[Feedback] [QoL] Proposals for Housing and Account-wide progression

DeadGlad · March 18

ESO Quality of Life Improvements

I’m calling on the community to hear my plea, and I hope the developers take these suggestions to heart!
Without diving into complex gameplay issues like light attack weaving or PvP class balance, I’d like to propose some general Quality of Life (QoL) improvements:

In-home Crafting Writ Boards and Turn-in Stations: Currently, player housing is mostly used for crafting, relaxing, and hitting raid target dummies. Adding the ability to pick up and turn in Daily Writs from home would give housing much more utility.

"Return to Previous Location" after Teleporting Home: We need a way to jump to a house and then teleport back to exactly where we were. It’s incredibly inconvenient to use the "unowned house preview" trick just to return to a spot, or to get stuck in places like Apocrypha where there are no players to "travel to" nearby.

Optimize Character Swapping: I have 20 characters, and doing daily tasks on all of them takes 1–2 hours just because of the constant logging in and out. The transition between characters needs to be much faster and more streamlined.

Account-wide Trait Research: Why do we still have to research traits on every single character? I always end up switching to my main crafter anyway. Research progress should be tracked across the entire account.

Infinite Furnishing Storage for ESO Plus: We have way too much furniture! A bottomless "Craft Bag" style storage specifically for furnishings would be a massive relief for ESO+ subscribers.

Account-wide Armory Slots: Buying Armory slots for every individual character feels excessive. If the developers don't make these account-wide, players will just keep using add-ons as a "crutch" to bypass the limitation.

... I believe these changes would let us spend less time in menus/loading screens and more time actually playing the game. What do you think, community?
@ZOS_Kevin — would love to hear if any of these QoL improvements are already on the team's radar!

PeacefulAnarchy · March 18

Writ boards has been asked for plenty of times, I don't know if its something the new team would reconsider.

Return to previous location is already doable with some annoyance, as you say, so it shouldn't be hard to do this, but I have my doubts they would.

Optimizing character swapping would be great, but I feel the technical hurdles are just too much for them to bother with. In theory the idea would be to keep the world instance so you're only loading character data, but I'd guess there are a whole lot of things attached to the loading that "just work" and they don't want to risk messing with that.

Account wide research, I'd be all for it, but I know a bunch of people wouldn't.

Infinite furnishing storage: they gave us the vault not that long ago so I doubt this is in the cards.

Account-wide Armory Slots they've mentioned as being on their radar so probably the most likely of these to happen.

Gabriel_H · March 18

DeadGlad wrote: »

"Return to Previous Location" after Teleporting Home: We need a way to jump to a house and then teleport back to exactly where we were. It’s incredibly inconvenient to use the "unowned house preview" trick just to return to a spot, or to get stuck in places like Apocrypha where there are no players to "travel to" nearby.

Already available for a miniscule amount of gold.

DeadGlad wrote: »

Optimize Character Swapping: I have 20 characters, and doing daily tasks on all of them takes 1–2 hours just because of the constant logging in and out. The transition between characters needs to be much faster and more streamlined.

Character load time is determined by the addons you have loaded. The more addons, doing more work, take longer to load. There is no way to optimize this without removing addons written in lua.

DeadGlad wrote: »

Account-wide Trait Research: Why do we still have to research traits on every single character? I always end up switching to my main crafter anyway. Research progress should be tracked across the entire account.

Character knowledge should still be part of an mmoRPG (emphasied the salient point).

DeadGlad wrote: »

Infinite Furnishing Storage for ESO Plus: We have way too much furniture! A bottomless "Craft Bag" style storage specifically for furnishings would be a massive relief for ESO+ subscribers.

Furnishing Vault?! Unless you are a hoarder (I am) then 500 slots for different items is more than enough.

DeadGlad wrote: »

Account-wide Armory Slots: Buying Armory slots for every individual character feels excessive. If the developers don't make these account-wide, players will just keep using add-ons as a "crutch" to bypass the limitation.

Yes/No. A character that is a DD and has several DD specs is not going to benefit from having 9 of those slots taken up with tanking/healing/solo setups.

BretonMage · March 18

Gabriel_H wrote: »

DeadGlad wrote: »

"Return to Previous Location" after Teleporting Home: We need a way to jump to a house and then teleport back to exactly where we were. It’s incredibly inconvenient to use the "unowned house preview" trick just to return to a spot, or to get stuck in places like Apocrypha where there are no players to "travel to" nearby.

Already available for a miniscule amount of gold.

Unfortunately, we're heavily penalised if we port again too soon after porting somewhere, by several hundred gold. It can add up too.

I've often thought that a variant of the Morrowind Mark and Recall spells would be particularly useful in ESO. Or perhaps we could just have a collectible furnishing which allows us to recall back to a previous location. I'd buy it.

