Hoarding Houses - Sometimes a Depressing Sight (a rant)

[Themarvin]

I still say they should give instanced housing. I also strongly disagree that they should ever, at any point, remove houses from people grandfathered in. It is never good PR for a company to punish people for following the rules, even worse if they were to do it after giving those people a pass. If SE wanted the system to work differently, then they should have planned and codded things to fit that. They didn't, and they are the only ones that should be getting grief for it.

Personally, if a house is being used, maintained, decorated, etc, then I don't care who owns it, or how many other houses they own. What bothers me is seeing the same houses sit for over a year, with literally nothing changing in them. Not a single new item. Nothing ever placed in the gardens. They just sit, collecting dust. They just feel like trophy items. I get it, we can't tell people how to use their houses once they have them, but at the end of the day, what is worse? Someone having more than one house, and spending hours upon hours decorating them, loving them, and using them, like housing is their end game content? Or someone that has a house and only goes to it once a month to reset timer(made worse when the people that do this do in fact have more than one house)?

At the end of the day, there is a slippery slope here, when it comes to saying something needs to be removed from players. Where do you draw the line? When does "this person has too much, take some away" stop? Does it just stop with people with more than 1 personal house? Or would it just move on to "no one should have a personal mansion", or "an FC needs this house more, take away the personal housing". I have seen those sorts of statements before. Once you open the door to things being removed, you can't close it. Also take for example people that have more than one house because they have more than one service account. Should they lose their houses to? They are 100% within the rules, but people will argue that they should still drop to just one. Rather than fighting to take away other people's toys, why not fight harder for SE to provide enough for all of us to play with evenly?

Mostly refering to to the bad PR part, how would be it any different than removing stoneskin from the base game as an example or should pre-SB people be grandfathered with the skill in the normal game thus being more valueable for heavy group content like savage raids/ex trials? it is the same analogy, if rules change it is for all, and yes if I would be one of the guys hit by having multiple houses I would not run here and complain about or whatever but accept it as it is, most likely as they can update the ToS even further and make it so you have to accept that to be able to login into the game, we do not even own our accounts whenever it get to it.

[AriesMouse]

Mostly refering to to the bad PR part, how would be it any different than removing stoneskin from the base game as an example or should pre-SB people be grandfathered with the skill in the normal game thus being more valueable for heavy group content like savage raids/ex trials? it is the same analogy, if rules change it is for all, and yes if I would be one of the guys hit by having multiple houses I would not run here and complain about or whatever but accept it as it is, most likely as they can update the ToS even further and make it so you have to accept that to be able to login into the game, we do not even own our accounts whenever it get to it.

That is possibly the worst possible analogy you could have used. Housing is not at all the same, or even close to the same, as class spells. A better comparison would be people having, or not having, access to certain raid content/instances. Still not helpful to the conversation, but it's at least in the ballpark.

And it still would be extremely poor PR. Job tweaking is something every game does, and everyone that plays an mmo knows it comes with the territory. Housing is a whole other beast. Housing is something people have/do spend real life money on, as well as hours of their time. You can't just prune that out as a balancing act like with class spells, or anything else. And again, people were well within the rules to utilize housing in the ways they have, and thus they were grandfathered in, as they should have been. With the rules now changed, I can see them taking action against people acquiring houses through sketchy means after the rule change, but those that obtained their houses before that shouldn't be touched.

Just as Alien_Gamer said above, it's a matter of trust between company and player, and SE is very smart not to risk damaging that. They have already taken steps to try to improve things, what we need to do now is to push them to improve them further with instanced housing, that is the only workable solution.

EDIT:

No it's more that I know that the chances of SE giving us a proper housing system are microscopically small, but the chances of them changing the current system are actually possible. .

The chances of SE giving us a proper housing system will only increase when people start putting the squeeze on them to give us a better system, rather than infighting among ourselves and demanding daddy SE take away other people's toys. Focus less on 'hoarders', and more on just getting instanced housing.