS would incorporate removing them and those annoying giant bears that block doorways into their performance improvement plan. Would probably fix all the lag.