Provisioning Revamp

MasterSpatula

Combination recipes will be rarer? Good grief, how much rarer can you possibly make them?

Drazhar14

So, for example, instead of 10 different types of grapes, there will be just "grapes"? Makes sense and keeps things simple. I like it, and so does my bank storage.

rekina

Cooking: Meat = health, fruit = magicka, vegetables = stamina

Shouldn't it be Meat = stamina, vegetables = health? lol

nudel

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

The regeneration benefit of drinking will now stack with food benefits (some balancing changes may occur)

Slightly worried that this will mean a nerf to food buffs across the board. Otherwise good changes overall.

Domander

eventide03b14a_ESO wrote: »

Domander wrote: »

My opinion is keep the current system and add recipes, and make drinks usable with food. Use the resources that were going to go into this revamp to improve another part of the game.

They are going to allow drinks useable with food per the OP.

I know.

Mortosk

MasterSpatula wrote: »

Combination recipes will be rarer? Good grief, how much rarer can you possibly make them?

I kinda hope that's not what he meant. I took it to mean blues and purples would be rarer than green recipes which give a single buff.

They need to make the purples drop way more often than they do now. They are at least an order of magnitude too rare at the moment. I don't want them to be common like blues, but they should have about the same rarity of the rare motifs no more. Currently they are 10x more rare than the imperial motif, and it's gold. That's not an exaggeration.

Seriously, ZOS, you do. They are too rare, if you can't see that then I don't know what to tell ya.

meglon978ub17_ESO

"How about an exchange merchant...a merchant interested in buying the old stuff - that just happens to be in high demand in Morrowind - for an amount of gold that scales with the outdated ingredient's rarity level?"

How about something even simpler....an exchange merchant that offers to exchange new useful items for old unused items? Simple as that.

Specific new items can be gained by turning in specific old items... just figure out which is comparable at what rate. That will let provisioners keep (more or less) the same value (food making wise) of the ingredients they already have.

Woolenthreads

The only issue I had with the food was the lack of stacking effects. In many cases it would never have been a massive benefit when they hit the cap anyway.

SirJesto

rekina wrote: »

Cooking: Meat = health, fruit = magicka, vegetables = stamina

Shouldn't it be Meat = stamina, vegetables = health? lol

I agree.

Nazon_Katts

@ZOS_GinaBruno could you please make sure to post these kinds of updates not necessarily on a Friday, where you folks all scatter off into the weekend, thus the naturally raised questions remain unanswered and pick a better fitting day, eg Monday, and use the opportunity to actually up your community interaction as promised by replying to our concerns in a more timely manner?

Thank you.

Maverick827

To be honest, I can't help but dreaming up new systems for Provisioning, but they're all essentially just Alchemy. Logically, you'd come up with dishes the same way you would potions. Obviously that would make the game play redundant, however.

zZzleepyhead

all those functionality changes sound great!

b92303008rwb17_ESO

Sounds really great! In fact, this is the first time that I can truly feel you are making good improvements and very much to the point, despite that you have been doing so since launch. A big applause to you!

Now back to the revamp of provisioning, I have only one plea, fish recipes please! If we can cook maggots, why not fish? You really should take fishing and alchemy into consideration seriously and make them connected systems as a whole. Fishing can be a great source of various cooking and alchemy ingredients, for example, fish as meat, seaweed as vegetable and fish oil, as a cooking byproduct, can also be an ingredient of alchemy. I am sure you can think of more and better ideas. Fishing can really spice up the whole system so much. I beseech you ZOS, revamping them as a whole will make it truly shine.

Cusppa

I have a lot of rare ingredients stored in my bank. I collected they during my questing, esploring and dungeoning. I spent a lot of time collecting they. Please don't waste my efforts. The rare ingredients (salt, pepper, red wheat and so on...) have to be included in the new provisioning system.

mndfreeze

Yes please. Thats all I really have to say on the matter. Provisioning def needs a kick in the pants and a boost in its usefulness to put it on par with other crafting skills.

Yes on cutting down the number of base materials. That would help deal with the people complaining about bank space as well.

