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The Housing Tours is a joke - PLEASE fix this!

AuthorMessage
Survivor
Jul 04, 2012
43
I stopped going on the Housing Tours altogether. It turned out to be ridiculous.

There are always people in the top 100 with houses with half the house blocked off, rooms full of pets and mounts and just garbage strewn around with absolutely NO sense of decoration. They are just throwing whatever they feel like into their houses, sticking them up on the list and, somehow, if they are visited often enough, there they are.

There should be some sort of standards or this is a complete waste of time.

Granted, SOME of the homes are gorgeous. The players have obviously taken the time and trouble to create something beautiful, interesting, stylistic or at least made an ATTEMPT to decorate. But most of them are complete trash.

People should still be able to rate these homes after they make the top 100. By not being able to do so, the homes almost never leave the list to make room for homes that deserve it.

I really had looked forward to this feature and it has been a huge disappointment. At the end of the time, I'm lucky if I have 10 people visit any of my homes. I don't know how people are getting enough visitors to make that list. My houses are not being seen.

I am not particularly competitive, but I would really like to have my houses shown and - most of all - would love to see some really great work in that top tier. So far, not so much.

Regards,
Suzanne

Squire
Jul 18, 2009
545
Suzne on Jul 31, 2016 wrote:
I stopped going on the Housing Tours altogether. It turned out to be ridiculous.

There are always people in the top 100 with houses with half the house blocked off, rooms full of pets and mounts and just garbage strewn around with absolutely NO sense of decoration. They are just throwing whatever they feel like into their houses, sticking them up on the list and, somehow, if they are visited often enough, there they are.

There should be some sort of standards or this is a complete waste of time.

Granted, SOME of the homes are gorgeous. The players have obviously taken the time and trouble to create something beautiful, interesting, stylistic or at least made an ATTEMPT to decorate. But most of them are complete trash.

People should still be able to rate these homes after they make the top 100. By not being able to do so, the homes almost never leave the list to make room for homes that deserve it.

I really had looked forward to this feature and it has been a huge disappointment. At the end of the time, I'm lucky if I have 10 people visit any of my homes. I don't know how people are getting enough visitors to make that list. My houses are not being seen.

I am not particularly competitive, but I would really like to have my houses shown and - most of all - would love to see some really great work in that top tier. So far, not so much.

Regards,
Suzanne
We can already rate houses that are in the top 100- this is why houses can move around so much in the lists. You just have to get lucky enough to visit it through the Random tours. Rating a house by visiting it through the top 100 lists could lead to abuse of the system and is too risky. If a bunch of kids like a trashy house or a house filled with gauntlets so they can freeload because they have no idea what tours is really for, that's what is going to get to the top of the list. I made a very long post a while back about ways to improve the system but of course nobody replied, probably because nobody actually read it.

I can't tell you how fed up I am with garbage houses getting top spots in tours. I work hard to make my houses interesting and filled to the brim in a tasteful way. Yet I have consistently been beaten out by houses filled with junk and even houses I've had to report for being inappropriate. House decorating is my endgame activity but unfortunately not everyone takes it as seriously as I do.

Historian
Jun 19, 2010
657
I agree with the Original Poster! I love decorating and being inspired by what others can do with their own houses. And like many individuals, I'm also expecting to see the best decorated houses on the Castle Tours Top 100 List. So, you can imagine my disappointment when touring these houses to discover they aren't the most impressive or best decorated I've visited or seen.

Being able to only vote on houses you visit randomly may sound fair; but its by and far, not the best or most effective way to vote on every house you've actually visited.

Voting should be available to every house in the game; both on and off the castle tours. At the owner's house, the owner should readily be able to see and determine how many visitors they've had to date, with the option to make this information visible, or hidden to everyone else.

Castle tour voting should be more transparent than it currently is. And can easily be done by showing the results of the following four voting categories:

1. The house owner
2. The house owner's accounts
3. The house owner's friends
4. Everyone else (with these being the only actual votes used for ranking purposes)

Champion
Mar 05, 2012
452
Totally Agree
I'm an avid decorator and only average 2 visitors on a busy saturday when one of my houses is newly added to tours that day.
Biggest peeve? When I tour 'added today' houses on a weekend I am in a continual loop of the same dozen of homes within 20 minutes.

