Chicken chicken chicken, chicken.

Since I have a lifetime subscription I avoid lots of problems you have.

Personally, I always found the housing to be a waste of time. You get charged rent per week and the housing places are so far from everything else you take a lot of time getting back out, especially if your house is way far in the neighborhood. So in my mind the shared storage isn't that much of a draw. I eventually dumped my house.

Chicken play... Yeah, I've protected a few chickens in the Trollshaws in my time.

I'll have to check out the Erebor related missions. There's something similar in Moria where you play a guard when the Balrog is awakened.

Yeah, it was more of a case of, "Hey, free money...I'll blow it on a house and see what the system is like!" Even the most centrally located development (Bree-Land) is still a significant ride away from stuff.

So you're telling us it's something about...chickens?

XD

The housing sounds pretty similar to how 'Asheron's Call' was set up, actually. Although I don't recall for sure, I don't *think* that you had to pay upkeep...once you forked over the money for the house, it was yours. But there was a limit to how many decoration slots there were, although there were a few outside the house as well as inside. Most of the housing was out in the middle of nowhere for AC, too. Although AC at least had portals that you could use to get to places.

Yeah, for the basic house the exterior allowed one large object and three (four?) small ones. Each of the two rooms inside allowed one floor covering, one large furniture and a few small furniture, plus some "thin furniture" which aren't buyable at the starter merchant (but a kinmate doing some housecleaning gave me some flower arrangements for the thin slots), and some number of wall items like shelves or sconces. No ceiling slots, and you can't move where the storage chest sits.

I suppose it's possible that things like "table with chairs" exist as furniture items, but I couldn't actually put chairs near the table.