Looking for feedback / suggestions on the Housing & Leaderboards "Ratings" UI page. This is the page listing current house ratings based on various categories and allows you to visit listed houses. Categories sufficient? Flow of publishing / rating houses intuitive? Filtering options sufficient? Additional functionality? We may be asking for feedback with other systems in the future, so please keep your feedback and suggestions limited to the Housing & Leaderboards "Ratings" feature (or related flow). Also note, not all suggestions will be implemented into the game, and remember to keep in mind technical limitations and scope of work to accomplish such suggestions. Thank you in advance for any and all suggestions you’re willing to give! The team and I value all of your feedback.
Hello and thanks for the opportunity to give input on the leaderboards. I will say the same thing I said back when we tested this on Test with the 4 free house we were given and our regular houses. It would be nice to have the Hall of Fame splitted in several categories (either existing ones or improved) even if the filtering greatly helps now. I would also like to be able to search by house owner name. I would love to see a filter by type of house too, which is what I requested already back in the day. The idea would be that if I want to see how Freeport Manors are decorated, I could check "Freeport 5+" somewhere and get a list of all the 5+ houses in Freeport. In that sense, we could add some categories: Freeport, Neriak, Gorowyn, Qeynos, Kelethin, Halas, Maj'Dul, Prestige. In those categories, we could get on the top filter the list of each type of house in the category (2 rooms, 4 rooms, 6 rooms, and all the prestige houses: Opera house, Isle of Refuge, Lavastorm and so on). That way, when I want to get ideas for, say, my Tenebrous Tangle prestige house, I could sort by prestige houses and would be able to see all of those available in a single list. I never really understood the purpose of creativity and style ratings, most people vote for the 2 at the same time and well, I never got it. Can't speak to the flow, I mostly published on Test and Storms which aren't/weren't the best examples of massive housing community.
+1 for the ability to filter by house type. It's difficult to tell what type of house many of the published homes started as, since they get re-skinned quite a bit, so this would be a helpful filter for those of us looking for ideas.
There's already a way to find stuff by size of house (Small = 2-3 rooms, Medium = 4 rooms, Large = 6 rooms, Massive = 7 rooms [Kelethin] and Prestige Houses, I guess), but once a house is in the Hall of Fame, those categories don't seem to apply much any more, if memory serves. And don't we have a Search parameter box? Granted, I haven't looked for a published house for quite some time, not since the last House Swap (not the one just finishing up, the one before that), but I seem to remember rejoicing about that. I think you have to be in the category you want to Search in, like by Author, but it was a big help, iirc. EDIT: Okay, now I remember, it wasn't that big a help. Despite whatever category(-ies) you might be in, like Small Homes, Newly Published, etc., the silly Filter button only spits out by House Name and nothing else. If the Author's (i.e., home owner's) name is in the House Name, you might get lucky, if you know the name of the house. If you just put in one letter, like you're trying to quickly get to, say, the houses starting with Y, you're out of luck (especially since we can't go backwards from the A's or punctuation marks to like the Zs, Ys, etc. My suggestion: make that possible, please). If you're looking for anything other than the House Name, you're out of luck with the Search box. That's why I wasn't remembering it clearly; I was so disappointed, I wanted to forget. X-P And while I know that after you've toured a published place, you get booted right back to where you were when you started your jaunt to the house, it'd still be nice to know at the very least what city a prestige place, for example, was in, like either Qeynos or Freeport, in case you get befuddled at the gloriousness of the place's decoration and just click on the front door and walk out into a potentially lethal situation (not all of us can point and laugh at KoS city guards). ;-> So many times, folks have posted their published house address for a prestige place on these Homeshow pages and in the Chat channel, only to miss the most important question: what city is the prestige house in? :-/ It could be that a limiting factor as to how much info we can get out of the Housing and Leaderboard window is the sheer "physical" space on our computer screens. :-/ Uwk
Create a decay scoring or reset all vote after a period of time. There are houses for years here, and not enough people care now to come and vote for new houses. I'd like to have a slash command to open it directly on a specific house.
Add a favorite feature where we can save prefered house. Add a filter to see the houses of whole account. My houses/My account houses
My Account houses, yeah, that'd be awesome, though with all the prestige places I have (almost free for my old Testers, back when the first four models were offered from 1SC each, just to test out the system), as well as the regular city places, including the ones who've Betrayed and now have 6 cities' worth of houses, that could be a very long list... ;-> Uwk who really oughta get some stock in any company that makes spreadsheets... ;->
I would like to filter by house its self...like what you see at the prestige portal...ie search for deepwater retreats or mara isles that are published.
