Housing Poll (Homesteads)

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

Greetings!

It has been a full month since the official launch of the Janthir Wilds Expansion. I just want to give you the option to quickly review the new housing system with a detailed poll.

Due to the limitations of the forums I resort to use an external platform this time. As I am not a professional data-collector, this will once again be far away from being a perfect survey. Please also keep in mind, that these kind of polls are by design vulnerable for manipulations. So do not take those stats too seriously. 

I will try to cover some basic player-information, housing-data and personal feedback. You are welcome to share your personal thoughts, opinions and improvement-suggestions right here in the thread.

Thanks for your participation! 

https://take.supersurvey.com/QMHR7UI5F
 

[kharmin.7683]

48 minutes ago, HnRkLnXqZ.1870 said:

As I am not a professional data-collector, this will once again be far away from being a perfect survey. Please also keep in mind, that these kind of polls are by design vulnerable for manipulations. So do not take those stats too seriously.
 

So, what then is the point?

[Farohna.6247]

8 minutes ago, kharmin.7683 said:

So, what then is the point?

A mild disclaimer before the forums pounce and say that polls are not an accurate reflection of the majority player base?

[kharmin.7683]

No, I meant what is the point of the poll if the data is already being claimed as biased and/or inaccurate?

[Farohna.6247]

1 hour ago, kharmin.7683 said:

No, I meant what is the point of the poll if the data is already being claimed as biased and/or inaccurate?

It is not the most reassuring way to take a poll lol.  Is this for curiosity OP, or do you have a question that you hope data will answer?  

[anninke.7469]

Alrighty, done.

As for the "please elaborate" it's mostly stuff that has been already mentioned. Like better sorting options in the crafting window (chairs/walls/plants...), adding a buy-junk-vendor other than Seimur, better alts management... and I'd really like being able to make a few fully custom NPCs.

[Mungrul.9358]

Started to work through the survey, but stopped at this question, as none of the answers represented my own experience with Homesteads:

Basics: Are you familiar with the Home Instances?

I have gained access to the homestead, and regularly park my characters there for the rested buff.
I use it to gather from my home instance nodes and garden plots on a daily basis, and I have applied glyphs (Volatile Magic) to the gathering boxes.
I have maxed out the associated mastery track.
It's a useful crossroads for porting characters between Core Tyria, SotO and JW.
I occasionally use it for some light fishing.

But beyond that, because there are costs associated with the creativity tools, I have no desire to interact with them.
Anything that takes resources away from my pursuit of Legendary armour is not worth investing in, and pouring resources into creating things in the Homestead won't benefit my game in any way via extra boosts or convenience, so the whole idea is dead in the water to me.

I see it primarily as pandering to a loud minority, that mostly Streamers will benefit from, and beyond that is a rather cynical new attempt to further monetise the game.

But I'm also a grumpy old man.

[Jeaellasar.2680]

I love the homestead thus far. When it comes to recipes through raids, I hope another option is possible. Didnt even know some needed it to begin with. But I am not someone people want with for raids. I lack the reaction time and insight and thus am a liability people usually dont want.

 

It would be great to have it possible relocating your characters permanently and have them sit down on chairs or do emotes you have unlocked.

 

Placing most decorations is fine but making changing their position vertically is not easy for very large objects or if you have a big part under the ground. 

When something is underground its not easy to remove if other decorations are near too (or I am doing it wrong)

Another awesome feature would be if the map / minimap also changes with decorations. I for example love making snowy forests. Would be nice if it was visible on the map too.

 

Regardless of improvement points, I love it ^^

[Astrial Dragonous.1038]

In response to the question around deco items being locked behind specific game play.  I love the PvE space quite a bit and have been working on Raids, Fractals, etc...but I hate the aggressive and negative PvP environment and thought I use to really enjoy the WvW environment the nasty groups from PvP seem to be slowly making it a bit negative as well.  It would be nice to have PvE access to the Deco items so if you want to play by yourself or with a few friends you can.  I love side stories and other achievement paths.  

Thank you for asking.

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

14 hours ago, Farohna.6247 said:

It is not the most reassuring way to take a poll lol.  Is this for curiosity OP, or do you have a question that you hope data will answer?  

The usual of course, curiosity.

As you can see from the structure of the survey, I try to cover different aspects of the feature. It is detailed enough to skip writing personal thoughts, but restrictive enough to trigger certain clarifications. There are also a couple of suggestive questions, which can be used for future adjustments of the feature - mostly a mix of ideas I have gathered through direct interaction with other players. Looking at the answers so far, that was not a mistake. Though there is always the problem that you never catch every single possible opinion with this approach.

Thanks for your participation so far and all the personal thoughts and opinions!

[Farohna.6247]

2 hours ago, HnRkLnXqZ.1870 said:

The usual of course, curiosity.

As you can see from the structure of the survey, I try to cover different aspects of the feature. It is detailed enough to skip writing personal thoughts, but restrictive enough to trigger certain clarifications. There are also a couple of suggestive questions, which can be used for future adjustments of the feature - mostly a mix of ideas I have gathered through direct interaction with other players. Looking at the answers so far, that was not a mistake. Though there is always the problem that you never catch every single possible opinion with this approach.

Thanks for your participation so far and all the personal thoughts and opinions!

I liked the survey, just wondered what you were thinking when you created it.  😊 

I like the homestead a lot more than I thought I would.  It has a nice cozy vibe, I love the boxes for gathering, the improvement to the decorating utilities have been most welcome.  

Still looking for a way to store my collected books ....

[TheNecrosanct.4028]

5 hours ago, Jeaellasar.2680 said:

I love the homestead thus far. When it comes to recipes through raids, I hope another option is possible. Didnt even know some needed it to begin with. But I am not someone people want with for raids. I lack the reaction time and insight and thus am a liability people usually dont want.

