Home Decorators: Sample “Hall of Fame” Update

From Domino on the EQ2 Forums:

Just wanted to post a quick update since I know folks are looking forward to hearing whose houses we picked, and how.

Due to the large number of submissions we couldn’t visit each house in-game, so we looked over all the linked screenshots that Amnerys compiled from the submissions in various places and made a short list of what we thought were the most outstanding houses, which we could then visit in game. There were some really fantastic submissions and it was a great to look through them all!

Since we’re copying all these “dev pick” houses to just one dev account character, we couldn’t have two of the same house, so unfortunately even when there were multiple houses in the same house location that looked fantastic, we had to pick just one of them. We also decided to eliminate houses that were almost entirely break-outs of houses that are not intended to be outdoor zones – even though a lot of these are amazing looking, we don’t strictly support the break outs as it’s possible there are outside areas where visitors might fall through the world or similar, which we wanted to avoid right now as these first listed homes will hopefully be heavily visited. Finally, out of the remaining list we made a final selection of some different sizes and styles of home – we didn’t want to pick nothing but big 5-room homes, or only Qeynos homes for example.

If all goes according to plan, we’ll be publishing the selected final choices on each server (except the one the house is originally from) before the servers unlock for GU61 so you can see them in the “hall of fame” listing in game. Just in case all does NOT go well however, we’re not going to list the names of the final houses picked until they are actually set up, as we don’t want to disappoint anyone if there’s a technical issue.

Whether or not your house turns out to be one of those in the early hall of fame listing, I’m certain we’ll see most of the houses that were submitted earning their own way in the hall of fame – great work in all of them! Even though I’ve spent most of my EQ2 life for the past 7 years enjoying decorating houses, I’m still always amazed by what creative decorators come up with. It was a pleasure to look through the submissions, thank you! And we’ll see your houses again on the house ratings leaderboards very soon, I’m sure.

When queried about why “house breakouts” weren’t excluded from the beginning:

We initially didn’t plan to exclude them, it was only when we started visiting the short-listed homes (and fell through the world) that we realized it would be a problem, by which time the submissions were closed. So, apologies that we didn’t know that in advance. That said, the break-out homes that were listed here are generally so outstanding that I’m sure they’ll make their way up the housing leaderboards in no time anyway, and we very much enjoyed visiting them for a tour in person ourselves.