Homes of Tamriel: ESO Housing Issues

Housing was one of the most anticipated features of The Elder Scrolls Online for me and many of my friends in the game. It opened the door to a level of depth for many of us in the game. A feature that would allow us to embrace our inner decorator, a place where we could be creative and expressive, and display our achievements in the game. 

And for the most part, housing has not been a let down. We were allowed to own multiple houses and new houses have been getting released over time. But as awesome as housing has been, housing hasn't been without it's issues (more on those below) and I am going to talk a little bit about the issues and limitations of ESO Housing. 

Furnishing Limits

This is been an on again, off again debate. Some houses have more than enough available slots to design some really cool things, but for many houses, even after a larger house is filled up (700/700 slots used) the place looks and feels vacant. 

A recent addition to this vacuous homes list is the Princely Dawnlight Palace. To say this house is huge is a gross understatement. The courtyard is one of the biggest in the game, with two different water features, a wall that is accessible and multiple steps to the main house and landings. The courtyard also features a set of stairs that lead down to the water and beach which could house an incredibly detailed dock.

And then we can enter the palace's main structure. With the highest count of rooms of just about any house out there and a main hall that is just about as big as the entire Serenity Falls Estate there is so much room for creativity that the mind can blow an o-ring just thinking about it.

But then reality kicks in... You have all this space, space that is ripe for creatives minds to design and build in, and you get 700 furniture slots. Only 700 slots for both inside and outside, and that's only if you are an ESO Plus subscriber, without ESO Plus you are stuck with only 350 slots. 

700 slots could be used with just decorating the outside, easily, and still have room for more. And then while the outside is decorated to the nines, the inside is bare bones.

This is not unique to the Princely Dawnlight Palace; 

• Daggerfall Overlook with its secret door to a water area with a huge area that can be accessed, save for the slaughterfish; 
• Mathiisen Manor with its large courtyard and a reflecting pool, 
• Hundings Palatial Hall with its 360 degree courtyard, stables, lighthouse, roof access, and vast beach.
• Grand Topal Hideaway; a private island that is absolutely massive, the most massive in the game
• Hakkvild's High Hall with a massive courtyard, underground tunnel and a large multi-level house.
• Earthtear Cavern - One Big Giant Cave Dwelling
• Several other homes also have huge outdoor areas, like the Strident Springs house or the Cold Harbor house; the later of the two doesn't even include a structure for the 1,000,000g price tag. 

These places are ripe for decorating, but can never reach their full creative potential because of particularly low limits placed on their available furniture slots combined with their massive space availability.

Hey Zenimax, how about looking at increasing these limits. For the larger houses, you know the ones with the huge courtyards and large house structures, how about treating the outside and inside as its own loading zone, so the outside of these places could have 600 slots and the insides could have 600 slots? I know one limit of the housing is that too many items, especially large items, can take a long time to render and load. Sometimes, loading into my haunted house or my Ebonheart Manor can take a good 10 to 15 seconds to load in when it's at max capacity (700/700 slots). But treating each zone, interior and exterior, as it's own load zone could make the loading less problematic while still allowing more overall slots for the house. Just an idea.

Stolen Items

One of the biggest requests I hear from people, second only more furniture slots, is why the hell can't we place stolen furniture items in our homes? How are we supposed to have a true thieves den if we have launder our stolen furniture items before we can place them? 

Furthermore, outside of the fact that some of the items we steal, like Wooden Toys and Hair Creme, don't actually have a rendered object in the game (a tangible 3d model that can be displayed), why can't we use the other stuff we steal as decorating items; armor, weapons, etc, you know, stuff that does have a rendered object in the game.

Armor Stands

This has been requested for so long. We want to display our armor. We can make wonderful pieces of details armor, and stylize these pieces to the Nth degree, but we are not allowed to display them. 

One idea that has been floated in the community is Armor Stands, so that we can display our armor like the heavy armored Knights in British castles. The community would love this and it would add such a wonderful decorative design component, especially to large castle-like homes; Daggerfall Overlook, Earthtear, etc. 

Can you make this happen Zenimax?

