Furniture still very inaccessible years later

Zypheran

So I recognise that crafting furniture was always intended as a grind. However, there eventually comes a point where I think it needs to be looked at.
Now, I'm not opposed to buying things on the crown store but realistically, it isn't feasible to furnish a 700 item house from the crownstore. At a conservative average of 150 crowns per item, it would cost over 100k crowns which is over €500 to decorate a single house in a game that costs, what? €20 these days? Anyway, its objectively ridiculous.
So you have to furnish your houses predominantly by crafting. But this seems to be locked behind SO many layers of grind that this too is a mountain to climb.
- The plans are rare
- The mats requirements are punitive
- The mats are becoming increasingly more difficult to farm in the required quantities
It just seems to me that there is a conscious effort to make housing the most inaccessible part of the game!
Now, I also recognise that there are some players who actually like this exclusivity and believe housing is end-game and should only be accessible to wealthy players but I think, that as with most things, there can be a balance. In the case of housing, I believe the accessibility is, and has for a long time been, drastically out of balance.
I have some ideas that I believe even one of which, would hugely help to allow more players participate in this part of the game. From ZOS's perspective, if more players could attain some capacity to decorate 700 items homes with nice items, it would surely encourage more people to buy these 700 item houses.
- Furniture Plans : Rarity for new items and plans is totally understandable but there eventually comes a point where older plans should be more readily available. This issue particularly effects newer players. If you werent around when plans were popular at a particular DLC, best of luck getting them now. Example, 2 1/2 years later, have a look at both availability and cost of Alinor plans and items on guild stores! You cant tell me thats accessibility! Surely the drop rate could be increased for older plans? Or better yet, a merchant introduced that sells ALL plans from older DLC.
- Mats : A 700 item build will probably take 2000 Mundane Runes. An hour farming runes will probably yield you 10-15 mundane runes if youre lucky. They cost around 400gold to buy. So you can either spend months farming them or spend fortunes of gold buying them. And thats just ONE material!!
- Crown Store costs : Why not consider a REASONABLE price that you think a player should spend in order to furnish a 700 item home... maybe, say 100 €/$ ? And then charge that crown equivalent to be able to place any 700 items from the crown store into that specific home. Or another way to increase the value to crown ratio for furniture would be to keep the price but offer the crafting plan with the purchase. Some items cost as much as 8-10 €/$ for a single item... one single piece of virtual resource. Surely the design plan should be included for crown store purchases.
I think either one of these hurdles will still create more than enough challenge to any player but especially a new player. But together, and combined with the crown cost of the houses themselves, I think the balance is just way to far in the side of inaccessibility.
Housing is a well designed system that would allow great longevity for players to pour hours into if only it were more accessible.
Please give consideration to mitigating even just one of the laborious barriers to engaging with it.

kaisernick

agree with all of this plus they really need to rework the rareisty system of plans, rarity seems simple green blue purple gold but we all know that some green plans are harder and more rare than some purple and even gold plans.
they either need to fix the drop rate or recolor them imo.

katanagirl1

Yes, I mentioned in another thread that Arkthzand Sprockets only have a chance to drop, not guaranteed like Shimmering Sand or Culanda Lacquer. Again, I remember the outrage at furnishing mats being “locked behind dailies” for Summerset but at least you could get up to 3 guaranteed per day. I have done Markarth dailies many times and got 0 Sprockets. The drop rate for deconning Radiant Bastion for the mat is not great either. As time goes on it becomes increasingly harder to get the mats you need.

Maybe more people will realize this once the Aerie finally becomes available. I was hoping to get a little stockpile of mats ahead of time so I could start crafting furnishings right away, but the amount of effort just to get a few is too much. There isn’t a public dungeon with lots of bosses to farm so you’re stuck farming a world boss or delve boss with one gear drop every five minutes or so. Only one of the three gear sets that drop can be deconned for the mat.

As far as furnishing plans go, the random envelopes help, but if the plans are so astonishingly rare that they are needed, that seems to indicate the drop rate needs to be increased. This is true especially for older areas because there just aren’t as many players farming those plans to put into guild traders to sell.

Crown store should be a last resort, in my opinion. As furnishing crafters, we have put so much time and millions of gold into being able to craft things so we deserve to be able to make use of that. There will always be players with money to burn and want the easy route, they don’t want to bother with crafting, and the Crown store is for them.

ThorianB

Housing is actually suppose to be an end game hobby so of course there will be some grind to it. I don't find it to be difficult to acquire plans or most resources to do furnishings. I get all my stuff from a combination of farming and guild traders. I like that it is a bit of a challenge because outside of vet dungeons and trials every thing else in this game is a cakewalk and not grindy. If there was no effort involved in housing, i probably would lose interest in it TBH.

They do need to do something about heartwood though. The drop rate of that needs to be doubled as a lot of base furniture is made using it. I almost never get it from nodes any more. Maybe one node out of of 10. It needs to be like 1 out of every 3 nodes.

