LunaFlora wrote: »

we are not getting an increase in furnishing limits. zos knows we want it, but they have made it clear they cannot do it.

it got reconfirmed as recently as May 2024.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/658726/follow-up-q-a-from-eso-10-year-celebration-event-community-roundtable/p1
Q: Will we ever get proper guild halls in ESO?
A: We love the idea of guild halls in ESO and recognize that our community has asked for them since the game launched. We have had many internal conversations about them over the years. The current challenge is the necessary caps. Much like the item limit caps in player housing, there is also a limit to how many characters can simultaneously be in a player home (it’s 25). As with items, these caps are in place to ensure that players on lower spec machines don’t encounter significant performance issues while in player homes.

I still really don't understand their reasoning here.

This year is the 10th anniversary, average hardware specs have risen considerably in the last 10 years. Fair enough, housing only came after a few years, probably around 2016 or 2017, but back then we were able to handle the current caps already. There's no reason to still support hardware that has been outdated for 10 years now. Just raise the minimum requirements to play the game, then this couldn't even be an argument against increasing the limits anymore. Just putting it 1 generation above the current minimum requirements should easily handle a reasonable increase in the cap (even though I doubt anyone still regularly plays on old hardware like that).

"Consoles holding us back" can't be an argument either, considering it's a different build of the game. We know they can deploy different builds to PC and consoles, otherwise we wouldn't be able to get bigger patches a few weeks early (on top of all the console only optimization that those builds will have, etc.). As there is no crossplay and no crossplay has ever been discussed or planned, there is no reason at all to not increase furniture caps for PC only.

The least they could do, without the risk of breaking anything, is to separate indoor and outdoor furnishings. Nothing is stopping you right now from placing 700 items at the entrance of your home and that does not seem to cause any issues. Unless indoor furnishings are loaded in / rendered while being outside (which would be weird and just a quick fix in the code, there's a loading screen after using the door to a house already anyway) this should not have any impact whatsoever. But at least it would take a lot of pressure of us while decorating, because right now you have to decide between a detailed inside or a nice inviting outside area. Both are simply not possible to manage, as the outside already takes up a couple of hundreds slots already (especially if you detail with flowers and such). Even in the smaller mansions (e.g. Linchal Grand Manor) it's hard to pull off.

I don't think it would impact performance to give a small increase to special furnishings or count assistants as their own category.

As with items, these caps are in place to ensure that players on lower spec machines don’t encounter significant performance issues while in player homes.

They shouldn't let that stop them. Players on lower spec machines have this same issue at dolmen, in trials, in Cyrodiil, anywhere there are a lot of players gathering and fighting and where there are a lot of particle effects. Increase the slots for everything, visitors and furnishings.