Lights

This one is about to be fixed, but still needs to be addressed. When someone comes in and turns off all your lights, there is no master switch for the home owner to turn on all lights again. Sure you are finally giving us the Limited Visitors permission, a year and half after housing dropped, but some people, that are friends, are still pranksters, and if you have over 100 lights in your house finding them all can be a huge challenge. GIVE US OUR MASTER SWITCH ZENIMAX!

Decorating with light is a huge part of many designs in homes. Could you imagine turning off all your lights with one switch, having a bunch of people enter your home and once everything has loaded for them you can switch the lights back on for the big reveal? This is key, especially for lights you bury as part of your design. It'd be like Christmas Vacation when Clark finally gets the lights to work... that ah-ha moment. 

Priceless.


Multiple Houses: 

Zenimax was kind enough to allow us to own multiple houses throughout Tamriel, but, we can't visit all of the houses owned by our friends, except for their primary residence, without them being at the specific house to travel to. 

Why can't we have a primary, secondary, etc., or just have a visit primary residence followed by visit other residence option that we can then choose from a list to visit any of their houses? Many times I have been asked by someone to let them see one of my many themed homes; my wedding house, my Christmas house, my Halloween house, etc., but I am in a dungeon or in Cyrodiil and none of these are my primary home. This leaves the person asking to see my home waiting for me to be available to show it to them. Allowing anyone to see any home I own without me having to be there for a fast travel hitch would be outstanding. 

Zenimax has done some good things with housing like adding storage chests, but there is some refinement needed. We spend a lot of time and gold buying, building and decorating our homes in Tamriel. We need to have the options for decorating and availability of the homes to be accessible. 

Zenimax, please address this.

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Dueling in ESO: The Violent Nature of Tamriel and The Unintended and Unresolved Consequences

In concept, I understand the need for dueling. Dueling is the only way to truly test one's build for PVP before taking it into combat. Sure the DPS test dummies are nice for posting DPS numbers, but the fact remains, those numbers only represent PVE/DPS values. And, since dummies don't fight back, you can test a tank or healer builds.

So from that point of view, the introduction of dueling to The Elder Scrolls Online allowed the broader test of all classes and PVP builds; but, it came at a price; a price that everyone in Tamriel has been paying since the One Tamriel patch dropped. Essentially, what dueling did was bring PVP out of Cyrodiil and into all Tamriel. 

When dueling was released as a part of the One Tamriel patch back in the fall of 2016 it introduced some major issues to the play-ability of the game. The first major issue is that anyone could duel anybody else, anywhere, at anytime and multiple duels could be happening simultaneously at the exact same location. For whatever reason, probably ease of access to easy targets, people chose to duel at way shrines, in major towns, inside and around the Undaunted Enclaves and other locations that required people to travel to for turning in quests, sell/deconstruct their hard earned gear or just pop over to town to rest from their exhausting adventuring.

By allowing dueling in and around major hubs of activity non-dueling players get hit with "Unusually Long Load Times", which is actually not so unusual these days. Quest and pledge givers can take a literal minute or two to load in and not be a black silhouette. Game crashes and locks are still rampant and some major cities, <cough> Elden Root <cough>, and these same cities are so laggy and crash-prone, that they are not the hub they were before One Tamriel.

Dueling also opened the game to bullies. High level characters played by small penis'd people who need to make others feel small to feel good about themselves, picking on new characters (who don't know any better) using the dueling feature as their weapon of choice for their bullying tactics. This is such a problem that Zenimax had to include an auto-decline all duels option for players just trying to quest.

The problems introduced with Dueling are so easy to fix, but Zenimax has not listened to our cries to make it stop. Instead they push forward like they can't hear our tears of frustration falling like Niagara. But let me put on my "Mr. Fix It Hat" and offer some viable suggestions to solve our never-ending saga of dueling woes.

First and foremost, make Dueling an illegal activity, like it is and was (for the most part) in the real world. If a any NPC witnesses a duel, each party responsible will get 2000g bounty and an invincible guard will appear and attack the duelers. This would definitely push dueling outside of towns and into remote locations which would limit the impact on the rest of the players in the game.

Second, see that image above, of what looks like a dueling arena? Yeah, build one of those in each of the lands of Tamriel; a place, an arena if you will, specifically for dueling to take place, legally. Make it open for everyone to go watch if they want to. Make it so the "Invite Duel" option is only available in these locations. Just keep it away from major cities. Zenimax gave us a similar feature in Summerset with the "Colosseum of the Old Ways", and even gave us an achievement for dueling there. Give us these types of locations across all of Tamriel and the unintended consequences of dueling, mentioned above, will go away.