Bucky_13

A good start would be to have furnishing mats be guaranteed drops in each node of a survey, as well as a far higher drop rate in normal nodes as this would most likely cause a drop in prices for them at traders.

As for plans, if you do master writs older ones are fairly easy to obtain through voucher vendor, but it does require you to invest heavily in crafting. Newer ones are costly, especially purple ones. The best thing there would be if drop rates are a bit higher, and if you are in The Reach for example, you can ONLY get plans from that chapter, same with Murkmire etc. The basic old ones can be obtained in the non DLC zones. This would allow players to farm themselves for plans without feeling like it's pointless when you get the 10th normal plan in Murkmire when you actually want the Murkmire plans.

kind_hero

I don't mind the rarity of some blueprints much, because I can ask someone to craft a rare item for me, but the big issue is with the common furnishing mats such as heartwood and mundane runes, which are used by most furnishing blueprints. The more furnishing blueprints are available, the more of these base resources will be in demand. They have adjusted the rune drop rate a bit, but people still need hundreds of them to furnish a house.

Some older blueprints require a silly amount of them. Like the Breton striated vase. Others require 12 rakeipa, plus other expensive mats. TBH, I do not mind this for some luxury item, like a decorative artwork, something that looks expensive and unique, but I mind for structures and common items. Those should require mats that are much more easy to buy. Structures should require stone/wood/metals that could be bought from NPCs. After a DLC is one year old, the style material, such Culanda or sprockets, should be much more easy to get (increased drop rate, node drop, double amount from dailies, etc).

What annoys me is that now, after several years, I have 3-4 large estates (Psijic Villa, Elsweyr free house, Antiquarian's house, plus Linchal that I bought 2 years ago) which are still mostly empty because mats are so hard to come by.

I am very glad with the addition of the Dwemer structure plans, thanks for listening to us, and please add structures of the previous styles as well, like Alinor, or Nibenese or Colovian (I mean Gold Coast Linchal manor style) now that we are going to an Imperial province, but what I want to say is, please consider making the building blocks and other common furniture, much easy to craft. What looks premium should be hard to make, but not the usual stuff.

Jaimeh

They need to adjust the drop rates for certain plans (dwarven/ayleid, for eg.), there will be a CP perk in the new system, which might help. Furnishing mats should drop from surveys, so that enchanting surveys should drop mundane runes and so on. CS furnishing need to drop in price, it's ridiculous how even some blue items are massively expensive. As things stand now housing is a huge gold sink, end-game or not. If they are not adding any more new features to housing, they might as well improve acquiring furnishings.

anadandy

The artificial scarcity of materials by locking them behind some kind of activity gate is what I dislike the most. As DLCs age, people stop doing those activities and it's more of a grind than ever. Murkmire is particularly egregious because Hackwing Plumage only drops from deconning items and it's not even guaranteed. Why not have them drop from Hackwings for crying out loud.

It really takes the fun out of housing.

Araneae6537

Totally agree with @Zypheran

Housing itself should not be relegated to endgame and it’s ridiculous for basic furnishings to require more work or gold than top tier gear. Maybe I overstate that a bit, but why can’t rough crates and other such items be made from any wood etc.? Heartwood and similar mats should be requirements of finer items.

There is already plenty in housing that is not immediately accessible but for better reasons to make it end game — such as master crafting plans and achievement furnishings and these do feel rewarding to get.

ThorianB

Araneae6537 wrote: »

Totally agree with @Zypheran

Housing itself should not be relegated to endgame and it’s ridiculous for basic furnishings to require more work or gold than top tier gear. Maybe I overstate that a bit, but why can’t rough crates and other such items be made from any wood etc.? Heartwood and similar mats should be requirements of finer items.

There is already plenty in housing that is not immediately accessible but for better reasons to make it end game — such as master crafting plans and achievement furnishings and these do feel rewarding to get.

It isn't relegated to endgame, but it is a major endgame activity. You can gather prints, resources, and even start decorating a a house before you are level 20. So it does have progression to endgame crafting.

For example a green Breton Bench needs woodworking 3. That is not to hard to achieve a few days of playing. A blue Breton bench requires woodworking 4, metalworking 2, and solvent 2. That is not that much more difficult to acquire since most people level up all profession together.

The green print is a common drop or you can buy it off the guild traders for 100 gold. Its not hard for a newbie to make 100 gold. Open a few treasure chests( decon the mats to get the improvement materials you need for furnishings) do a couple of quests, sell some junk loot.

The blue print is a little more pricey and not a lot for sale. So maybe farm that one. When you get it a second time sell that one on traders to someone else and use that money to buy the prints you are missing or materials you need. It is a system that works really well when you learn how to use the system to get the things you want without farming them. You dont need to farm for the breton bench knotwork print. You just need to farm for prints. Add the ones you don't have to your collection and sell the rest and use the profits to fund your housing projects. It works really well when you use the system that way.

katanagirl1

Interesting that many of you mention furnishing mats being harder to obtain than plans. I feel like just doing an hour of farming nodes every day gets me plenty of furnishing mats, but several hours a day of farming furnishing plans in Markarth often nets only green and blue plans I already have, and unless they are Dwarven blue plans or greater quality or Solitude purple plans there is no need to even pick them up and try to sell them, so I’m empty-handed. The market is saturated with the lesser quality plans from the zone.