Yes on drinks and food both being able to be active. Food generally does outweigh drink in the usefulness category. Except perhaps some specific situations in pvp where 100 or 200 health/magicka/stam doesnt matter much. (rough example)

Yes on making what I loot match the thing im clicking on to loot it from. I mean that just makes common sense. The last thing I want is another game called Rust where every meat source is chicken breast, but the TESO version....

Please be careful on how transition will occur. I'm already a max level provisioner and have been since day 5 I think. I have just about every blue recipe above level 30 and a mish mash of blues below 30, all 3 level 35 purple receipes for some reason, and no others but I'll be daaaammnned if the transition makes me lose all that progress.

Please make the 'stale materials' you will be creating worth some gold so we can at least vendor them. Ideally not all just 1G either. Unless they are being left in the game to be looted still, then it makes sense to make them 1G or 0G, but I sure would like all my stacks of soon to be useless food bits to have at least a tiny value when I dump em.

Dang, I said a lot more then Yes please. Oh well!

Winnower

Catch a fish, get fish mats
Kill a deer, or a mudcrab, get the relevant meat
Find an apple tree, pick ripe apples off the ground under it
Milk a cow or a sheep or heavens forfend, a pig: milk it and get the milk.
Wander by a field of wheat; harvest it.

If you can have 10,000 useless swords and helmets cluttering up the environment and stuck into the loot tables on containers, you could do more for everyone by having the cooking ingredients do the same.

And you can control where the ingredients come from by putting them in various zones.

Your alchemy system works very well; the ingredients are all the same and there is a controlling factor in the type of magical water you mix them in in order to determine level.

Given that you have a system where food and drink provide obvious fantastical benefits, it is clear that - as words can have power via the dragon shouts -, so can potatoes have power via an empowered chef.

Make *all* mobs drop some kind of meat. Have vegetable and fruit nodes everywhere. Use the alchemical waters you have now, already in place, in order to determine level. High level and/or magical mobs could drop specific ingredients that provide better results.

Sure, you can still let some of the processing ingredients like flour drop from sacks or other containers, and throw in a random assortment of things for them - a good pantry can have a lot of different things in it.

Cooking is easy. Yeah, it's complicated because of all the ingredients and how you want to design the system, but ultimately cooking is less about recipes (though yes, most people think that way) and more about techniques.

Given that you're doing an abstraction of mechanical processes in life, there are a lot of ways you can choose to implement the system. I'm ok with the one you have now, even though it's obviously flawed. The new one looks nice too, and I can point out just as many flaws from a design standpoint or an immersion standpoint as I can with the current system.

I can tell you that people who have invested heavily in your current provisioning system are going to scream bloody murder if you don't compensate them adequately for their investments of time, efforts, and gold.

I have 3 level 50 provisioning toons. I haven't spent absurd amounts of money on a V5 purple recipe yet - and now there is NO WAY that I would give your announcement, but I've invested significant time and resources into cooking and brewing. I'd like to not have it all be for naught.

Ri_Dariit

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

We realize this is a major change and that many of you have invested heavily in leveling up Provisioning and collecting recipes, so we wanted to get your feedback before proceeding. We feel this would be a major improvement to the game and want to hear your thoughts on the matter!

Already maxed Provisioning, bring it on! Cooking is one of those things you don't get tired of (at least I don't).

Kaynlor

I love this improvement! If I may, I'd like to throw in a few ideas.
1) Allow fish to be used as an ingredient. It would give a rational purpose to fishing.
2) Instead of recipe levels, a recipe gives a % increase, and things like broth, and jus determine time length.
3) We find recipes in the scrolls, notes and books we read. Special, yet basic recipes.

