We now have something like at least 9 DoF style housing options not counting alternate layouts of the normal maj'dul houses, and I'm sure you'll just keep making more, but... Please stop already! Change it up a little. Pretty soon we'll be able to tour the entire DoF continent within houses. How about more race specific houses that we don't have yet. Like an Iksar style house . Maybe something like Vault of Eternal Sleep, Emperor's Athenaeum, or even Sebilis styles would be neat. Whatever new houses you do make in the future, just please don't make it DoF style.
I would love a Felwithe house that is actually, you know, a HOUSE. not the throne room raid zone without mobs in it, built to size to accomdate the giant wandering statues and the hundred vamps MAyong summons during hsi fight and what not. give me something the size of the Uncanny Unrest estate. the Qeynos 5 room, heck even the Mistmoore crage estate with Felwithe textures. heck give me ALL of Unrest house (minus the basement, but give me the yard and the general house) retexture it in Felwithe textures. I'd snap it up. quit taking dungeons and raid zones and stripping them of mobs and calling them houses. especially gigantic ones like the thurgadin/felwithe/kromzek/master/planetarium homes. quite making homes where I feel like I'm crossing the Sahara to walk into a building the size of the colloseum. quite making homes that have nothing about them that is a home. it's one thing to give us a place like Tenebrous island and say build your own. quite another to give that huge round space with a dual staircase that is felwith and call it a house. you don't give any homes the item count required to basically build our own house inside the 'house' we just bought. if I wanted to build my own, I'd get the tenebrous island that was designed for it.
Rainmare@Oasis wrote: Taking an existing zone and making it a house takes a lot less resources than building new geometry. - Captain Obvious
True. but those houses there's NOTHING about them that says house. the Felwithe home has no 'rooms' to it. it's one circle with a few gardens off the circle. to make a bedroom, or a bathroom, or a kitchen, or a living space, or well anything that you might actually find in a house, you'd have to basically build the house inside the house. and frankly it doesn't look good. it's not like you can say, section off the side rooms and build around the center, because the walls and ceilings are so high it makes it impossible. which is the same problem in the kromzek house, and the other gigantic raid/instance zone houses. you can't section them and work in a feasible smaller space. you literally have to build a house. ceilings, rooms, the whole thing, and it looks like a doll house inside a living room, and it eats up ALL the item count doing it. like Tock. Tock built this wonderful submarine look by partioning around the zone in point. it also has virtually no furniture. nothing in it. becuase all the item count went into building the 'house within the house'. and I've seen others that do it. to make an actual home, they use up all the item count building walls, dorrways, windows, floors, counters, kitchens, sinks, etc...that they have pretty much no seats, no sofas, no rugs, no lighting, it's mostly empty. becuase 990 of thier 1000 item count went into building an actual feasible house...inside what is supposed to be the house. and the most recent is the worst case of it. the shimmering citadel is a huge zone. and the 3 towers are gigantic in scale. ( the very fact the most common idea for it is to make it a golf course shoulda been a big red flag.) even the people that talk about using hedge seeds to partion it off..you can't do it feasilbly, and have it look even halfway decent. the hedges don't get that big. to scale a bed for example, to the size of the towers to make it look like it should be there, it'd have to be so big you can't get into it unless your a Kromzek. the Storm Tower isle is the proper size of a tower as far as scale. it's beleiveable that you could live there, and it won't eat up huge item counts to make it look so. the citadel towers are prolly 4 or 5 times wider and bigger. they don't need to release houses like they are on a factory line. take the extra time. build an actual house, and the textures to match the theme. or take actual houses that ARE houses and retexture them. I'd rather wait 9 months for a house I might actual look at and say wow, this is home I coudl decorate, then 3 months to go gee, another raid zone big enough to house Trakanon/Vyemn/Harla dar/Nagafen and Dozekar in it without them every making eye contact with each other.