Third, with the introduction of Battlegrounds, why is dueling still needed? Why can't there be 1v1 Battleground Map, that looks like the arena mentioned above, and that when two people agree to duel, are they are loaded into?

Again, I see the value of dueling, but I think it can be done in a way that it minimizes the impact on the rest of us denizens of Tamriel. That's my two cents, which when inflation is factored in, isn't worth a whole lot, but I feel better getting it out.

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The Elder Scrolls Online: The Daunting Task of Shopping Guild Stores

One of my biggest personal issues with the overall user experience in the game is not being able to search stuff in guild traders, you know, recipes, set armor items and motifs etc. I know that crashes, glitches and other problems with the games have a much more significant impact to the gaming experience in Tamriel, but not having an ability to search for specific things I need by just typing in Ring of the Red Mountain instead of having to scroll through 16 pages of rings would be a huge improvement to the user experience in the game.

This is especially if you are looking for a Silken Ring Swords Motif... just filtering for Purple in motifs still leaves you with 10+ pages to look through, only to find that the guild trader doesn't have it. The incredibly long list of items in a guild store, pages and pages and pages of things you have scroll through to find what you are looking for is a daunting task; one I generally hate undertaking.

Hence my use of of the above gif... the complete overwhelming nature of of finding anything specific in a guild store is far too daunting of a task.

Let's be honest, we can search the crown store through the housing interface's purchase tab to find a chair, not just any chair, but an Breton Pew, Windowed and we don't have to scroll through all the chairs across all the different types of furnishing (praxis, plans, blueprints nor Dining, Parlor, etc.) but after three years we still can't search the guild traders? I mean housing is only a year and half old, guild traders came into existence a short time after the game launched.

I realize that Zenimax makes money, as in REAL COLD HARD CASH, off people buying crowns and using those crowns to purchase furnishings (and other crown store items), but seriously, can't Zenimax just copy and paste the search code from the Crown Store Furnishing interface and apply it to the guild trader interface?

Is it really that hard?

Wait... I just realized what I asked and how what I asked relates to who I asked it of.

Of course it is hard for Zenimax.

First; they don't have any incentive to develop it. They get gold in the form of tax with each sale in a guild store, but gold really means nothing to them since, unless you are bot farmer, has no real world monetary value.

Second; they have proven time and again that whatever they touch breaks everything else in the game. So if they were to develop this search capability in guild stores, it would likely make it so anyone who did damage in PVP would produce a message that the player is sending too many messages, kick them out of the game and crash them to the home screen, remove all player's character's an ability to weapon swap, change the stats of training gear to proc a 100% chance of 1000% weapon damage for any damage is delivered and give us all 17 minutes of "Unusually Long Load Time" screens with every 18th step a character takes.

Third; Zenimax has made it their mission since before Summerset to not make anything easy.

I want to talk about that last point a little bit more because it is an important point. See, Zenimax reads peoples comments regarding the game being boring and not enough new content to keep us busy between releases; this is about player engagement. But rather than work to deliver more value added content, deeper content, what they choose to do it read those player's comments and see them as things were too easy. And while some things remain easy in the game; grinding levels = easy, leveling alchemy/provisioning = easy, etc., but they their idea of more content is to make it harder to complete many basic things in the game.

Let's look at some examples. First, jewelry crafting research. They have made the jewelry crafting line without a skill bonus in Lapidary for increasing the number of items you can research at one time. This means you can only research one necklace or ring at a time, not a ring and a necklace at the same time, like you can Metallurgy Skill in the blacksmith skill line.

But with only 18 traits to research in Jewelry it's not that bad right?

It could take you four months to research all the traits in Jewelry without purchasing reduction scrolls from the crown store, or having an Orc as your master craftsman or having ESO plus with it's bonuses.

This isn't adding more content, or making it harder, it's just adding time to an already arduous time-consuming task; and this get more frustrating for those of us who were already Master Crafters before Summerset dropped.

