CRAFTERS and PLAYERS UNITE

osaceeub17_ESO

(this is a combination of a couple of posts and i will be adding more as my guild mates and I get more data)

I am doing this post because I am a Guildmaster of a crafting guild. Myself and my officers provide an environment in which beginning and advanced crafters can exchange information, data and support as we strive to be the best crafters we can be. A leader's purpose is to recognize the strengths of others and help them achieve their goals. Strength lies in the people we surround ourselves with.

I have one toon that is a devoted crafter, she is V10. I restated her to be my DEDICATED crafter. I chose to have one dedicated crafting toon because instead of having to find several motifs to go on three crafter, I only need one. It was a waste of resources to duplicate everything on several part time crafting toon. It is better for my guild when I can share resources/ motifs, recipes with my guild mates that do not have them these resources yet.

I have a total of 8 playable toons. Of which I allotted some of my skill points to my hirelings. Now when I am not using them, they are not wasted pixels.

Now back to the point, hirelings. This is my guild members and my suggestions to the developers:

1. Do Not send items through our hirelings we can purchase through a vendor.
We have come to destroying items that we can buy (if we need them) from a vendor. (that doesn't mean that you should talk yourself into the idea of taking items out of the npc vendors stock.... not everyone is a craftier)

2. Do Not decrease or eliminate the rare items we now receive through our hirelings. The rate of drop in the live game is pathetically low. If I have extras gold mats to sell/share it is only because I obtain them through farming. One of our members has been keeping track and it is a depressingly low number of USEABLE items that we get from our hirelings.

3. Stop forcing writs down our throats. If this is to be the only ways we can obtain rare items, then people will be extremely unhappy. When I was doing the writs, it was a horrible drain on the resources of our guild. We are a small guild but growing every day. We are also combining two guilds into one guild.

When you add up the number of resources that it takes for a level 50 crafter to complete each writ at level 50 it consumes approximately 100 +/- hard mats, i.e. woods, metals or cloth/leather per writ. When that is multiplied by 20 to 50 master crafters, what guild can support consuming that many mats on a daily basis. It will take many hours of farming to collect enough raw mats to do the blacksmithing, clothier and woodworking writs every day. I farmed in several areas: Craglorn, the Rift and eastmarch. Compared and averaged the time and number of mats.

All our officers stopped doing the writs so our lower level crafters would have the mats available to make, trade and breakdown equipment for leveling. I do not believe the developers understand the dynamics of crafters. It is not the only thing we want to do--at least we would like to have time to do other things instead we are trying to run around and gather materials. Which brings me to the next point;

4. Stop trying to give us "busy work". i.e. 'gather more materials to obtains rare items', 'fish more to make high end foods/beverages', 'complete writs and be rewarded with hard to obtain items' (that is what our hirelings are suppose to do). Please don't make it so hard to be a crafter that we have very little time to play. When people have to spend most of their time in game running around and competing with other farmers for the limited resources you currently provide, that is when the game will cease to be fun. We enjoy being crafters, and have spent a lot of time to get to where we are. It was our choice to be crafters, but at some point we would like to be able to pvp and pve more than we do now.

5. If we still have hirelings, place them on a set 12 cycle. Many people are not an a 9-5 schedule. Here are some of the dynamics that make your current system difficult:

a) 12 hours shifts;
b) dedicated family time (don't let the wife/husband feel neglected or no more gaming);
c) rotating shift work;
d) long commute times;
e) rotating shift hours;
f) unscheduled life events.

They have suggested 12pm and 12am as set times. That way a person would have a twelve hour window to check your mail.

Hirelings are suppose to obtain things we need. We spent valuable skills points to "hire" them.

If my employees, in real life, tried to pass by me the mediocre results of their "handy work", I would fire them, and hire someone else that could bring me quality items--not items that have very little or NO VALUE. For the most part they are without value and take up critical inventory, bank and guild bank space.