A lot of the 'prestige homes' aren't actually intended to be anything more than a novelty. I have the Thurgadin Grand Hall. I decorated it as a temple to my gods, The Tribunal. I access it through a portal in my Halas house. I didn't buy it intending to 'live' there.
These larger houses should be guild hall flagged IMHO. Roughly the same size, let a Guild master purchase it to use as the guild hall with working amenities.
Rainmare@Oasis wrote: I totally agree with this Rain. The presteige homes are meant to be grand and impressive, but most of them are just too big, to the point where it's almost stupid. Especially with the low item limits and the smaller scale of most house items. If you build (or try to build) a house within a house, you end up being very limited in terms of decorating afterwards. I own a Vale Island and decided to build a completely seperate home, since the "home" included with the isle is nothing more than a tiny, two-room, doorless hole in the ground. The island is beautiful (love the whole Rivervale / EL look), but the house itself is worthless, something more along the lines of Bag End for LotR would have been way more appropriate for a "presteige" home, but that's a different conversation. Anyways, after building just the basics of the main house e.g. floors, walls, windows, roof, counters etc. I only had about 100 item spaces left and that was with buying expanders for an extra 300 items. Trying to do something with the little hole, the little island, the garden area, the dock and the rest of the isle with only 100 items is next to impossible. You have to decorate very sparsely and plan out everything carefully to even have a chance at making it look nice, especially if you want to save some spots for seasonal decorating. It's been hard and people run into the same kind of thing in almost all of the homes. Rain also made a very good point about item scale. If you try to scale items to fit the premade rooms, the items get so big that they'd be unusable by anyone but a giant and even then, many of the items are still way to small to look like they belong in the rooms or grounds. If you try to section areas off or make multiple floors out of a single tower or room so that it feels more like a normal house or even mansion (anything that doesn't have 50ft-100ft ceilings everywhere) you run into the item count problem again. I also agree with the OP. Please give us some new styles of housing. We have more than enough Gfay, Neriak and Maj Dul style homes now. Using pre-existing areas and / or graphics would be fine. The mill from Windstalker Village, one of the small forts in Antonica, a Kerran hut, Omen's Call in Fens, one of the buildings from Somborn Village, the mill in Steamfont, the druid tree in Darklight Woods, the monk tower on Mara, one of the family homes w/ courtyard on Mara, one of the stone buildings from Grobb, a Jintu panda cave, the pub / store in Rivervale etc. with a little bit of land would all be nice. Just having normal, real homes with normal-sized rooms, that look like they belong in Rivervale, Felwithe, Somborn, Grobb, Mara, Guk, Steamfont or wherever would be awesome as well.
Nephretiti wrote: /agreed we could use some guards/amenties in those huge abodes feldon30 wrote: I'm waiting for a G-fay zone house.. or dungeon.. we have the elddar tree house already which is ok but not the same... gime Gfay as a zone for housing or dungeon crawling and maybe Ill splurge on dungeon items/house items
I should have said..."Post these and other ideas here!" We have that thread bookmarked for reference, so feel free! http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=513008
Windstalker wrote: You know... we were asked by you to give some ideas about how to encourage people to come back to EQ2. So maybe you could share your thoughts please in that thread instead yet another thread "lets give soe ideas how to earn even more money from those few players left in eq2"...
Windstalker wrote: oh ya aside from G-fay as a dungeon or huge housing zone (w/guards) give me nektulos or Neriak to.... yes *rubs hands evily* those would be great dungeons and/or housing zones. .. *with guards/amenities*
In all fairness, these prestige homes sometimes just require a bit of creativity and a masochistic desire to build. I have a guildmate who took the vale island and built Kelethin on it. The place is awesome. I just took mine and made it into a wildlife preserve with wandering house pets and some added trees. It also contains portals to all of my other pretige homes from the various toons on my account and they all link back there, making it kind of a hub. I spend way too much money on prestige homes, but I like them.