 

It would be great to have it possible relocating your characters permanently and have them sit down on chairs or do emotes you have unlocked.

 

Placing most decorations is fine but making changing their position vertically is not easy for very large objects or if you have a big part under the ground. 

When something is underground its not easy to remove if other decorations are near too (or I am doing it wrong)

Another awesome feature would be if the map / minimap also changes with decorations. I for example love making snowy forests. Would be nice if it was visible on the map too.

 

Regardless of improvement points, I love it ^^

Even if we get another option for the raid recipes (for which I would have to ask, why?) you still need to do raids to be able to make those recipes into decorations. If you don't do raids there is no point in getting those recipes, no matter where they are available, because you need the trophies you get from the bosses to make the decorations, just like in the guild hall.

I agree with the removal of underground decorations. For instance, I have made a gravesite with lots of plants and trees around, but I've placed them so the pots they are in aren't visible and it looks like they naturally grow there instead. As a result, I can't select any of those decorations for removal. If I want to change something I'll probably have to remove the whole lot and start over.

I can work with what the homestead offers. I just won't do much with it because a lot of decorations I wanted to use are simply not available yet. So I'll wait until next year. Until then the homestead is merely a farming site (though I am glad we don't have to farm every node separately anymore).

[Danikat.8537]

22 hours ago, kharmin.7683 said:

No, I meant what is the point of the poll if the data is already being claimed as biased and/or inaccurate?

What the OP said is true of pretty much any survey. Acknowledging that right away was probably supposed to stop people arguing about those limitations and using it to dismiss any results.

Unless it's somehow made compulsory for 100% of the relevant population it's going to be biased towards the type of people who will choose to take a survey, and in this case that's a sub-set of the type of people who will choose to visit this forum. That's not always a problem as you might still get an accurate representation for the things you're surveying, but it's still something to be aware of.

Even professional surveys which are compulsory are open to manipulation. In 2001 a rumour went around the UK that if enough people recorded their religion as Jedi in the national census then it'd have to be officially recognised by the government. It wasn't true but it lead to about 0.8% of the population giving that answer, which of course means the count for all the other categories are slightly inaccurate. Probably not enough to matter, but a number of humanist and atheist groups did ask people not to do it because they assumed (or wanted to imply) only non-religious people would do it and it was affecting the official count of non-religious people.

Edited September 24 by Danikat.8537

[Ashantara.8731]

Not a bad poll, ANet should check it out.

[Gnomskii.7423]

the house system here is very poorly done, compared to other MMORPGs

[Raskol.3014]

the first question should be "do you use your homestead?"

[Rallicus.8367]

Did the poll. Honestly, I can't think of a single thing I enjoy about the homesteads. Everything thus far has felt incredibly lackluster, and this is coming from someone who generally enjoys decorating and home building in MMOs.  I suppose my biggest gripe is how pointless it all feels. The only positive thing I can say is that the editor is really good, but that's in spite of everything surrounding it being terrible.

I'm sure there's some behind the scenes reasons for the decisions they made, but the limitations of basing it off home instances (so you will only ever have 5 people parties) and pulling alts from the character select screen rather than their logout location (meaning no backpacks, weapons or infusions - plus them respawning when instance is reset) remain two of my biggest issues, because those two cannot be fixed as far as I can tell.

[Killthehealersffs.8940]

Hopefully next expansion we get housing v2   facing  PvE horde of mobs lke Orcs Must Die 3   or  afk gaming like Brotato but 3D (and your autos like afk weapons are improved) and face horde , and have some fun with friends

 

Spoiler

(we didnt spent 12 years inovating old gg for nothing . Now that every other "normal thing" that exist in other games , it will like a new content in here .

The market will saturate from ideas , and hold and behold , easy to pluck things with a shiny game 😛)

 

Whats left is to test things out , like a segregration lfg for example . People in the end (when people have afked enought)  , play with the same minded people  ;P)

 

Edited September 25 by Killthehealersffs.8940

[Sakri.7234]

The homestead was a big disappointment. I see no utility in spending valuable resources to build stuff that doesn't generate profit, give new skins, or at least achievement points. Until they add some real progress to homesteading, it will just be a place to get my resting bonus.

[EDOTDOT.9265]

Definitely not a fan of the homestead.  Between having a housing instance already available as well as guild halls, this just feels like redundancy while the devs charge full price and call it "new content."

[Gnomskii.7423]

Arena.net, you should play final fantasy 14

[Teknomancer.4895]

On 9/24/2024 at 5:15 AM, Mungrul.9358 said:

It's a useful crossroads for porting characters between Core Tyria, SotO and JW.
I occasionally use it for some light fishing.

It's pretty obvious that the doorway is taking the place of the teleport scroll that other regions have, and if one of the WV dailies is fishing, then I do it in the homestead for convenience.

Other than that, I really have no use for the thing. Parking alts there just adds loading screens to the daily chores, so I don't even use it for the buff.

On 9/24/2024 at 5:15 AM, Mungrul.9358 said:

But I'm also a grumpy old man.

I feel that, and more or less agree with your take on the Homestead. It's not even worth telling someone to get off my lawn over. 😉

[Mungrul.9358]

2 minutes ago, Teknomancer.4895 said:

It's not even worth telling someone to get off my lawn over. 😉

You'd have to invite them to your homestead first 😄

[Ashantara.8731]

On 9/25/2024 at 11:23 AM, Sakri.7234 said:

The homestead was a big disappointment.

Wasn't it pretty clear what it would be long before release? I mean, you know how Guild Hall decoration works, don't you? 😉