Does player housing - much like Garrisons - remove the social side of ESO?

Sturmfaenger · May 2020

How often do you enter other people's homes - be it housing fans or not - and see them crafting for dailies or writs or yawning on the couch while their queue is on? And how often do you meet players in the cities that say "Oh I was not here for ages, it would be nice to talk but I have to return to my house as quick as possible again"?

These statements are given without any basis for it, besides perhaps a "feeling" you have, added to the fact that you say yourself that you have never gotten into housing. How can you judge the level of socialisation in ESO? Have you tried to socialize with players who love housing before you go around judging?
You miss a whole lot of socialisation alone in the housing community (not necessarily just in guilds) - be it invitations and visits to show the newly furnished house, brainstorming how one could improve a certain section of a house, plies for help to get a certain piece of furniture crafted (for free, just provide the mats) and the shared creativity of that aspect of the game. You can use housing for socialising aspects like guild auctions or games, but they are limited in time and use and will not keep players from entering cities, thats just nonsense. There is a number of people I know that still play ESO only because of housing.

And towns full of people define to me not as "socialisation". What is a busy town of players that are all running from place A to place B with crafting and shopping at the guild traders in their mind? Interaction is the key component here, not mass.
Try the zone chat in the capital cities and the new chapter zone of the year - its still full of people seeking groups (because the group finder is not working properly, and the group finder you did not mention is not associated with housing btw), guildless trading offers, world boss groups forming, crafters offering their services, newbies that ask questions and more or less witty fellows with questionable manners.

An MMO gets older with time - players in endgame mode will not quest in the zones that much anymore, others will leave the game for new challenges and so on. So if there is a decrease in population, its very unfair to say "You! You one fact of doom! It's your fault!"

There could be more socialisation in ESO - for example group music and concerts like in lotro or something. But the joker is with ZOS here, and housing is not to blame.

[Edit to remove bait]

Sange13 · May 2020

ITT:
WoW fanboi who wants game to be more like WoW and/or bring WoW's flawed logic to this game.

Answer:
*Flying never hurt WoW--bad dev logic did, especially the laziness involved with choosing to remove/limit it instead of designing for it like they did in BC/Wrath/Cata.
*Skill trees never hurt WoW--bad dev logic did, especially removing player choice over their builds.
*Player housing doesn't hurt ESO.
*Garrisons didn't hurt WoW because it already lost the social aspect when MoP launched and they lost 2/3 of their player base.
*Being able to join 5 guilds in ESO ensures there's plenty of community for those that want it.
*Dungeon Finder didn't hurt WoW--it enhanced the ability to find players for group content and thus created *more* social interaction. Trying to spam "LFG" in zone chat and getting everyone to the zone entrance wasn't "social," it was a chore that frequently resulted in those groups fizzling and never getting to run said content.
*Raid Finder actually did hurt WoW, but only because it provided no challenge and too strong of rewards while not actually teaching people how to properly run said raids--not because of the social aspect.
*Stricter enforcement of player behavior rules and proliferation of reporting hurt the game more than anything else, socially speaking, because it generated even more toxicity than letting people deal with it on their own. It created a type of player who tries to abuse the rules to gain power over other players while themselves being highly toxic but "technically" still within the rules.

I played WoW for a long time, but that game killed itself due to bad management, not random things that people like to claim undermined the social side of the game (for the most part).

Rave the Histborn · May 2020

SgtSilock wrote: »

Player housing is great, and whilst I have never gotten into it myself, the one thing I have noticed is just the lack of socialization within ESO since housing. It never use to be like this, and towns use to be full of people, now most of them are dead because the majority of players are doing their crafting/queueing in their home.

Now this isn't a request to remove them, it's a good idea, but this is an observation. Once upon a time this game was a lot more Social than WoW because of the lack of flying mounts and garrisons, and now it seems to be just as bad.

Why do I bring this up? From playing Classic WoW, because of the lack of any of these things it's a lot of fun actually talking to people, helping each through group content and seeing all the hustle and bustle going on in towns. This isn't a post saying that one game is better than the other, and I am only using WoW as example because it's all I know outside of ESO, but I do really miss the social side of MMO's and ESO is my favorite MMO bar none, and it it's self, has now unfortunately, outside of guilds, has fallen in the same camp as WoW in regards to socialization.

What town are you in and who does crafts at home? I figure everyone parks their crafters in Alinor or Rimmen because of the stations to drop off distance