SilverBride · March 18

No to writ boards and turn ins inside houses because I like the towns being active with other players.

No to account wide traits research because not all characters need to know all traits and too many things have already been made account wide.

No to infinite furniture storage. We already got the furniture vault that holds a lot and significant housing slot increases. We do not need to encourage hoarding with infinite storage.

MissNoir · March 18

As long as I have no possibility to choose if I want to see sorc flappies and exploding mounts in my face I am all in for writ boards in my house. I can live with having to do the turn ins in town, but optimal would be to have that in house too.

Enemoriana · March 18

SilverBride wrote: »

No to writ boards and turn ins inside houses because I like the towns being active with other players.

Can cost 1-2k vouchers and require crafting achievements.
Then those who want, could buy and craft in their houses, guildhall will be a bit more useful, but still will be people crafting in towns, as not everybody will like to use guildhalls (or have no guilds at all) and will not bother to buy for themselves.

Also, some places could be a bit less populated... I didn't find place better than Vivec yet, but it loads slowly and often is laggy, much worse than other places. Also too much flashing and flapping.
Even with half of players it still will look crowded.

I'd love boards and turn in, because I have great house for crafting, that will make it perfect.

scrappy1342 · 1:34AM

DeadGlad wrote: »

"Return to Previous Location" after Teleporting Home: We need a way to jump to a house and then teleport back to exactly where we were. It’s incredibly inconvenient to use the "unowned house preview" trick just to return to a spot, or to get stuck in places like Apocrypha where there are no players to "travel to" nearby.

use a house in a zone you don't own. walk out the door and it will do this

DeadGlad · 1:36AM

Subject: Addressing the counter-arguments: Why QoL matters more than "forced social hubbing"

I’ve been reading the comments, and I want to address some of the concerns raised, especially by those who fear these changes might "kill the world's population."

1. On Crafting Boards in Homes vs. "Ghost Towns":
The argument that cities will become empty is a hollow one. Players don't visit Vivec City or Leyawiin to socialize; they go there because they are forced to use the most efficient crafting loops. Forced attendance isn't genuine social interaction. If player housing—which costs millions of gold or thousands of Crowns—is to have any real value beyond being a "furniture museum," it needs to be functional. Let us choose where we do our chores.

2. On Account-wide Trait Research:
To those saying "each character should earn it": we already have the Stickerbook (Collections). If I can reconstruct a Nirnhoned axe on an alt because my main knows the trait, the "individual progression" argument is already dead. Forcing players to wait months for a timer to tick down on 20 different characters isn't "gameplay"—it's an outdated time-gate that adds zero value to the experience.

3. On "Return to Previous Location":
We already use the "unowned house preview" exploit to do exactly this. If a workaround exists and everyone uses it, it means the current official system is flawed. Adding a "Return" button isn't "lazy"; it’s respecting the player’s time and reducing unnecessary loading screens.

4. On the "20 Characters" Argument:
Saying "it's your choice to have alts" ignores how ESO is designed. The game encourages alts through different classes and daily rewards. Punishing players for utilizing the game’s own systems with 2-hour login/logout cycles is bad technical design. Optimization should be a priority, not an afterthought.

5. On Monetization (Armory/Storage):
I understand ZOS needs to make money, but selling Armory slots per character in a subscription-based game—while PC players use add-ons to bypass this—creates a massive divide in player experience. Quality of Life should be a baseline, not a microtransaction for every single alt.

I believe these changes would actually increase player retention. When the "chore" part of the game becomes faster, we spend more time actually playing the content we enjoy.

SilverBride · 1:43AM

Enemoriana wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

No to writ boards and turn ins inside houses because I like the towns being active with other players.

Can cost 1-2k vouchers and require crafting achievements.
Then those who want, could buy and craft in their houses, guildhall will be a bit more useful, but still will be people crafting in towns, as not everybody will like to use guildhalls (or have no guilds at all) and will not bother to buy for themselves.

Also, some places could be a bit less populated... I didn't find place better than Vivec yet, but it loads slowly and often is laggy, much worse than other places. Also too much flashing and flapping.
Even with half of players it still will look crowded.

I'd love boards and turn in, because I have great house for crafting, that will make it perfect.

That is all fine but does not change my feedback.

BretonMage · 2:52AM

scrappy1342 wrote: »

DeadGlad wrote: »

"Return to Previous Location" after Teleporting Home: We need a way to jump to a house and then teleport back to exactly where we were. It’s incredibly inconvenient to use the "unowned house preview" trick just to return to a spot, or to get stuck in places like Apocrypha where there are no players to "travel to" nearby.

use a house in a zone you don't own. walk out the door and it will do this

The OP has already said they know about this exploit. I do too. It's awkward and exploity to do this; ZOS might as well give us a nice piece of furnishing that does the exact same thing, and sell it for crowns or make it an antiquity to work for. Everyone wins.