camelknightb16_ESO

1) There are way too many ingredients as it is and some are way too rare (like Red Wheat. Think I've found about 10 of them in total and I'm VR7 while opening just about every container).
2) Food & Drink stacking: good thinking. I've been able, and known, to get both drunk and really eat my belly full outside of the game. Eating doesn't make me less drunk in real life, though I wish it did...
3) Reciped even more rare? Yeah, there are a *** of recipes that keep dropping. But the rare recipes are already too rare. Don't have any of em and whenever I do see someone sell them, they go for over 100k. Insane.
4) Don't make the old ingredients "stale". Just remove them from the game entirely and return some cash. They currently sell for 0 gold, so I wouldn't mind if I didn't get anything for em. Better yet: turn them into usefull ingredients.
5) The amount of recipes is too damn high! Less recipes creates a better overview. I currently pickup just about any ingredient since I've got no clue to what recipe it could be usefull.
6) Give us the ability to open our cookbooks (and while you're at it, do the same for BS, Clothing, Woodworking, Alchemy and Enchanting please). It's silly that I can't open my cookbook on the road when I'm hungry and want to know if the ingredient I picked up is usefull or not. I don't need to use it, just want to know if I can craft something.

Just my 12 cents.

Katinas

Can I suggest that while exploring other alliances' territories as veterans we would still have a chance of aquiring recipes that are associated with that alliance and require ingredients found predominantly in them?
At the moment, as a V1-4 you are entitled to looting the following: Mud Crab Cakes, Fishy Sticks, Crab Meat Stew (all green, extremely common); Fortified Mud Crab Cakes, Enriched Fishy Sticks, Invigorated Crab Meat Stew (all blue, relatively common to find and easy to find someone who would sell you one); Consummate Mud Crab Cakes, Consummate Fishy Sticks, Consummate Crab Meat Stew (unimaginably rare and extremely difficult to find, if you find one you may consider to be the luckiest person online - link it to the zone chat and you are guaranteed to get dozens of messages asking you to sell it). The same goes for drinks - 3 greens, blues and purples.
As V5+ you get also 9 foods - 3 greens, blues and purples. Purples appear to be the single most rare item in the game. You could ask for a million septims for it and people would queue to buy it from you. I'm not exaggerating, million+ is what people are willing to pay for them. And then there are 18 drinks - 6 of each green, blue and purple quality.
This is it. As you spend days and dozens of hours of gameplay exploring two alliances you have 45 recipes available for you to loot. At levels 1-49 you have 306 recipes, at V1+ you have 45. And if you want to collect all recipes that you've missed out because they can be looted in other alliances' territories you have to either roll characters on those alliances and try to find them, or buy them from others.
My suggestion would be to make it so that there is a chance to loot any Aldmeri Dominion recipe while you are questing as a veteran in Reaper's March, have Ebonheart Pact recipes available as possible loot while you are doing Stonefalls veteran quests and so on.

Fenris Wolffe

"In fact, make all junk items worth 1g each. That way they're not complete junk.
Right now, all i ever do with them is "destroy". I gets old after a while." - THIS

I love everything about this post. As one of the few who has troubles with provisioning, I'd love it to make more sense.

thesongoftimeb14_ESO

I would love to see a filter implemented into the game, that allows you to shut specific items off from being looted. Once you have looted an item to the point that you don't want anymore, it would be so nice to tell my character to stop looting that item, but continue looting everything else I need. This would solve a lot of problems over the entire game system. It would save us a lot of time wasted, make managing a little easier for all mat collecting, and most importantly, make looting more fun. Your basically creating one solution to solve all 6 crafting experiences and making them more enjoyable.

ZOS_GinaBruno

Hey folks, just wanted to clarify a few things based on questions or comments that have been raised so far in this thread:

• When we say "Combination recipes will be rarer, require more ingredients, and give multiple benefits as expected", this means that they are rarer than non-combination recipes, not rarer than they are now.
• The insane rarity of high level purple recipes is absolutely a bug with a fix coming, and is already in the pipeline. For example, it is not our intention that rare recipes are sourced exclusively through Trials.
• We're going to try to update the existing recipes that you already know to equivalent recipes in the new system. There may be some exceptions and some trade-offs, but our goal is to have you not lose the effort you spent collecting the recipes in the first place.
• The ingredients themselves will not be tiered, but the recipes themselves and the food made from them, will be. The plan is to make each recipe be a specific unique combination of ingredients that is not duplicated in any other recipe. This means that putting venison and cheese together may result in a level 5 recipe, but putting venison and flour together may result in a level 50 recipe, even though all the base materials are available immediately.
• We do intend to have a rare component for purple recipes akin to Oats, though we may add additional ways to obtain it.
• Level 50 and Veteran Rank 5 drinks providing the same bonus is definitely a bug which we'll look into.
• As part of the condensing of materials and making things more clear, we are likely going to remove the notion that certain recipes only drop in certain alliance zones.
• This revamp will absolutely NOT affect the rank in provisioning that you have achieved.
• Once the Justice System is released, we will make sure that Provisioning is adjusted to ensure you don't need to be thieves in order to participate meaningfully in the tradeskill.

joeparadis_ESO

SirAndy wrote: »

What always bothers me is that people expect realism in some of the oddest places while playing a fantasy game.

Your have walking lizards and talking cats and flying ghost dinosaur pets and you shoot fireballs out of a wooden stick and you can carry 100 swords and drink a potion that can heal you in a second and wear a hat that can knock back an opponent, yet you are bothered to find a bundle of grapes in a dungeon?

Oh how dare you sir!!! I'm going to leave some stale trotter pie in the guild bank just for you! ;P

Yeah yeah yeah so you're funny hat can knock back people at random and your magic stick shoots great balls of fire. Some of us require reasons for things DAMMIT! ...even if they are based fairy dust and flying ghost dinosaur women! ;P

lancepro

Cogo wrote: »

3. Regarding mats. I think its good as it is. Same like gear. It should be some sort of random and not just you know before you see it what it is. Exploring and being nosy about everything, should still pay off. This is also to not bring back "farming". Mats are not hard to come by when you to get them, have a guild who helps, or simply go buy em in a guild store.

This.

Dagoth_Rac

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hey folks, just wanted to clarify a few things based on questions or comments that have been raised so far in this thread:

• When we say "Combination recipes will be rarer, require more ingredients, and give multiple benefits as expected", this means that they are rarer than non-combination recipes, not rarer than they are now.
• The insane rarity of high level purple recipes is absolutely a bug with a fix coming, and is already in the pipeline. For example, it is not our intention that rare recipes are sourced exclusively through Trials.
• We're going to try to update the existing recipes that you already know to equivalent recipes in the new system. There may be some exceptions and some trade-offs, but our goal is to have you not lose the effort you spent collecting the recipes in the first place.
• The ingredients themselves will not be tiered, but the recipes themselves and the food made from them, will be. The plan is to make each recipe be a specific unique combination of ingredients that is not duplicated in any other recipe. This means that putting venison and cheese together may result in a level 5 recipe, but putting venison and flour together may result in a level 50 recipe, even though all the base materials are available immediately.
• We do intend to have a rare component for purple recipes akin to Oats, though we may add additional ways to obtain it.
• Level 50 and Veteran Rank 5 drinks providing the same bonus is definitely a bug which we'll look into.
• As part of the condensing of materials and making things more clear, we are likely going to remove the notion that certain recipes only drop in certain alliance zones.
• This revamp will absolutely NOT affect the rank in provisioning that you have achieved.
• Once the Justice System is released, we will make sure that Provisioning is adjusted to ensure you don't need to be thieves in order to participate meaningfully in the tradeskill.

Just about all of these answers made me happy. Especially the 3rd. I just found and learned a Level 50 purple drink recipe last night (i.e., not as good as a food recipe, but no need for tomatoes/oats). If it had been made obsolete by this change, and I could have sold it for 6 figures in chat instead of learning it, I would have ragequit (not really, but you have to exaggerate on the forums, it's a law).

lancepro

psufan5 wrote: »

Did you just say you have 8 toons, followed by you are a casual player?

Yeah I think the average casual player by now has about 8 characters; 1 or 2 of which has probably broken into veteran levels in different alliances, with the rest being used as crafters/pack mules or sitting around looking pretty.

