Why the needless emphasis on housing?

Was it worth it?

I saved up enough money for a plot and found one available, but it was surrounded by all sorts of annoying custom homes by other players with vendors on their roofs, and the door wasn't facing the road, and I still had to save up money to actually build the house, and then defend it from campers... and I decided it just wasn't worth getting, and I gave up.

 

Emphasis on housing wouldn't really need to be an issue if they didn't make it an issue.

In Elderscrolls online, you don't need to carry around any crafting molds, utensils, instruments, equipment, etc. - but you do need resources, either in bank or on hand. You can simply walk up to a crafting station and if the resources are in your bank or pack, all the items to craft are automatically at the station.

By making a zillion crafting necessities (not including resources), they are requiring people to have some significant sort of storage. If the bank will be sufficient, or you can buy upgrades to bank space, that's fine. But the sheer number of crafting items is going to take up an awful lot of space.

But again, the OP made a point about a strong selling point for the game: housing. If it's not really necessary, why bother focusing on it?

 

Actually it was definitely worth it. The size of the house didn't matter to me. But the amount of storage, I desperately needed to upgrade. I resented having to spend real cash for it though. Considering I played the game 7 years beyond that, and spent $10/month for 10 years. I'd say they made their money on me. So why buy a house as well? It was a spendy proposition.

Any game that has a lot of items, and people play for a number of years, will need a lot of storage capacity. If not the bank, then a house is needed. I had all the gold in the world. But no one was selling a house at max storage for gold. At least not that I could find.

 

If you paid $200 for a house then we must be talking about one of the larger homes like a villa, large marble, or something of similar size. Clearly you had a need for a larger house (as did I) but surely there were small houses available, you just decided to pass on those and save for a larger house. That's totally understandable, but my position was that houses in general were always available. That didn't automatically mean large houses. Also, yes, houses in Felucca were much more available than Trammel houses. So you are talking about a very specific case here. You wanted a large house in Trammel and those were in the highest demand of all houses. But for players who in general just wanted their first house, and didn't mind a one room house or a house in Felucca, there were always opportunities to get those.

I want to point out again that I do share your concerns about housing potentially ending up being too limited in SotA, and how that would be a bad thing. I don't want you to think I'm out to get you. But I think that the housing "shortage" in UO was overblown and that the UO system was actually quite excellent (prior to Age of Shadows).

 

Yes, I get it. The problem was, yes, you could get a small house, in Fel and sometimes Trammel. But who wanted those? Storage was so ridiculously limited. You simply couldn't play very effectively with that limited of storage. When they limited banks, it drove the need for more storage in homes.

 

I think she was probably talking about buying a house prior to Age of Shadows, which is when custom housing began. Custom housing was one of the worst things ever introduced to UO, because as you said, most of them looked hideous and you would be embarrassed to live next to them. My "favorite" were the ones with snowy roofs in the middle of the desert. It could have been a good thing if they allowed limited customization, like different pre-made rooms to put together in different combinations, but instead they chose to make every single tile customizable and it really did ruin the landscape overnight, and Malas was basically a ghetto. I'm sorry you had to play in that era of housing

 

Well, I played on a freeshard after the fact But the custom housing was just one of the things that annoyed me.. in addition to vendors on roofs, the whole need to defend against campers, housing bleeding out into the wilderness and having monsters roam around them, houses only being a couple of inches away from each other, awkward placement of houses. It just wasn't very pleasant, especially for someone who wants a house for role-playing purposes. None of that made owning a house feel like it was worth it to me. Of course, I'd get extra storage, but I have no problem tossing junk if I need to.

In all seriousness though, I tend to agree with Caliya on these threads, that if the game world was anything like a real world, anyone would be able to get a home. There's plenty of wilderness, plenty of raw materials to build with.... Limiting housing is an entirely artificial restriction. The value of plots are their location.

 

In the end, I don't think that there will ever be a significant shortage of lots. The Dev team can always just create an island or a new town somewhere, and have lots of additional lots suddenly available. There would already be projections, based on the number of plots already sold, combined with the Citizen+ pledges, over time.

Is it likely that a new land mass will be added yearly, with each new chapter?

Every existing lot is an opportunity for Portalarium to up-sell in-game content to every player, and I'm fine with that. It means that The Dev team will be working hard to make a game people want to play. If the game was a clunker, due to cheating, hacking or duping, for example, and people left the game - then the value of everything would fall.

At the same time, over-flooding the market with available lots would also depress the price. This would be known to the Dev team and I think they are likely to orchestrate a well-planned release of available property.

It will be a battle, probably, to get prime lots close to some sort of action, especially good Vendor spots. But even if a new 'island paradise' is somewhere created, it will only be a portal away from the mainland.

