NOTE: This is a repost because the original got buried and probably would fir this forum better anyway. If a ZoS employee asks me to delete the original so only one exists I will.
Hi there everyone. I am a dedicated farmer who has been at it for years. My favorite thing to farm for used to be Ayleid furnishing plans. I have gotten 4 purples in my time, but you see therein lies a problem. My first was a stroke of incredible luck. My first mob in Bonesnap on a throwaway character dropped the dang bookcase. I have something of an obsession with ayleid aesthetics and lore so I was overjoyed to eat it on my crafting toon. The next came after I started actually farming the place. It was very close to exactly 10 hours of total farming later, just as the guides will tell you online. I had it pretty good until the next one took 20 hours. "Okay" I thought "that was some bad luck, but it shouldn't happen again." The next drop was 100 cumulative hours of farming from the last one to get. By then I had suspected something was up, so I changed tactics. I moved to the other two ayleid public dungeons, mostly the one in Greenshade. I tried new characters on it, low levels, new classes, new ways of killing mobs, and changed which ones I killed. I tried with killing bosses and without, different perks on the new CP system's trees, I killed them all at the same time and one at a time. I killed them at a dps of 5k, 6k, 7k, all the way to 22k. I tried with other people and without. I tried taking breaks, leaving characters in the dungeon, outside or in different zones when not using them. I farmed efficiently, not continuing on that character for a day if it got a purple. I learned a whole lot about farming in general, but after more than a thousand more hours of farming I couldn't take it any more so I made a ticket to ZoS (This is still when you didn't have to select specific categories) and they told me that I was just having bad luck and told me to continue trying. Now I don't understand why after my soulcrushing thousand cumulative hours of bashing my head against a wall I continued, but I did. I haven't kept track of the time spent since but suffice it to say that even factoring in the break I took from ESO I spent at least a few hundred more hours in there to no avail.
Now I will let you decide for yourself if it is just "bad luck" but if you're like me you see a pretty clear pattern in these times. 0, 10, 20, 100, nothing. To me it seems very clear that they get rarer the more you get. The worst part? I never got the purple brazier to drop so it's permanently missing from my catalogue. Which brings me to my point in telling this story.
I had simultaneously been tracking the prices the whole time and what once sold for 4 mil now sells for 17 mil. The prices keep going up and the higher the prices the more scalpers they attract. People will buy what's on the market and sell it at a high markup, which then attracts more flies to what is now the corpse of this farm. The price is in a fixed state of increase and has no signs of stopping ever. This increase has and will continue as long as ZoS keeps the drop rate as it is. I simply propose they do away with whatever limit they have put on how many you can get and make the drop rate 100x what it is at least. These are special decorations and deserve to be used, not forgotten. And before you bring up that it would mess with the profit margins of those who already have the plans and sell the decos please look at the prices. They sell for mat cost.
TL;DR ZoS should make the ayleid furnishing plans dramatically easier to get.
Edited by ZOS_Kevin on 7 November 2024 10:13