Next Tuesday on Beta: Game Update 66 & Player Studio Houses

This was posted over a week ago, but I wanted to post some commentary about the forthcoming ability for house decorators to sell their house layouts on the Marketplace. And since that time, there have been a number of clarifications from EQ2 Programmer Kenneth “Terrogaunt” Roecks which further shed light on what we can expect.

Here’s Holly “Windstalker” Longdale’s initial announcement:

Greetings to our decorators – existing and potential,

These are very exciting times for passionate decorators! On April 2, when we start Open Beta for Game Update 66 “Scars of the Awakened,” we will also be inviting you to test our Player Studio House category that allows you to buy and sell decorated houses of all types, shapes, and sizes in our marketplace! Sellers earn a real portion of the profits!

We are working on details right now to make decorating simple to do and test. For example, your new character copies to Beta will include the houses you have on your server so setting up homes to sell should be easy.

We are working on a lot of details behind the scenes to get Player Studio Houses ready too, including a new Web page that will allow you to pre-qualify to sell houses through Player Studio (if you’re not already qualified through Player Studio) so you can get ready to sell houses when the category launches. We will let you know as soon as pre-qualifying is live!

Our goal right now is to launch Player Studio Houses with our game update on April 30!

Commentary

When Player Studio was announced, it didn’t take long for players who may not be 3D artists to ask if there was something they could contribute. SOE’s answer (announced at SOE Live) was the selling of decorated Player Houses on the Marketplace.

Since EQ2 launched, players have been selling their interior design services to other players for in-game currency. With the advent of JesDyr’s Layout Editor (made possible by the addition of the Import/Export EQ2 House Layout feature), players have been able to make richly detailed house and guild hall layouts worth a significant amount of Platinum or even a gift of StationCash.

The upcoming feature simply offers an alternative for those players who, rather than work on commission or for in-game currency, would like to decorate houses for real money. Even after its introduction, I expect that many decorators-for-hire will continue to work directly with players rather than avail themselves of the Player Studio/Marketplace system.

Sifting Through the Details

A player asked if customers will be able to buy a pre-decorated house if they already have one of those houses, to which Terrogaunt answered:

I created a multi-house dropdown for each of the access doors so that you can now stack houses on the same door – up to the housing limit, of course.

On the subject of where the items come from…

[House items in a Player Studio house] are created as virtual items that cannot be taken out of the house. To preserve the item limits on the house, you can hide unwanted items to make them not count towards your item total.

and yes, players will now be able to show/hide items:

There will be some new UI and a button for you to toggle whether or not a virtual item is rendering in the world. When the particular item isn’t rendering, it will show as hidden in your item list and not count towards the item totals.

Further on this new category of Virtual Items that’s being created for Player Studio houses:

Virtual house items are similar [to Dungeon Maker layout props] in that they cannot be picked up, but they also cannot be sent to the moving crate. Instead, we’ve added a new tab onto the main housing window: Items. From here, you can see all of the items in your house and move them, retrieve them if they’re normal, and hide or unhide them if they’re virtual.

[When it comes to Virtual items, you can] Move, use, access, hide/unhide, destroy. Just can’t pick it up, but you can rearrange to your heart’s content.

When asked whether Player-written Books would transfer successfully when sold with a Player Studio house, Terrogaunt encouraged testing:

I believe text inside of a book is actually serialized data that we store on the particular database record of the item. Assuming that’s the case, it should definitely transfer with the item. Feel free to test that out in Beta

So… when you sell a house, are you selling it just once, or is it like other Player Studio items where they can be bought an unlimited number of times?

In the current implementation, we are keeping the house on the Marketplace after it is sold for other players to also buy a copy. The system is expandable though, so we’ll have to see where we take it beyond that based on player feedback and what sort of awesome stuff we have time to do.

All EQ2 houses can be decorated and sold. If you choose to decorate a Prestige or Legends of Norrath house and sell it on the Marketplace, you will actually lose access to that type of house layout from your account and need to re-buy the deed. So decorating and selling Prestige/LoN houses could end up being expensive. NOTE: This is ONLY if you sell a house on Player Studio…

Until further notice, all houses can be sold. Keep in mind though, that selling a house is giving up access to it. Prestige and LON houses fall into this category as well. If you sell one of those houses, you’ll need to reacquire the deed to it to buy another one from the accessor. (As you probably know, relinquishing the house does not require you to get the deed again, this hasn’t changed)

And that means when you sell a house, you are losing everything inside it, including any irreplaceable items from past events, No-Trade items, etc. So be careful!

The house, as well as everything in it, leaves your character.

Until the house sells a copy, you have the access to remove the house and place it back on your character at any time. Once it sells, that option goes away.

And here’s a whole bunch of answers to player questions all in one place:

Houses will go away from your character when you sell them. This means that if you’ve claimed the house and put it up for sale, you will NOT be able to get another of those houses on your character until you reacquire the deed. For prestige housing, this would mean that you’d have to buy the deed again. For claimed, it would mean that you’d lose it permanently unless you had another count to claim. I haven’t been told there’s any homes we want to limit, but I could see that being a possibility,

Current implementation says any items left in the house get sold with the house. Historically, you could always transfer to a different server with someone else’s items in your home, so it only makes sense that this follows that same groundwork since this is essentially a house transfer between servers. Also, No-Trade and Heirloom items are fine, since the items are virtual and aren’t actually able to be removed from the house.

When the house comes down after purchasing it on the marketplace, it is a completely new instance of the house. Any of the links on housing portals will most likely be broken so the portals would just be decorative at that point. You CAN destroy virtual items though, so feel free to remove any disjointed portals.

The house you buy will correspond to that house’s particular location in the world. Buying a prestige home should be faction-generic. We’ve implemented code to swap the Qeynos version for the Freeport version if you’re evil aligned and vice versa when it comes down from the Marketplace. All other homes, like a villa in Halas, will be accessed from where you’d normally find them in the world.

Assuming we allow storage containers like the Tinkered Personal Harvest Depot to be sold with the house, it probably won’t include any of the items inside (and will actually error out for the seller if it has items in it in the current implementation).

We’ll find out on Tuesday exactly how this is going to work out. Are you looking forward to it? Will you buy or sell?

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