Now let's look at another example; quests. Zenimax's idea of more content is making quests that require you to travel from one place to another and back and forth doing nothing but talking and conveying messages between two or more NPCs. The game was already a joke due to the lazy nature of NPCs in this game and this back and forth adding load times in a patch that was plagued with broken load screen. A problem we initially experienced in Morrowind.

<Quest>

NPC Farmer: "Run over there and talk to my pig, he'll tell you."

NPC Pig: "Yup, the farmer is right. Now go the bar back in town and talk to the drunk at the table."

NPC Drunk: "Yup, I agree. Now tell that farmer I agreed."

NPC Farmer: "See, I told you. And here is 100g, 3k experience and a green ancestor silk hat."

</Quest>

They took this to an extreme with Summerset. The quests to max out the Psijic skill line, the "A Book and its Cover" quest/no-a-quest/achievement and bouncing and loading to and from the same locations repeatedly. The achievements and housing items that come with the achievements that require player to enter the same three delves and destroy the "new dolmens" called Geysers, over and over and over again for 30 days to get it done.

This are not what players meant by more content. This is not the depth users were asking for. These are mundane, and frankly, boring filler and fluff. The same boring filler that players complained about with Morrowind and even more so with Clockwork City. Repetitive, rinse and repeat game fodder.

Don't get me wrong, the main story line of each of the above mentioned releases was fantastic. Good story telling. Epic adventuring. It was all the shallow side quests. Each release failed to match the quality of the side quests of the base game, not that all side quests of the base game are gold... they aren't, but there are some that were much more fulfilling than others.

Within a couple of days most of the people I gamed with had completed the main story, roughly 8 to 16 hours of game play. Within a week, most everyone I game with had the Psijic skill-line maxed out. Within two weeks, everyone had their Jewelry crafting to 50. Within a month everyone has their Summerset dailies and achievements done. Everyone seriously looking to complete their motifs has done so. After a month, of game play the only thing remaining with Summerset is researching Jewelry traits.. and the game is as boring as it was the day before Summerset dropped.

Okay, I have to admit that wasn't a fair statement. The game wasn't as boring as the day before Summerset dropped.

It is more boring than the day before Summerset dropped, because the day before Summerset dropped, we were excited for Summerset and we don't have that now. We get to deal with bugs, crashes, bot farmers and an extended free play period because the game we paid for, a game that many of us continue to pay for (with Chapters we plaid for now becoming DLC, ESO Plus and Crown Store purchases) is free for anyone with a Gamepass subscription through Xbox.

Now that's some bullshit. 

No, you see, Zenimax doesn't want to make any part of the game more usable, convenient or, dare I say, easy. They don't want that because if it takes an hour and half to find a Minotaur Chest motif, well in Zenimax's eyes, that just "content" to fill the hours while we wait for them to toil away at fixing the stuff they broke and wait for them continue to develop another release filled with repetitive quests, bugs, glitches, crashes and other drivel to keep us busy for a few weeks this fall. All before the next round of unbearable boredom sets in and we get to take another repetitious ride of frustration and disappointment.  

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Voice Chat Woes In Tamriel: The Elder Scrolls Online

Voice Communication is a critical aspect of this game. It helps teams communicate quick commands to each other during high tension battles, it allows new friendships to form, it enables long conversations to not have to be types out via Xbox's antiquated controller based keyboard. Without voice chat, much of the social aspect of the game is lost, and let's face it, outside of the main quests of this game, the rest of the game requires come socialization and team work to get through.

In a game where so many aspects of the game rely on a solid foundation of communication (guilds, questing, dungeons, trials and Cyrodiil) it is surprising that The Elder Scrolls Online built-in chat is as dysfunctional as it is and not conducive to a positive gaming experience from a user perspective.

THE PROBLEMS:

Since voice chat remains an ongoing problem that Zenimax seems to have done very little to resolve. I am going to focus on four main pain problems with in-game chat, things that just about everyone has experienced problems with. All four of the problem areas tend to contribute to the others problems as well. The four points I will address are;

1. Group Chat
2. Area Chat
3. Chat Controls
4. Chat Bugs

Group Chat
There are several problems with group chat, but I will focus on two main issues. The first problem is when loading into a dungeon, half the time (if not more frequently) you will get dropped from Group Chat, making group chat not very reliable, especially if running with the same four people for the Undaunted Daily Dungeons. This has been a problem for so long that many people either use Xbox Parties or Guild Chat.

