Hireling question

SadisticSavior

SirAndy wrote: »

Shadrail wrote: »

The hireling will always give you items equivalent to the level of the character that opens the box.

@Shadrail
Not exactly. The items are according to the highest level of the craft across all your characters.
;-)

Wrong.

I have gotten legendary items twice, and I am not even close to being maxed out on my crafting...and my highest level character at the time was 18.

Whatever the criteria, it is not tied to level.

SadisticSavior

imjanko wrote: »

But when you "upgrade" to level 2, shouldn't you get...more?

Probably a higher chance of better stuff. Like instead of a 1 in 100 chance of an epic item you get a 3 in 100 chance or something.

To me it appears to be random though.

Laharl_Overlord

huntgod_ESO wrote: »

I'm curious how the OP missed the thread that addresses these specific issues and has 20k+ views and is the top thread on the entire board.

OP posted this when the other thread was on the second page. Taurus498 first posted the video here. Then posted the video in the other thread which caused that thread to become active again.

lowf

Cheatingdeath23 wrote: »

You make some good points, but I think the easy solution is this:

Instead of binding it to a character, but avoiding the storage issue of sending the items, they could include a single line of code with each "chest" so that when the chest is opened, it references the source character.

Example: I have a main and an alt. Both have hirelings. I receive the mail on my main and open it immediately-- it automatically references my main account UPON opening the chest. I switch to my alt and open the mail (but not the chest). I then switch back to my main and open the chest-- it automatically references my alt account (despite me opening it with the main).

I'm pretty sure a single line of code referencing the intended character solves it. That said, I don't think it is that giant an exploit as it is. I plan on starting up 6 more alts and investing in hirelings, but it will be a pain in the rear to "harvest" each of the chests each day.

Interesting thought, it would require modifying the the "chest" object with a custom field, but that does sound like a lot less effort than storing the entire contents. I think this would introduces a bunch of weird cases tho, for instance what happens if the original character is deleted at the time when you open the chest?

Haha - and **nothing** is ever a single line of code!

As well, I forgot to mention in my original post, this only affects the ore you get in the chest, not the rare items, which seem to be random all around. So you would just get a bunch of iron instead of Dwarven ore or what have you.. Doesn't seem like a huge deal that requires fixing to me.. If they want fewer legionaries they can just dial down the random chance threshold and call it a day.

Laharl_Overlord

lowf wrote: »

Thank you for dispelling all the rumors flying around on this thread, I was planning to post something similar til I saw yours!!

Laharl_Overlord wrote: »

The hireling brings items based on the crafting level of the character that opens it.
...
Hirelings are on a 24 hour timer that starts when you receive the mail, so just note the time you get your mail and try to get it about the same time the next day. Yes, it will keep rolling later and later which is annoying.

Fun facts, there are two, lets call them "features", at play here, both of which would be VERY difficult to change from a software engineering standpoint. The first feature is that the contents of chests are calculated when they are opened, the second feature is that chests from your alts can be accepted and opened by your main.

--disclaimer-- when I say hard, I mean it would require a one off engineering solution, that wouldn't fit into the original design of the rest of the systems they are related to, this doesn't mean that Zenimax won't change it, it just means it would be a significant investment of engineering time so I don't imagine it will be prioritized over fixing dupe bug, balance play, creating new content, etc. As well, this bug doesn't really hurt anyone, even with 8 hirelings, I get 1-2 legendary tempers every 1/2 days, that's 1 epic-to-legendary upgrade every 20-40 days for a lvl 1 blacksmith, or 1 epic-to-legendary upgrade every 10-20 days for a lvl 50 blacksmith, doesn't seem that OP imho. (http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/68548/temper-expertise) --disclaimer--

One possible change that would "fix" this "feature" would be to calculate the contents of the hireling chests when they are sent in the mail, and base the contents on the crafting level of the receiving character.

Let's start by considering why chests are currently calculated at opening time instead of received-in-the-mail time: this is a simple storage issue, if the contents of each chest takes 1 kilobyte of space (the size of a small text document on your computer), now let's say that 1 million people have a single point in a single hireling type, 1,000Bytes * 1,000,000 = 1Gigabyte of storage space, per day, being used. This is space that can't be reclaimed and reused until these people open their mail. Seeing as there are far more than 1 million players (I believe) and many players will have more than one character, with more than one hireling, this would be very costly to do.

So, the next possible solution would be to bind the chest to the character with the skill point in the hireling when the mail is sent. That way no other character can accept the mailed goods.. Well, here we have an amusing problem.. The mail system is designed to explicitly NOT allow any character-bound items to be mailed, *ever*. So this fix would be in violation of that explicit feature, mail just doesn't support sending bound items, period. To change this would mean implementing a very specific loophole for this very specific use case, and if implemented poorly could create a loophole by which all bound items can be mailed, thus it would be hard to implement correctly.


This is why I assume this won't be changed soon, and I hope it won't be changed ever! 8 toon hireling build FTW!

I made that post when I was still using 1/3 hirelings. I have since upgraded to 2/3 hirelings across all four crafts. I now get about 3-5 legends per day and about the same amount of epics. Small sample size I know, but it looks good so far.