I had enough hardwood already in stock to get the charity writ achievement on my 3 alts this past event and though it put a sizeable dent in my stock I did not have to buy any. That is not to say that hardwood is easy to come by, but that I can reliably get it and not so much with furnishing plans.

ThorianB

katanagirl1 wrote: »

Interesting that many of you mention furnishing mats being harder to obtain than plans. I feel like just doing an hour of farming nodes every day gets me plenty of furnishing mats, but several hours a day of farming furnishing plans in Markarth often nets only green and blue plans I already have, and unless they are Dwarven blue plans or greater quality or Solitude purple plans there is no need to even pick them up and try to sell them, so I’m empty-handed. The market is saturated with the lesser quality plans from the zone.

I had enough hardwood already in stock to get the charity writ achievement on my 3 alts this past event and though it put a sizeable dent in my stock I did not have to buy any. That is not to say that hardwood is easy to come by, but that I can reliably get it and not so much with furnishing plans.

I dont find that to be the case on PC NA. All those plans are worth selling, imo. There are very few plans i cant get at least 100 gold for and turn over in a few hours.

Zypheran

I suppose the point was trying to make is that I agree it shouldn't be easy but there needs to be a balance and at the moment it's just too punitive.
We don't need increased mat drops AND increase furniture drops AND lower crown costs. What I'm saying is that just a small tweak in any one of these would help shift the balance back toward furniture being more accessible to players.
Personally, I'd vote for better availability for older plans. That would free up some time and gold to acquire the necessary mats. It would still be a grind but at least an achievable one. You'd still need to buy the occasional crown item and the faction that need the exclusivity still have it for newer furniture items.
I think the best idea would be to do something like the writ vendors where you have a merchant that sells older plans. I really worry for the future of furnishing for newer players as the likes of Alinor and Elsweyr plans become ever more infrequent in guild stores.

Bucky_13

katanagirl1 wrote: »

Interesting that many of you mention furnishing mats being harder to obtain than plans. I feel like just doing an hour of farming nodes every day gets me plenty of furnishing mats, but several hours a day of farming furnishing plans in Markarth often nets only green and blue plans I already have, and unless they are Dwarven blue plans or greater quality or Solitude purple plans there is no need to even pick them up and try to sell them, so I’m empty-handed. The market is saturated with the lesser quality plans from the zone.

I had enough hardwood already in stock to get the charity writ achievement on my 3 alts this past event and though it put a sizeable dent in my stock I did not have to buy any. That is not to say that hardwood is easy to come by, but that I can reliably get it and not so much with furnishing plans.

I'm curious how much you consider to be a lot. For me when I decorate a house i can easily burn through 2k of heartwood. Mundane runes are a bit less, but often around 1k. I have 20+ houses so I use a lot of those mats.

For plans, being a crafter on multiple toons and selling a lot each week helps alot, that and the fact that it's a one time purchase. You can collect older plans from from the voucher merchant, sell the spares, the buy the last ones you're missing. For newer plans I usually farm them a bit early on, then buy the rest that I want once prices start dropping. I think at least 2/3 of the plans I have have been bought, and I have all but one pre-Greymoor, and most of the plans post as well.

katanagirl1

Bucky_13 wrote: »

katanagirl1 wrote: »

Interesting that many of you mention furnishing mats being harder to obtain than plans. I feel like just doing an hour of farming nodes every day gets me plenty of furnishing mats, but several hours a day of farming furnishing plans in Markarth often nets only green and blue plans I already have, and unless they are Dwarven blue plans or greater quality or Solitude purple plans there is no need to even pick them up and try to sell them, so I’m empty-handed. The market is saturated with the lesser quality plans from the zone.

I had enough hardwood already in stock to get the charity writ achievement on my 3 alts this past event and though it put a sizeable dent in my stock I did not have to buy any. That is not to say that hardwood is easy to come by, but that I can reliably get it and not so much with furnishing plans.

I'm curious how much you consider to be a lot. For me when I decorate a house i can easily burn through 2k of heartwood. Mundane runes are a bit less, but often around 1k. I have 20+ houses so I use a lot of those mats.

For plans, being a crafter on multiple toons and selling a lot each week helps alot, that and the fact that it's a one time purchase. You can collect older plans from from the voucher merchant, sell the spares, the buy the last ones you're missing. For newer plans I usually farm them a bit early on, then buy the rest that I want once prices start dropping. I think at least 2/3 of the plans I have have been bought, and I have all but one pre-Greymoor, and most of the plans post as well.

I guess I spend so much time farming plans that I don’t have as much time for decorating them.

I have mostly kept up with farming plans since Elsweyr, but have been buying random envelopes for Vvardenfell. There are still quite a few base game plans I do not have. I really only got into furnishing about a year after Summerset dropped.