Mortosk

camelknightb16_ESO wrote: »

1) There are way too many ingredients as it is and some are way too rare (like Red Wheat. Think I've found about 10 of them in total and I'm VR7 while opening just about every container).
2) Food & Drink stacking: good thinking. I've been able, and known, to get both drunk and really eat my belly full outside of the game. Eating doesn't make me less drunk in real life, though I wish it did...
3) Reciped even more rare? Yeah, there are a *** of recipes that keep dropping. But the rare recipes are already too rare. Don't have any of em and whenever I do see someone sell them, they go for over 100k. Insane.
4) Don't make the old ingredients "stale". Just remove them from the game entirely and return some cash. They currently sell for 0 gold, so I wouldn't mind if I didn't get anything for em. Better yet: turn them into usefull ingredients.
5) The amount of recipes is too damn high! Less recipes creates a better overview. I currently pickup just about any ingredient since I've got no clue to what recipe it could be usefull.
6) Give us the ability to open our cookbooks (and while you're at it, do the same for BS, Clothing, Woodworking, Alchemy and Enchanting please). It's silly that I can't open my cookbook on the road when I'm hungry and want to know if the ingredient I picked up is usefull or not. I don't need to use it, just want to know if I can craft something.

Just my 12 cents.

Some ingredients do have vendor value currently of 1 gold. Some ingredients are easier to sell to other players than others. There always seems to be 1 bottleneck ingredient per recipe that is rarer than the other components, which usually results in someone having 5 stacks of beef in their bank, but not enough Lard, for example, to use it all. Selling beef to players might prove difficult, but if you tried to sell a stack of Lard, you wouldn't have any issues. The ingredients like Lard that are a little rarer are the ones with the 1 gold value.

Furthermore, you can turn 1 Lard and 1 Beef into a Beef Sirloin which you can then vendor for 16 gold (4g ea x 4). Therefore, it has vendor value, you just have to cook it first. If all those ingredients were made stale, the people who were smart enough to cook their entire stock and vendor them before that happens would be the smart ones. Problem is they are going to have a lot of left over Beef, and Kava Beans, and Shanks, and Crystal Berries... Well you get the idea.

I like #6. They should definitely add something like this to the game. There is currently an addon called recipe book, but I haven't been able to use it because for some reason it interferes with the LootDrop addon, causing a lot of lag.

Mortosk

lancepro wrote: »

psufan5 wrote: »

Did you just say you have 8 toons, followed by you are a casual player?

Yeah I think the average casual player by now has about 8 characters; 1 or 2 of which has probably broken into veteran levels in different alliances, with the rest being used as crafters/pack mules or sitting around looking pretty.

Or they started playing their pack mules and leveling them, because they didn't have any other character slots

logsplitter69b14_ESO

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hey folks, just wanted to clarify a few things based on questions or comments that have been raised so far in this thread:


[*] The ingredients themselves will not be tiered, but the recipes themselves and the food made from them, will be. The plan is to make each recipe be a specific unique combination of ingredients that is not duplicated in any other recipe. This means that putting venison and cheese together may result in a level 5 recipe, but putting venison and flour together may result in a level 50 recipe, even though all the base materials are available immediately.

So this is pretty much the way it works now? The ingredients are not tiered. But since they can only be used in tiered recipes, they kind of are. So the new system will work much like the old one only less overall materials and new recipes that draw from the same pool of materials. If this is the case cant you achieve the same goals by just tweaking rare food drops and fixing the other glitches you have mentioned in your list?

I would like to ask again that you consider removing level restrictions from food. The new system would have the same issues for me as the old. I have one character who is a high level provisioner. That character has all the recipes I have found and I use it to create food for all my lower level characters. But often I do not do that. First fumbling through the jumbled up provisioning UI to find the correct food produce for my other characters then finding the mats to make the food. It is just way more time consuming to do that. I would much rather go without using food and occasionally hike back from the nearest wayshrine because I didn't have that 126hp bonus from a worm tart and I died.

But this is just my playstyle. I am sure not everyone plays this game driven by time management as much as I do. It will be nice to see fewer ingredients, no rare ingredient drops and a system of collecting ingredients that makes a bit more sense.