Delver
Jun 30, 2009
279
Suzanne, I agree with you. The way the housing is set up is crazy. I wish there was a "feedback" sheet that would allow the homeowner to improve on their house, or potentially have a rating of five stars? I'm tired of going into homes that have litter all over the ground and random things hanging on the wall, and they are considered to be the #1 house.

Either something of a rating system or have people who work for a team who go in and judge the house and pick a rating (sort of like a contest). However, I can presume this will cause complications of potential nepotism.

Survivor
Jul 04, 2012
43
Thank you all! I hope KI will do something about this. It's ridiculous.

I have had a house on the Tour for 3 weeks. I have had all of 9 visitors. This stinks.

Happy Wizarding (and decorating, despite the House Tours).
Suzanne

Geographer
Mar 12, 2013
923
Definitely would love to leave more details in housing tours ratings. Pretty much the deciding factors for housing ratings currently are a) do they have gauntlets and b) is there a pvp circle. Nothing else seems to matter, even if it's nigh impossible to move around the house (due to clutter) let alone see any effort put into it.

It took me almost a year to glitch all the plants, corals, tube sponges, and pink jellyfish into place at my sunken palace, and it has yet to see the leaderboards whereas any crowns castle with an arena and a bane stays at the top for 2+ weeks.

Survivor
Jun 05, 2010
28
Suzne on Jul 31, 2016 wrote:
I stopped going on the Housing Tours altogether. It turned out to be ridiculous.

There are always people in the top 100 with houses with half the house blocked off, rooms full of pets and mounts and just garbage strewn around with absolutely NO sense of decoration. They are just throwing whatever they feel like into their houses, sticking them up on the list and, somehow, if they are visited often enough, there they are.

There should be some sort of standards or this is a complete waste of time.

Granted, SOME of the homes are gorgeous. The players have obviously taken the time and trouble to create something beautiful, interesting, stylistic or at least made an ATTEMPT to decorate. But most of them are complete trash.

People should still be able to rate these homes after they make the top 100. By not being able to do so, the homes almost never leave the list to make room for homes that deserve it.

I really had looked forward to this feature and it has been a huge disappointment. At the end of the time, I'm lucky if I have 10 people visit any of my homes. I don't know how people are getting enough visitors to make that list. My houses are not being seen.

I am not particularly competitive, but I would really like to have my houses shown and - most of all - would love to see some really great work in that top tier. So far, not so much.

Regards,
Suzanne
Yeah I've had similar problems going to top 100 houses. Several times I've gone to the top decorated houses only for nothing to be there. Literally 0 items, just a shell of a house. I just rolled my eyes and walked out.

I feel that rather than being able to vote on the top 100 houses (since that can be easily abused), there should be some item requirement for a house such as a house must have 50+ items indoors/outdoors to be put on the castle tours, it'd at least limit spamming and mean that some houses would actually have to be rated on decor rather than just having a nice looking house from a bundle.

Also maybe limit editing a house while it's on tour, I feel a bit iffy about it as many people want to continuously make changes to their houses, but how about taking the house down from the tours when someone edits and then letting them putting it back up again when they're finished. Otherwise people can put a nice looking house up then when it reaches a high rank, edit it so that some areas become blocked or some furniture like winterbane is missing, it's just kinda petty when people do that and it annoys me a lot.

Geographer
Mar 12, 2013
923
Duckburst on Aug 2, 2016 wrote:
Yeah I've had similar problems going to top 100 houses. Several times I've gone to the top decorated houses only for nothing to be there. Literally 0 items, just a shell of a house. I just rolled my eyes and walked out.

I feel that rather than being able to vote on the top 100 houses (since that can be easily abused), there should be some item requirement for a house such as a house must have 50+ items indoors/outdoors to be put on the castle tours, it'd at least limit spamming and mean that some houses would actually have to be rated on decor rather than just having a nice looking house from a bundle.

