msetten wrote: »

I was just doing a survey and thought about the following idea: why not also have purple and gold crafting surveys. They use the same location as the blue surveys, only they provide much more crafting resources (say purple 2x the blue survey and gold 4x the blue survey). These purple and gold crafting surveys would come in the same manner as the blue surveys, from doing daily crafting writs, only with a lower chance (and based on your crafting progress just like master writs). What do you think of this idea.

Only real problem I see with that is, the surveys taking up 3 times as much space in your inventory/bank if you don't do them regularly.

Maybe a way to combine existing blue surveys instead of them dropping, say you have a stack of the same survey map, for one of the sites, have the option to combine them into a purple/gold survey map, when your ready to go harvest them, that way you can control the impact on your inventory space and make harvesting a stack of surveys easier.

I think it's a fine idea. Wouldn't take up 3x the space since they would be infrequent and you have incentive to do them immediately. So you grab your purple/gold surveys and their associated blues and go.

Give me an NPC that offers to trade my surveys for a reduced number of materials. Say a wood survey would give me 120 raw materials. The NPC would offer me 60 materials instead. This would help reduce the clutter and speed up my gathering process but at the cost of materials. Time savings at the cost of mats.

Another alternative would be to have all surveys and maps go to a separate tab that takes up no inventory space. Account wide like craft bag.

This combined with the idea of epic and legendary surveys at a low drop chance would solve some of my inventory issues.

I imagine if something like this were implemented they'd nerf the drop rate for blue surveys so that the amount of mats entering the market doesn't change and disrupt the economy. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since it would mean fewer surveys clogging your inventory pre-collection and less time/travel needing to be devoted to collecting them. What it probably wouldn't mean is getting more mats in total than what you can get under the current setup. Still, I wouldn't mind that sort of change if that's what the result ended up being.

I know this is not in theme but what about sorting surveys by zone instead of craft. Add-on creators, hear me!

msetten wrote: »

An other ideal situation would be that if you have say 3 the same surveys in your inventory and go to the location of the survey, the amount you harvest is automatically for those 3 surveys. That would help immensely with doing surveys once a month.

If they did this... they'd have to make sure the "rolls" (for double node, for nirncrux in Crag, etc...) are all done as "independent" events (like they've done with the new multicraft on PTS).

Alchemy would not work, since the randomness is in the flowers as well (which you can see before collecting)... who's to say I don't have a stack of 20 of them, and I'll just 'reset' the node until I get 4 or 5 corn flower nodes before I collect it?

I go back and forth on the whole idea for this.

Yes, I'd like it to be easier to collect the surveys, they do take a good amount of time for me to do...

That being said, I also feel...

1) Writs are already, by quite a large margin, the most efficient gold making tool in the game, in terms of time spent to reward. I average close to 8,000 gold "total" return (factoring in the gold/materials/tempers) per character a day, and they take like 2-3 minutes. That's a HUGE amount.

2) That doesn't factor in the value of the master writs you can get, nor does it factor in the surveys, which have more materials, which can drop more tempers, etc....

Thus, I also see the additional steps that have to be taken to do the master writs, or to collect the surveys as being an additional step to "slow down" the gold making machine that daily writs are.

Collecting surveys is still a very, very, very profitable endeavor, worth the time to do them for the materials/tempers/etc that you get from them. But, I also see how they're not for everybody...

The changes alone to crafting with Scalebreaker patch, being able to instantly refine our materials is going to cut the "survey" time in half already, since I would already spend close to an equal amount of time collecting the surveys, as I did refining the materials I collected.

Hence... I go back and forth on this... lol

msetten wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

msetten wrote: »

An other ideal situation would be that if you have say 3 the same surveys in your inventory and go to the location of the survey, the amount you harvest is automatically for those 3 surveys. That would help immensely with doing surveys once a month.

If they did this... they'd have to make sure the "rolls" (for double node, for nirncrux in Crag, etc...) are all done as "independent" events (like they've done with the new multicraft on PTS).

Alchemy would not work, since the randomness is in the flowers as well (which you can see before collecting)... who's to say I don't have a stack of 20 of them, and I'll just 'reset' the node until I get 4 or 5 corn flower nodes before I collect it?

You are right regarding Alchemy nodes and the special items like nirncrux or dusts like you find in Wrothgar. But even doing it only for the other surveys would be a huge increase in convenience. Now one has always to travel a bit (never knowing just how far) to refresh the nodes.

There might be a solution for Alchemy that it would also be done as independent invents, just giving you ingredients like it had spawned a new set of nodes (which you just didn’t see). So it wouldn’t all be from the initial six types.

The solution to the alchemy issue already exists. Just copy over the Clockwork Alchemy Bag “nodes” and you’ve done exactly what you’re asking. You don’t see the actual items populated in the nodes, and the rng of multiple nodes could work in the background.