Gabriel_H · 3:55AM

BretonMage wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

DeadGlad wrote: »

"Return to Previous Location" after Teleporting Home: We need a way to jump to a house and then teleport back to exactly where we were. It’s incredibly inconvenient to use the "unowned house preview" trick just to return to a spot, or to get stuck in places like Apocrypha where there are no players to "travel to" nearby.

Already available for a miniscule amount of gold.

Unfortunately, we're heavily penalised if we port again too soon after porting somewhere, by several hundred gold. It can add up too.

I've often thought that a variant of the Morrowind Mark and Recall spells would be particularly useful in ESO. Or perhaps we could just have a collectible furnishing which allows us to recall back to a previous location. I'd buy it.

You can get 3 free inn rooms that are near to wayshrines. Porting from one house to another is free. And if you don't want to do that, 700g is hardly a large sum of money given daily crafting quests yield 5k and a simple dungeon run can net you 3k.

DeadGlad · 4:32AM

Gabriel_H wrote: »

BretonMage wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

DeadGlad wrote: »

"Return to Previous Location" after Teleporting Home: We need a way to jump to a house and then teleport back to exactly where we were. It’s incredibly inconvenient to use the "unowned house preview" trick just to return to a spot, or to get stuck in places like Apocrypha where there are no players to "travel to" nearby.

Already available for a miniscule amount of gold.

Unfortunately, we're heavily penalised if we port again too soon after porting somewhere, by several hundred gold. It can add up too.

I've often thought that a variant of the Morrowind Mark and Recall spells would be particularly useful in ESO. Or perhaps we could just have a collectible furnishing which allows us to recall back to a previous location. I'd buy it.

You can get 3 free inn rooms that are near to wayshrines. Porting from one house to another is free. And if you don't want to do that, 700g is hardly a large sum of money given daily crafting quests yield 5k and a simple dungeon run can net you 3k.

Gabriel_H Regarding the tavern room teleport suggestion:

This is exactly the kind of "crutch" (workaround) that I’m talking about, and it’s not a viable solution for several reasons:

1. It doesn't return you to your original spot: If I’m deep inside a public dungeon or a remote quest location, teleporting to a tavern and then back to the zone will only put me at the nearest Wayshrine, not back where I actually was.

2. Too many loading screens: This method requires three separate loading screens (one to enter the tavern, one to step outside into the city, and one to teleport to the final destination). This is the definition of a time-waste.

3. Unnecessary travel time: You still have to run and jump your way from the tavern to the nearest Wayshrine or city exit. It’s a clumsy manual process that players shouldn't have to deal with in a modern MMO.

We need a proper, streamlined "Return to Previous Location" button that respects the player's time, rather than forcing us to rely on these inefficient tavern-hopping tricks.

katanagirl1 · 5:14AM

DeadGlad wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

BretonMage wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

DeadGlad wrote: »

"Return to Previous Location" after Teleporting Home: We need a way to jump to a house and then teleport back to exactly where we were. It’s incredibly inconvenient to use the "unowned house preview" trick just to return to a spot, or to get stuck in places like Apocrypha where there are no players to "travel to" nearby.

Already available for a miniscule amount of gold.

Unfortunately, we're heavily penalised if we port again too soon after porting somewhere, by several hundred gold. It can add up too.

I've often thought that a variant of the Morrowind Mark and Recall spells would be particularly useful in ESO. Or perhaps we could just have a collectible furnishing which allows us to recall back to a previous location. I'd buy it.

You can get 3 free inn rooms that are near to wayshrines. Porting from one house to another is free. And if you don't want to do that, 700g is hardly a large sum of money given daily crafting quests yield 5k and a simple dungeon run can net you 3k.

Gabriel_H Regarding the tavern room teleport suggestion:

This is exactly the kind of "crutch" (workaround) that I’m talking about, and it’s not a viable solution for several reasons:

1. It doesn't return you to your original spot: If I’m deep inside a public dungeon or a remote quest location, teleporting to a tavern and then back to the zone will only put me at the nearest Wayshrine, not back where I actually was.

2. Too many loading screens: This method requires three separate loading screens (one to enter the tavern, one to step outside into the city, and one to teleport to the final destination). This is the definition of a time-waste.

3. Unnecessary travel time: You still have to run and jump your way from the tavern to the nearest Wayshrine or city exit. It’s a clumsy manual process that players shouldn't have to deal with in a modern MMO.

We need a proper, streamlined "Return to Previous Location" button that respects the player's time, rather than forcing us to rely on these inefficient tavern-hopping tricks.

The inn room in Rimmen, if you choose to travel outside the house, puts you just a few steps from the wayshrine without any loading screens.