Also maybe limit editing a house while it's on tour, I feel a bit iffy about it as many people want to continuously make changes to their houses, but how about taking the house down from the tours when someone edits and then letting them putting it back up again when they're finished. Otherwise people can put a nice looking house up then when it reaches a high rank, edit it so that some areas become blocked or some furniture like winterbane is missing, it's just kinda petty when people do that and it annoys me a lot.
The problem with taking a house off the tour when it's edited, is people sometimes list a house they are actively still using - gardening, crafting at, moving things around for perfectly functional reasons.

Whenever a plant at their house matures or elders or gets harvested, that would change "edit" the house and then it would fall off the tour? :( That would deter people from listing houses that are, actually, liveable.

The item requirement would PROBABLY work, but not the way we expect. For instance, I could list my RBF right now, because it has 56 small enchanted plots and 56 white tiger lilies, a scattering of unwanted or low-priority pets, a gnome, a weapon rack, potted cattail, etc.

It is sort of an eyesore (except for the waving smiling tiger lilies) but it would make the cut. So would a house where someone just emptied their backpack onto the floor: 45 pets, 4 mounts, and a teleporter.

Gauntlets: I have a death house. I spent an hour and a half glitching a Grand Tourney Arena into the small kiosk shed-thing next to the choked swimming pool. It looks like the gauntlet is in a mausoleum. I have a pagoda I glitched into a wall behind a curtain. You see the prompt for the sigil just as you reach the curtain. Do I want my house to be excluded from tours because it contains gauntlets? Nah. Do i expect to get rank from those? Maybe. But the real pride and joy of the house will be the sheer amount of skeletons and lost souls bustling about the place, trapped in a bygone century, unaware they are long dead, and the house is literally rotting away around them.

I would hope that guided feedback would help differentiate the latter house from the former examples.
Maybe a simple survey with a scale for each of 4 categories: Does the house have a theme? Are all the areas of the house decorated? how easy is it to tour/are there excessive obstacles/clutter? Uniqueness and creativity?

Explorer
Mar 31, 2013
82
I agree with all of you and I have posted about this very issue. Hopefully KI is hearing us!

That being said, I sure wish I could see some of your houses or to create some kind of "decorator's society" in the game.

Explorer
Mar 07, 2009
50
Suzne on Jul 31, 2016 wrote:
I stopped going on the Housing Tours altogether. It turned out to be ridiculous.

There are always people in the top 100 with houses with half the house blocked off, rooms full of pets and mounts and just garbage strewn around with absolutely NO sense of decoration. They are just throwing whatever they feel like into their houses, sticking them up on the list and, somehow, if they are visited often enough, there they are.

There should be some sort of standards or this is a complete waste of time.

Granted, SOME of the homes are gorgeous. The players have obviously taken the time and trouble to create something beautiful, interesting, stylistic or at least made an ATTEMPT to decorate. But most of them are complete trash.

People should still be able to rate these homes after they make the top 100. By not being able to do so, the homes almost never leave the list to make room for homes that deserve it.

I really had looked forward to this feature and it has been a huge disappointment. At the end of the time, I'm lucky if I have 10 people visit any of my homes. I don't know how people are getting enough visitors to make that list. My houses are not being seen.

I am not particularly competitive, but I would really like to have my houses shown and - most of all - would love to see some really great work in that top tier. So far, not so much.

Regards,
Suzanne
I still like doing housing tours, but I have to agree with you. I did visit quite a few houses in the "Top Rated" section that were absolutely GORGEOUS, but many of the top rated houses in the "Decorated" section are just crazy. That's why there's a "Crazy" house category!

Champion
Mar 05, 2012
452
Another problem I have personally encountered -
I have seen 4-5 'tourists' in my home while I checked plants etc. and it shows Zero visits even after waiting a day to check the status. They are not in a group, they are there one at a time.
This happens constantly (I put many houses on the tours and this flaw is consistent).