New Combined Housing / Leaderboards Window Adds Convenience

If you are a member of a Guild, then over the last few months, you’ve gained the ability to pay your rent on all of your houses, visit them with one click, and also visit the houses of friends and guildmates, all without having to venture beyond the confines of your guild hall. Now, these abilities have come to those who are between guilds or simply prefer to adventure on their own.

With this new window, you can travel directly to any of your houses anywhere in Norrath as long as you are within a city zone. You can also pay rent upkeep, and view stats about your house. When you are inside your house, you can of course rename it and take up to 2 screenshots which will appear on Housting Leaderboards for others to view.

What Housing & Leaderboard window would be complete without the ability to buy more houses?

The Ratings tab has undergone the fewest changes from what I could tell, as you can still browse player’s houses, see their awards, travel to them, and then leave your own ratings based on creativity. Just be ready to take off at a gallop when stepping out of a home in an opposite-aligned city. City guards won’t take to casual conversation from their mortal enemies.

And perhaps the least assuming but most useful change in the new window is the Visit tab.

When I first tried out the Visit tab, I could make neither heads nor tails of it. The window was blank and I couldn’t get it to do anything. Then it dawned on me that the problem might be because I was in my Guild Hall.

Once I zoned to Qeynos Harbor and brought up the window, I was able to instantly access every house owned by every person in Qeynos Harbor who has their house open to Visitors. A suggested improvement to this window might be to display a message like “You are not currently in a city or place where there is Housing.” to clue players in as to what’s going on. Once I traveled to South Qeynos, the window updated to show me all the housing available there, listing those houses open to Visitors, or whose owner has set me as a Friend or Trustee.

Personally, I’ve never had a problem with reading the street signs and wandering a bit while consulting house numbers (I didn’t even look at the addresses on EQ2Map) until I found the house I wanted to visit. Typically, I’ve visited houses to buy expensive Broker items sans commission.

If you deal with a lot of housing, or aren’t familiar with all the nooks and crannies of the cities where different houses (especially the prestige and rent-free houses), then this should further streamline your daily travels. No doubt it will cut out some of the Customer Service e-mails from folks who won or bought Rent Free or Legends of Norrath houses and haven’t the foggiest idea where to find them!