Lady_Galadhiel wrote: »

whitecrow wrote: »

I know people go crazy for the gigantic house when they become available

Those people who get mad to get the huge homes mostly don't even use them as homes,mostly not even the buildings what come with it.Instead they lock all out and build something completely new in those places.
Don't get me wrong,creativity has no limits and some are really talented in building something completely new.
It is just not my cup of tea to see for example a mushroom cave at a forgemaster falls house,a vampiric castle in a hunters glade house or some kahjiity bazar in a Psijic Villa.
I prefer to stick with the theme of the house,if I get a dark elf house in morrowind I would never make a winter wonderland out of it for example.

My first couple houses are kind of a hotchpotch as at the time I didn't envision getting so many more houses, and so I think of the stuff in them as just souvenirs from my travels. But for newer houses like Psijic and Lunar I have tried to keep to the style of the area. And my coven cottage of course is the "spooky" house, open during Witches Festival season.

Bouldercleave wrote: »

My problem with housing is that other than using one for a guildhall, there is NO purpose to having a house in this game.

If you want a perfect housing structure, look to Everquest 2.

They had a global auction house, but you could travel directly to a player's house to save yourself the broker fees. It gave a person a real reason to visit your house.

You could craft and sell USEFUL things for your house - like storage containers and such.

I love the diversity of housing and furnishings in this game but they lack one KEY element - PURPOSE.

I LOVED housing in EQ2. They did everything right imo!

Lady_Galadhiel wrote: »

It's way better than most games, and gives you a lot of freedom when placing furniture. So yes, I like it.

But there definitely needs to be more space. The current limits - even when subscribed - are way too low.

I also wish they would incorporate what addons I'm told already kind of do, which is let you connect all of your houses together via portals. Something similar, allowing you to link all of your houses together with doorways, could give creative players a work around for the current and insufficient limits.

Jeremy wrote: »

UGotBenched91 wrote: »

I’m glad it offers a lot of players happiness and enjoyment but it’s not for me. I’d rather design and make my character look unique and cool then spend time on a house rarely anyone would ever see.

Yeah that's one of the flaws. This game doesn't have neighborhoods like LOTRO, so housing for the most part goes unnoticed by other players. That's partly why I think they should allow players to set up Bazaars in their house. It would give a purpose for other players to visit.

I agree with this, there should be an in-game index of player houses to browse. But, for now, you can use the essential housing tools + community addon. This addon creates an index of open player houses, which you can browse endlessly at your leisure. There are literally thousands of houses you can browse in essential housing tools, and its quite fun to just explore others work.

Just to add, if you are feeling bold, you can even publish your own houses on essential housing tools (EHT), for others to browse and see your work. EHT is available in minion.

I like that this game has housing, but it is too limited so I don't spend much time with it.

I haven't tried any houses yet but I was always a heavy user in other Beth games. I will get into it eventually. Hope it's better than other TES games. I like settlement building in fallout 4. Keeping my fingers crossed

I really like housing, but it's not my main occupation, more in phases and whenever I've accumulated enough materials to be able to produce a larger amount of furniture. However, I invest most of the gold in furnishing plans, which ultimately means that housing is an important part. But I don't invest crowns in furnishings - with one exception: candles ... damn wax ...

GenjiraX wrote: »

I use housing mostly for fast travel, especially now they’ve added the travel to outside the house option. Location is the most important thing. I have spent days furnishing and building (after @markulrich1966 showed me what was possible) but it falls flat for me if there’s no selfish incentive for other players to visit.

Thank you, glad I could contribute

Yes, you mention a valid issue - you just can share what you created uploading videos, or joining a housing guild that organizes housing contest events.

Myself, I use housing as distraction from normal gameplay.
I often do daily quests to farm rare mats for furnishing I sell.
This is extremely repetetive, have done summerset dailies maybe 3000 times already.

When I take a break to work on a house, it is the required break from such gameplay for me, to avoid a "burnout".

Even small and short decos can contribute, for example this simple grave chamber in lake xanmeer manor helps me to relax, after I turned it into a living-room with a "meditative" ambience. The sound of water and flames, the relaxing music, the movement of flames, water and steam.

