Real Housing Upgrade?

Palantir

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This fall Turbine is clearing house (finally) and kicking out players in default of their houses & Kin-houses, some have been in default for years.
My neighborhood is dead, last count only 6 houses & 2 Kin-houses were occupied (@25%)- 2 of them are mine.

The Dev's also announced they had some housing changes coming this fall; and about dang time since nothing has changed since launch.
I haven't picked up any new "housing" item in over a year as there's no place to put anything anyway under the current system.
A Huge Yard "space" and you can only put 1 tree in it? Or a Large Yard space and only 1 picnic table fits there? Inside, a large floor space and just 1 table fits there, no chairs... sad.

But, with the recent vague announcement (zero details) I cleared out my small house in anticipation of swapping it for a Deluxe House & am dumping another in a different neighborhood to try and get 2 Deluxe Houses close to my Kin-house. I also picked up some bonfires / cook-fires in the Summer Fest just in case they made the decoration mode a tad more "realistic." You should really be able to put a table under a huge oak tree or a few chairs around a 6' table in a 20' wide room.

Come on Turbine, you put a lot of effort to make & offer housing stuff but ZERO incentive to get it or space to put it.

I'm hoping that they make it "squares" with each item taking up "x" number of ground /wall space squares. A chair takes up 1 square, a 6' table 3x2, a tree base 8 etc.
Adding a stable for your mounts to be seen would be a nice touch.

Also making the inside dimensions & layout match the outside would be a REAL nice change. My kin-house should have half a dozen rooms on the upper TWO floors yet I have just 1 room up there and that's after you go up 2 flights of stairs to get to it.

Finally, how about making the neighborhoods directly accessible from the towns they are supposed to be part of? Just put the archway you go thru in a corner of each town instead of putting the archway out in the boonies.
 

Redwolf

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I bet this gets cancelled. They made announcements like this before, such as another PvP zone.

Right now the situation is that pre-purchase of the expansion doesn't start and no time has been given. And there is some fuzz over their refusal to clearly state that the Tolkien license has definitely been extended, which is required for operating the thing in 2014. While I think it's unlike that the whole thing just closes it has a rapidly slowing rate of work being done on it. I originally thought they would jump on The Hobbit the movie but they didn't. Then I thought maybe they just missed the deadline for the first movie. But there's no movement to do anything for the second one either. Apart from the Erebor raid which apparently you can do at level 20. Which looks to me like they want new players to enjoy it quickly instead of having to wait for them to level up.

The only changes they do for real, apparently currently being tested by that so-called council, is a complete revamp of all class skills. And that's why I am so negative. Really? That's the problem that you throw most of the programming resources on?
 

Palantir

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Yep, if they only have limited resources & time I'd rather get to Mordor than see fluff stuff added.

And yet ANOTHER class skill revamp? I'm about sick of those.
The only players who are hyper-sensitive about the class skills down to the .0001 differences in stuff are the raid groups who make up a tiny (yet vocal) fraction of the players in the game.
I'm quite happy with my classes & skill as the are THIS time thank you, I don't need another messing around with them.

They should just stick to the main game & move us along thru Rohan into Gondor & Mordor. The areas they are doing are still great as are the quests, I don't need new skirmishes (which while fun in small doses I don't do) or another skill revamp or festivals.

I don't need updates every other month to enjoy the game but just enough to keep us moving along (2-3 a year) & as long as they keep up the quality of work and eventually allow us to complete the Epic Quest line in style.
 

Redwolf

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The only players who are hyper-sensitive about the class skills down to the .0001 differences in stuff are the raid groups who make up a tiny (yet vocal) fraction of the players in the game.
Well they won't make those players happy. It's a revamp for "streamlining".
 

Palantir

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Needless to what could happen...

Before the "in default" penalty kicked in I emptied my scattered houses & kinship house of all their stuff ( a lot!!) so I could move everyone into the same "new" neighborhood & closer together.
And then like a dozen other players stood around the "Bree Housing Vender" for a couple of days waiting for the defaulted houses to come up for sale.
I logged in a couple of times a day to check to see if it happened. Two days later Turbine announced a "hotfix" which signaled the houses were about to go up for sale.

I came back on line after that time and presto 80% of ALL Houses, Deluxe houses and Kinship Houses in every Bree neighborhood were available to buy. I can just bet it was the same situation in every races neighborhood.

Frustratingly- the exact deluxe houses I wanted in my old neighborhood were already bought! Probably because my old neighborhood's name started with an "A" so was at the top of the list & the first seen so...

I "abandoned" my old Kinship House & all my other houses and moved into a new neighborhood down the list. I bought the same Kin-house location and the 3 Deluxe Houses around it.
I had one alt alone sitting on 100 gold so it was no big deal to buy them or to maintain them now that you can pay for 6 months (a year?) in advance.

Of course it's all really meaningless but it will be nice to be able to bring in any character and have easy access to all the chests.
Plus the still aggravation of the silly "hook" decoration system; dropping a pair of hobbit boots the size of a 5 years shoes on the floor takes up as much room as a full sized bench!
Hopefully the new housing revamp will improve that situation.


But as RW hinted at- this better not be a smoke & mirror rouse because we're not going to make it to Mordor...
 
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