Thread: A missed housing opportunity

Thinking about the seasonal festivals I had always wondered why there were never any quests for decoration items INSIDE the housing areas. I mean it makes sense. If I want the latest decoration, why wouldnt I have to go to my housing area (mine's in the Shire) and do a set of quests there to get the seasonal wallpaper or yard item.

Quests could be as simple as searching the area for a certain characters house or helping NPC's decorate or harvest the seasons finest wine or food. I mean they dont have to be epic quests but they could be more directed to housing content.

Or maybe we should be able to roam the neighborhood and get to vote on who has done the best decorating and that person gets a special decoration.

I just think that having a house and living in an area should be more like living in a neighborhood.

/2 cents

Originally Posted by postnasaldrip

Thinking about the seasonal festivals I had always wondered why there were never any quests for decoration items INSIDE the housing areas. I mean it makes sense. If I want the latest decoration, why wouldnt I have to go to my housing area (mine's in the Shire) and do a set of quests there to get the seasonal wallpaper or yard item.

Quests could be as simple as searching the area for a certain characters house or helping NPC's decorate or harvest the seasons finest wine or food. I mean they dont have to be epic quests but they could be more directed to housing content.

Or maybe we should be able to roam the neighborhood and get to vote on who has done the best decorating and that person gets a special decoration.

I just think that having a house and living in an area should be more like living in a neighborhood.

/2 cents

Suggestions forum.

I think part of the problem with the way housing is done (as far as it relates to quests) is that it is so heavily instanced. This means that at any given time, you're the only person in your neighborhood and (for myself at least) it feels less like you're in a neighborhood than wandering through a long-abandoned piece of suburbia. There's just no "life" there. Part of the idea of the Festivals is to get all the players in one place. Quests located in instances doesn't seem to do that and just makes Yule (or whatever) seem a bit lonely.

That said, putting holiday quests in neighborhoods not a bad idea. It might generate more interest in going to the neighborhoods, which would be a good thing. This is just me thinking about one aspect of why the housing in LotRO is so unappealing (there are other aspects, of course).

I really dislike what other games have done with housing as well -- the blight of houses everywhere in Ultima Online, and the "everyone uses the same door" of Anarchy Online and CoX, for instance. Maybe if housing were actually done with many doors and many different floor plans in an actual town (rather than so inconveniently far away from towns) it might be better. Or, more like the current setup, if they just moved the zone transition to be adjacent to the towns like an actual neighborhood, then put the celebration areas outside that transition (in the town itself rather than the neighborhood) with festival quests that required you to enter the neighborhoods, that would help.

Right now I think the game housing is a feature that hardly anyone uses and could really stand for a serious reworking. My kinship has a kinship house. I don't think any of us have gone there in 6 months. Seems a shame.