Sometimes I just stop my dailies, travel there, and rest for 10 minutes to "calm down".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds8ueSzznPs

A year or so a go, I would've picked the "Yes, but..." option, but now I've mostly given up on housing. Just as I've slowly given up on most things ESO. The time invested, in comparison to the enjoyment gained, just isn't worth it to me anymore. I mean, there are real problems with the system as well - the greedy over monetization, the lack of furnishing slots, and the lack of functionality with homes - but I used to dance around those issues and just concentrate on furnishing and designing cool environments for my characters, while hoping that ZOS would do something about the issues. But they haven't, and they haven't shown any intention of doing anything about those issues in the future either.

Thus I am left with a system that is hobbled by some glaring flaws, and is just fundamentally too grindy too be of any real fun anymore. And that really is the kicker here, there is so much potential and possibilities for fun and creativity there, but it is all buried under mechanics that demand too much time, way too much time.

The cynic in me tends to think that it is to encourage real money purchases to circumvent the odious grind associated with housing. Don't have the time or energy to farm hours upon hours for mats? Can't muster the willpower required to do 50 more runs looting coffers in the same bloody ruin in hopes of finding one bloody purple plan? Just use real money and buy the stuff you need with crows! Easy peacy!

The realist in me concedes that there is some amount of that, but mostly it's just badly thought mechanics layered upon one another, until the whole thing has bloated up to the point where it is no longer tenable and stop-gap solutions, like those furnishing plan envelopes, had to be introduced. Or when they finally, after years of people complaining about it, realized that the drop chances for DLC paintings was on unobtainium levels, and they changed the system so that chest in DLC areas only drop DLC paintings.

You still have plenty of this crap going around - Like the problem with acquiring Culanda Laquer and, the fact that Murkmire greens tend to be listed for ten times as much as Murkmire purples, simply because Murkmire dungeons don't have coffers, only grub jars.

There's a lot of stuff like that, small little things that just make the whole thing more frustrating than fun. Add to this the utterly deranged pricing of non-craftable stuff, both in gold and Crowns. I guess the Altmer Windmill is the most obvious example - Why is that thing priced at 250k? I mean, why? Even 25k seems high for one bit of furnishing.

Why do some Achievement pieces cost 5k while other cost 100k and more? You've done the thing required for the right to buy the bloody thing, why do you then have to go and grind for gold so that you can buy your "reward"?

The whole point with housing is to provide players with building blocks they can fiddle with to express their creativity in fun and entertaining manner. So why limit that fun and enjoyment by introducing mind numbing grind for mats and gold to the mix? Is the housing editor itself not entertaining enough to secure player retention? Does it really need artificially introduced grind to keep players logged online?

That is what, for me atleast, it boils down to - For every hour o fun to be had in fiddling with my home decor, I have to invest several hours into farming, and running from guild kiosk to the next in search for the stuff I need. I do not want to log on to run the same dungeons for the 187th time looting coffers, I do not log on to spend my evening running around harvesting crafting nodes, in the hopes that I might get enough mats, so that I can do maybe a half an hour or so of work on one of my homes.

I no longer sub, and only log on couple of times a week to do some PVP. Housing was a big reason for me to maintain my sub, but the whole thing has just become so tedious that I can't be arsed to bother with it anymore. Games like Sims or Minecraft show that there is a lot of lure in housing and related mechanism, but you have to do it right. Farming mats, and searching for plans is fine, as long as they do not turn into the main focus of the system. When you spend less time doing decorating that preparing for it, that's when the system has gone off the rails.

Hymzir wrote: »

While I agree with you in some of the achievement furniture being overpriced way too much,yet it is another gold sink without the gold going to another player like when you buy suff from guild vendors.

BrownChicken wrote: »

The biggest disappointment is the houses themselves. I don't understand the logic of the designers. It seems that houses should only look in the crown store, which is why they are so strange and huge. Why is there still no Summeset village house? Why did ZoS decide that the house in the new Nordic village architecture should be a gallery when many players requested a small and cozy cabin?

Well the houses are what people make out of them,the Alpine Gallery house was or is,in my opinion,a nice farm house and with a bit of more flat land it would have been just right.And the house would have been fine just being one floor instead of 3.

Yes I agree 1000000000% we NEED a small Summerset house somewhere in the green.People have been requesting this for years yet nothing did happen.

BrownChicken wrote: »

The biggest disappointment is the houses themselves. I don't understand the logic of the designers. It seems that houses should only look in the crown store, which is why they are so strange and huge. Why is there still no Summeset village house? Why did ZoS decide that the house in the new Nordic village architecture should be a gallery when many players requested a small and cozy cabin?

I guess because antiquities was just introduced and people needed a place to put them all.