There is also the fact that you can refine the ore (and other mats) and get epics and legends. You generally get about 34 ore/wood/silk per day. You refine these and often get more from that. Since it's calculated by the character who opens, you get the high level stuff which in turn has higher chances to refine into higher quality upgrade mats.

The video which was deleted from this thread and the other showed how this method can net you over 150,000 gold per week with current prices.

Cheatingdeath23

lowf wrote: »

Cheatingdeath23 wrote: »

You make some good points, but I think the easy solution is this:

Instead of binding it to a character, but avoiding the storage issue of sending the items, they could include a single line of code with each "chest" so that when the chest is opened, it references the source character.

Example: I have a main and an alt. Both have hirelings. I receive the mail on my main and open it immediately-- it automatically references my main account UPON opening the chest. I switch to my alt and open the mail (but not the chest). I then switch back to my main and open the chest-- it automatically references my alt account (despite me opening it with the main).

I'm pretty sure a single line of code referencing the intended character solves it. That said, I don't think it is that giant an exploit as it is. I plan on starting up 6 more alts and investing in hirelings, but it will be a pain in the rear to "harvest" each of the chests each day.

Interesting thought, it would require modifying the the "chest" object with a custom field, but that does sound like a lot less effort than storing the entire contents. I think this would introduces a bunch of weird cases tho, for instance what happens if the original character is deleted at the time when you open the chest?

Haha - and **nothing** is ever a single line of code!

As well, I forgot to mention in my original post, this only affects the ore you get in the chest, not the rare items, which seem to be random all around. So you would just get a bunch of iron instead of Dwarven ore or what have you.. Doesn't seem like a huge deal that requires fixing to me.. If they want fewer legionaries they can just dial down the random chance threshold and call it a day.

Alternatively, could "nerf" it by only allowing epic/legendary once per day for each class of chest.

So theoretically, I could have my main open 50 chests every day, but only 1 is in the lottery for the best stuff. The rest just offer normal ore and things.

That seems like an easy change to make completely outside of the chest code itself.

huntgod_ESO

You get used to it, the only irritation is that each day you collect a little later since it is a true 24hr cycle (I wish they made it 23 so I would not have it slowly get later everyday. It takes about 6-10 minutes to log in and out of each alt and check mail. So after a week if you were doing this at 6:00, you are not doing it at 7-7:30, another week and now it's closer to 9. A week after that it's closing on 11 and the week after that you basically are going to be skipping a day if you are like me and have to work in the morning.

I really wish it mailed 1 bag every 24 hrs and let them stack up, or changed the counter to 20-23hrs

Laharl_Overlord

huntgod_ESO wrote: »

You get used to it, the only irritation is that each day you collect a little later since it is a true 24hr cycle (I wish they made it 23 so I would not have it slowly get later everyday. It takes about 6-10 minutes to log in and out of each alt and check mail. So after a week if you were doing this at 6:00, you are not doing it at 7-7:30, another week and now it's closer to 9. A week after that it's closing on 11 and the week after that you basically are going to be skipping a day if you are like me and have to work in the morning.

I really wish it mailed 1 bag every 24 hrs and let them stack up, or changed the counter to 20-23hrs

Agreed, getting the mail is quick and easy. That 24 hour timer sucks though. Wish it was 20 like the horse.

Taurus498

lowf wrote: »

This is why I assume this won't be changed soon, and I hope it won't be changed ever! 8 toon hireling build FTW!

So you would actually be okay if everybody in the game used this "exploit"?

And you would also be okay with the very significant effects it would have on the games economy?

You may be right that it might be difficult for the devs to fix this Hireling System "exploit", but it's rather obvious that it's not supposed to work this way. There probably are other bugs in the game that need to be addressed first, but those few of us "in the know" will be reaping large amounts of rare crafting materials and gold in the meantime.

alphawolph

Taurus498 wrote: »

lowf wrote: »

This is why I assume this won't be changed soon, and I hope it won't be changed ever! 8 toon hireling build FTW!

So you would actually be okay if everybody in the game used this "exploit"?

And you would also be okay with the very significant effects it would have on the games economy?

You may be right that it might be difficult for the devs to fix this Hireling System "exploit", but it's rather obvious that it's not supposed to work this way. There probably are other bugs in the game that need to be addressed first, but those few of us "in the know" will be reaping large amounts of rare crafting materials and gold in the meantime.

I love how you call it an exploit, and then say you'll be reaping the rewards from it.

Taurus498

alphawolph wrote: »

I love how you call it an exploit, and then say you'll be reaping the rewards from it.

I put quotation marks on exploit as it's not yet official that the Hireling System is not working as intended, and the Devs are currently investigating this issue. So at the moment it isn't wrong for anyone to take advantage of this "exploit"

I only found out about this "exploit" 2 days ago, and it will take a while for me to reap the rewards from it, as my level 25 Main characters Crafting & Hireling Skills are only 1-2 skill point extra compared to each of my 7 alts. And there is the off chance that this isn't actually an "exploit", but is actually working as intended. Which means I (and everybody else) would be stupid not to take advantage of it.