That still might be too much to ask for that Housing and Leaderboards program of theirs; it might take a separate function to be able to access it from anywhere. :-/ For instance, we can access the Mail for attachments and the Broker from anywhere (as long as we're Members...sigh), but we can't access the Bank from anywhere (which can be a problem, if you're an Evil in New Halas or Kelethin :-/). Apparently, long, long ago back during the Paleolithic (in game years; like, 2006?), we could have something in our houses akin to the Mailboxes that we could use to access the Bank, but they very quickly got rid of that; I do know Uwk never qualified for one, and that was his year of birth here in Norrath. :-/ At any rate, it may be something akin to that, technical issues-wise. :-/ Uwk
Just some of the things I suggested in the past (cannot find where I put that info). Be able to filter by house name/type. I see lots of people asking if anyone has a good City of Mist house they could look at for ideas. Include zone house is located. This is helpful for those trying to do video tours for events and later if house is no longer published but people want to get a closer look at how someone did something. Include the house name/type. Such as Lavastorm Winter Retreat or Jade Tiger's Den, etc. Add a category Personal Use Only. Or whatever other name might be better so those people that want to have fast way to their own houses do not clog up the leaderboards with houses not really meant to be toured by others. Maybe a checkbox while publishing would do the trick. So so so many houses with a guild hall door and not much else. Other ideas I had probably too much work so will stop with this list. Thanks for asking everyone for input!
I like all of Oci's suggestions, but I would like to add one more. If technically possible to have cross server visiting function or even if not, would it be possible to Add an Event Category? I mean in reality the Events are what drives the housing community together with the work of dedicated players and organizers. Event coordinators, could "publish" an event to run 30-90 days, and when players publish their home have an option to be added to the said event where a coordinator could "approve" the entry to be added. Also in the spirit of this idea, would it be possible to add a different trophy type(s) that organizers could award to their contestants?
As far as the rating system, this is what I'll say. Decorating Community is a fickle bunch, what someone would rate a 10 another would give negative points to. There are players who are not liked but have excellent skills and on occasion showcase those skills in a published home. Whatever changes may happen, it should not be exploitable bc someone does not have good enough social skills to be liked by everyone and vice versa, where some may rate something lower bc someone was offended or putt off by another player in some shape or form. As much as I like a 1-10 rating idea, I don't think it would be a good one here. Not speaking for everyone, but I think for most of us the current system of Creativity and Style just means: Creativity: "Hey I like the effort you put into this house" and the Style: usually means "Yes or No I would live here". Most of us just click yes for both, but when Style is not included in on a vote I imagine its because of something that was off putting for the visitor. It might be beneficial to put a WOW rating in, bc weather you like something or not there is no denying some of the Wow factors some of these homes have good or bad. However, then again thats what HoF and Dev picks are for. So instead, maybe a nomination system for HoF or Dev pick could be added? Another thing to mention is, there is a good portion of Home swap events. This is when an owner gives trustee access to their home to decorate. Normally, the decorators name is added to the home name but the awards still go to the owner. Perhaps we can add an option to add the decorator where they can also be awarded when appropriate. Not only will this increase participation for such events, but may also up the quality of finished projects. Not to say, that home swaps have a lower quality, but it would add incentive to put best efforts forward.
I did have that as a suggestion in something I put together before but I just think it might be too much work for it to happen anytime soon. This special category would probably need someone's assistance to get old event houses moved into the category. I would be willing to help since I do have a spreadsheet of videos with an event id such as HHE20. However, it wouldn't catch houses that weren't videoed but I think that would be okay just as long as majority make it into category. Devs might be able to just do a search of all houses with any of the event ids I know about being in the house title and move them with a query but I don't know anything how their database is designed. For the Event category, I would love a way for people running contests to have a way to award level (first, second, third, runner up) and have prizes go out after coordinator set award levels to houses. Be a way to award trophies, dbc, krono, marketplace item, coin, etc. automatically so don't have to worry about hand delivering krono (had issue with this in past getting ahold of winner). Plus, for non-contest and contest events could have a participation prize that way. This would also get all participates to actually publish the event homes so that it is much easier on videographers, coordinators, judges and other participates to find all the houses. I am not sure it is needed to have organizers to approve entry before it can be added but people that are now organizing events could be more helpful than me with this idea since I no longer run events.
I think you would have to have an entry approval, you wouldn't want some jerk just adding a bunch of houses that have nothing to do with the contest.....people do what they can for no reason at all, and generally speaking if people can, they usually do. It also cuts down the administration time for organizers having to check FB groups, forums and in game mail on numerous toons. They just have a single sign up on the forums and then approve whoever is signed up.
They do have different awards, sometimes; mostly, they're for themed contests and challenges, rather than for swaps. Uwk who's gotten a few...mostly, they're sort of "thanks for participating" type things, but they are cool
Ah, yes, good point there, it would be nice if we could publish our guilds. Maybe without the "publishing locks items down" though, it can be useful to move items in a hall (I always move the guild fuel vendor/TS writ givers when I do writs and it was designed that way)