 

Said like a true realtor. Location, location, location! hehe

 

The housing shortage in SotA, if they keep with their original statements about it, will be a very real shortage. And again, to focus on the OP's original comments, why so much focus on housing when it will be rare, limited, and people say repeatedly "you won't really need a house."

Sorry, but I don't buy it.

 

You haven't read older threads on the topic. I don't want to repeat myself or be a broken record, nor have the last word. I'm only giving information you must not have read.

Richard Garriot said he wanted to limit the number of houses to 100-150 per city. In order to accommodate only the original 26,000 backers, we would need 173 cities.

Now, does it sound likely they will simply "keep adding landmass"? With what resources? The budget is severely limited as it is.

I know of no MMO that has even 100 cities, let alone a helluva lot more than that.

They have said housing would be rare, limited, and RG himself said he expected every available deed would be sold prior to launch.

So you tell me. Is this realistic to place so much emphasis on housing when the vast majority won't be able to obtain it?

 

Simple answer with no embellishment - money. People are paying bank for their e-homes

 

I think it was one of the most amazing things ever introduced. The mistake was that the customizable plots when wanting a certain size did not come with default designs to pick.
None of the SotA houses are even remotely as nice as I have seen people design in UO.

To me not letting people have that freedom is like saying: "Most paintings people make are abysmal, lets not let them have paint and brushes."

 

There is only a small percentage of these backers on a pledge level which entitles him for a house.
All the others would have to struggle in game or live without an house in the multiplayer universe.
Now a few interesting if's:
If the transfer of stuff between single player online and multiplayer online is possible - in this case you would have "instanced" housing in the private single player instance available for everyone, who doesn't want or need one in the persistent world.
If this instance can be used to store stuff from Multiplayer online and only a logoff is between transferring between two modes to use the storage capacity of the house ... this would solve some of the shortages (and devalue some aspects of the persistent world housing).
*Salute*
Olahorand

 

SPO will not be completely private in regard to lots, I think. You'll see the houses of others, just not other PCs (maybe NPCs instead). The effects of players in the persistent online world will shape/influence things you see in SPO.

 

I admit I saw some truly amazing creations with the custom house system. But these made up less than 10% of the custom houses, I'd say. The overwhelming majority (at least back in 2003-2004) were a mess with tiles mashed together apparently at random. Walls connected to nothing, floors made of every possible different floor tile, lava placed next to snow, etc... everywhere you went, those custom houses were an eyesore. Malas in particular was horrifying to look at, because it was made up almost entirely of custom houses.

Not to mention another major mistake with custom housing, which was allowing 3 full floors for so many lots, so custom houses were constantly towering over other houses and blocking parts of them. This made many areas feel quite claustrophobic. Prior to custom housing, this problem was mostly mitigated because almost every house was 2 floors or less. Only the large tower had 3 full floors, but it was harder to get another house very close to a large tower because of the "wings" sticking out from the roof.

Default designs would have helped, yes, as would a selection of pre-made rooms and structures to mix and match. But instead they simply dumped an empty lot on everyone and gave them every possible option for every single tile.

So to use your analogy, it's more like you are saying that because a few select people can paint beautiful paintings, art galleries everywhere should also include all of the terrible paintings that everyone else makes, which we then are forced to wade through to get to the few beautiful ones.

 

well written, i agree with all of that. it's much better to have professionally done housing, to keep with the proper theme and to avoid all those ridiculous houses.

 

I enjoyed this new concept when it was introduced back on 24 Sept 1997.
I really loved player housing in SWG (2005).
I think it's an important aspect of online gamming and real life.
Keep it. Use it to your advantage.

 

I agree with other parts of your post (that I deleted for brevity), that there were some horribly ugly houses. The person who bought my house from me (I took painstaking hours to build it), tore it down and left it as only a plot with chests. No walls, nothing.

But as far as that analogy goes, if people were to pay money, real money, to be able to put a painting in a gallery, they should be able to, regardless of how ugly it is.

 

I think my problem with it was more the implementation of it, rather than the concept. They could have done it right and given players a proper framework to build with. Create several basic house designs for each different lot size (beyond the house designs that existed prior to custom housing). Design some basic pre-made rooms and other common areas people would want, like gardens or pools. Create palettes that would group floors, walls, and other decor that go well together for easy reference. Most people don't have much experience in design, but if you gave them templates like this to work from, they would quickly figure out how to modify what you give them so that it's customized to suit them but still aesthetically pleasing.

Instead we got "Here's your blank lot. Here's all the tiles. Start building." It was a really sloppy implementation. As was Age of Shadows as a whole.