Summary:

This will not only impact crafters it will impact every player. What happens when gold or purple mats sell for 10 times what they do now.

I have several other crafters getting numbers on the writs and what they return on the PTS.

Everyone needs to advise every guildmate they have to speak up and let the developers know this will not be good for the overall economy of the game.



Most graciously,

osacee

Troneon

I agree with everything said.+100000

I also do not like crafting writs, it does feel like "busy work" "dailies grind" and it takes way to long to complete them if you don't have the materials already.

I like crafting but when it takes up half my game time in one day it becomes really a hateful thing to do.

Robbmrp

Great OP. Hirelings need to be fixed, not nerfed.

MrGhosty

Interesting points here but I can't say that I agree.

Hirelings were providing high end improvement mats (even if sporadically) that you didn't have to go out and gather yourself. While it sounds from your description that this isn't the case, there are those who simply farm those mats as easy gold. Some of these people then turn around and simply sell those mats on at high prices which makes it an expensive endeavor for crafters to get a hold of them when they need them. I think ZOS's thinking is trying to incentivize doing crafting writs and harvesting raw mats and refining which are both active processes versus the passive one of checking your mail. It is also worth noting that your hirelings send you leveled raw material to refine as well as trait stones and other gubbins, so with the refine rate supposedly yielding greater improvement mats it may end up still being a worthwhile thing to have.

I've not yet done crafting writs on PTS to see what the new drop rate is, but as it stands on live I agree that crafting writs aren't really worth their cost particularly with having the valuable reward (crafter map) seemingly granted on rng which hates me.

Additionally, as many players are hoping for some ability to add character slots limiting the value of the hirelings seems important to do so or there will be riot about people buying character slots for more mules and hireling mail gathering.

The guild I run is also quite upset about the hireling changes, but I still disagree that they should be MORE profitable. With the changes to stacks allowing for 200 it should be a bit easier to keep yourself stockpiled for writs and I'm not sure about your calculations, but I can get a stack of refined mats (sometimes one of each type) in about an hour and a half. Add that into the stack of raw materials I get from my hireling and I can do several writs without any major time commitment (not every day, but fairly often).

What I DO agree with is how poorly crafting writs have been handled and they provide little to no benefit for Master Crafters and aren't even that great for players trying to level their craft up. Breaking down the random junk you pick up while questing plus getting a crafting buddy for breaking down is still the most effective means of leveling a craft if not a bit expensive at times.

To me there should be guaranteed rewards for the crafting writs, something a long the lines of after X number of writs completed you will receive a survey. and then make the RNG alternative styles of the current motif sets, nirncrux and dwemer frames. So for every writ you do there is a chance you will pull a motif or a valuable trait material and have a guaranteed survey map after a set number of writs completed.

Kalman

osaceeub17_ESO wrote: »

Each refined mat uses 10 raw mats to create. That is 1000 raw mats per writ (3000 raw mats for all three writs-DAILY).

That is completely wrong. How can you be a crafter and think that is the case? Yes you need 10 raw to refine, but you get between 7 and 10 refined mats not 1.
The average refined you get is 8, so on average you need 130 raw mats to get just over 100 refined mats.

Jayne_Doe

I agree with the OP on this. Yes, people can make a bunch of alternates to farm mats from hirelings, but there are actually those of us who don't do this. I have only one lvl3 BS hireling, and after about 8 or 9 months, have only managed to amass 35 tempering alloys, and probably half of them have come from refining.

I like increasing the drop rate from refining, but significantly reducing the already paltry drop rate from hirelings to add a significant (but presumably still paltry) chance of getting them from a writ doesn't really help, due to the large amount of resources you must acquire in order to do the writ in the first place. I was lvl 50 in BS before the writs were introduced, so I only did them when I happened to have the required number of mats from my wanderings while questing. Only obtained one survey and little else to make it worthwhile. I realize that adding boosters is an attempt to make it more worthwhile, but this change only forces people to spend more time doing writs, for a miniscule chance of actually obtaining a rare booster.