This leads to the second problem with Group Chat, when you join a group, everyone in the group is automatically forced into the glitch-ridden, problematic Group Chat, whether everyone was already in a guild chat or not. Not everyone needs to be forced into Group Chat automatically. This issue is exacerbated by the number Chat Bugs discussed below.

Area Chat
Area Chat is trash. Nothing more, nothing less. People blasting their music (hint, your cheap ($9) Wish.com headset mic doesn't pick up any bass and your music sounds like the left Walkman headphone shoved in an empty spinach can; yes it sounds that shitty), people talking shit about everyone and everything; overtly sexual and misogynistic language used in degrading manners. If people wanted to ask for help in Area Voice Chat, they wouldn't be heard.

Area chat is not moderated. It is the wild, wild west of chat channels... and it is ridiculous. The only saving grace to Area Chat is the occasional auction, which is held in the remotest of area in Tamriel to prevent the issues described above from ruining the auction.

Outside of the action aspect, is area chat this even useful anymore?

Chat Controls
Zenimax has provided absolutely no chat controls. A group leader can't communicate the need to go to BRK in Cyrodil with a group of twenty-four people having ten different conversations at once in group chat and no option to mute all mics.

A group leader can't mute an individual that has walked away and left their mic next to a squawking bird or next to their television speaker. Group leaders lack any control around voice chat and this needs to change.

Players have to endure listening to others playing music in group/guild chat, or listen while stuffing their faces with potato chips/crisps or one of my favorites, when a player doesn't mute their mic when their significant other comes in the room to pick a fight with them or when they yell at their kids... that's always amusing. We have no way of muting another players except to mute or block via the Xbox Live interface and we may not want to have to resort to Xbox muting or blocking because they are just forgetful about muting their mic.

Chat Bugs
When a group forms and half the group loses their group chat and have to restart the game one or more times to get chat back.

The game forces a player from guild chat into group chat (but not 100% of the time because it glitches, see above bug), then if the players choose to join guild chat again, because group chat sucks (see issues identified above), guild chats disappear, requiring one or more game restarts to get the guild chats back.

If someone joins an Xbox Party Chat they have to hard reset their Xbox to get in-game-chat back, but not all the time.

How about the thing I call the "Domo Arigato Mister Roboto" Chat Effect; an effect that is specific to in-game-chat. Where packet loss causes the voices of everyone in a chat channel to sound fragmented, robotic or overly digitized. This is not a client-side issue, as everyone in the chat channel experiences it at the same time. I know it is specific to in-game-chat because not only do I hear it, but others in the party hear it and it affects everyone, regardless if they have fiber-optic, cable or DSL internet and if we move into an Xbox Party Chat voice coms are crystal clear. This is a MegaServer side issue. 

ZENIMAX FIXES:

Give us options...

• First and foremost... fix the Chat Bugs. 
• Don't force us into Group Chat when we join a group. Prompt us and ask if we want to join group chat, just like we are asked, giving us the option, if we want to travel to the group leader right after joining. DO NOT blend the two. Keep each prompt separate, ask if we would like to change to group chat, wait for our response, then ask if we would like to travel to the group leader.
• We have two unused radial menu options (Down and Left Hold) that could be put to use. Why not use one of them to add some Voice Chat Controls for players and group leaders. Just a thought; mute all mics (except the leaders), mute player, also adding a voice chat ready check requiring people in group voice chat to confirm the leader's need to for chat to be clear, especially in Cyrodiil, and only after they have confirmed or the group leader manually unmutes them can they have an active mic in group chat.
• How about giving all players the ability to mute others in the chat channel, say via the group interface; if someone is playing music in a chat during dungeon, or has an excessively barking dog, crying kid, squawking bird, talks non-stop (without take a breath) or just an annoying voice, we should be able to mute just that player via Voice Chat Controls without going to Xbox, leaving the game, to mute or block them.
• Do something with Area Voice Chat PLEASE. It needs to be moderated by Zenimax staff or turn it off altogether. 

What do you think? Does voice chat work fine for you? Did I miss some bugs or suggested features? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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