Again, hirelings were designed to help us obtain rare resources. They aren't to be our only resource, but there are those of us who don't "game the system." Now I have to spend more time farming and competing with other farmers to have the same chance at obtaining rare resources as I currently have in 1.5. Ah well, I didn't want to do any PvE anyway.

Sigtryggr

I consider myself a casual crafter and I agree with the hireling change. This was a poor game mechanic from the very beginning. There is a lot of ‘relog crafters’ who leveled up all 8 characters just to get the max hirelings and resell the purple and gold materials. At the moment, this is the best way to make gold in the game other than maybe ‘farming’ motifs and high end gear. Both strategies have very little to do with actual gameplay. Being a ‘real’ crafter in this game and actually crafting stuff for other players will earn you very little compared to playing the alts game. Some crafts, like provisioning, were trivial to level, so you could probably have 8 master provisioners in a matter of days if you really wanted. How was that fun and not bad for the game?

In reality, people who will be mostly affected by this are the ‘relog crafters’ and that is a good thing, in my opinion, as I have always seen this as an exploit. I agree that some of the writs are not really worth the hassle now, but I believe that is what they intend to improve. If the golden materials taken away from hirelings will show up in writs rewards, people who are willing to do them will be fine.

The only way to deal with the alt game and keep casual players happy would be to provide some sort ‘hireling enlightenment’ system where if you play the character for X amount of time the hirelings for that character get greatly improved chances of delivering good materials in the next mail.

Also, I think it would be worth considering to allow the equipment crafting writs to be made with any level of material, so people can always find the raw materials if they want to, even in peak times.

osaceeub17_ESO

Kalman wrote: »

osaceeub17_ESO wrote: »

Each refined mat uses 10 raw mats to create. That is 1000 raw mats per writ (3000 raw mats for all three writs-DAILY).

That is completely wrong. How can you be a crafter and think that is the case? Yes you need 10 raw to refine, but you get between 7 and 10 refined mats not 1.
The average refined you get is 8, so on average you need 130 raw mats to get just over 100 refined mats.

I sincerely apologize for my error. You are correct. I have edited the post to reflect what you pointed out.

I_killed_Vivec

Admittedly I'm "idling" at the moment - anything I haven't completed can wait until the Champion System comes out and XP has value again - but I don't have any trouble gathering the raw materials needed for writs.

I'm level 50 in all the crafts, so the XP from writs is meaningless. Though the cash is close to 5K for not much effort, and I average 2 surveys a day (but not all of the surveys provide anything useful - Kutas, not Tas please; Bugloss not Wormwood).

My problem is with the random nature of the rewards - a trait stone is an insult, the same recipe that they have just asked me to provide is nonsense, repair kits get sold to merchants along with the trash weapons, armour and enchantments (though why I get paid in these for providing them I have no idea).

I'm not sure about the hireling problem.

Over something like six months I have received the grand total of 20 tomatoes - having items only come from hirelings is not satisfactory, because then you are playing the RNG game and through no fault of your own you might be losing.On the other hand, you invest skill points in hirelings, so you do expect something in return better than just materials that would take you a couple of minutes to get for yourself.

I don't mind "busy work" because I tend to do it while I am running round playing the game in any case. It doesn't take too long running round Craglorn to pick up all I need for the next writ.

What I do object to is the cocky letters that accompany materials from hirelings telling me how well they have done sourcing all these rare ingredients... only to find that I've been sent hops or just two runes (no Aspect rune).

Ashtaris

I agree with you 100%. Supposedly from the PTS Patch notes the drop rate on rare tanins and tempers was going to increase by refining. Well I call BS to ZOS on that one. I refined almost 700 pieces of cloth and received 5 Elegant Linings and one Dreugh Wax. Out of 700 pieces of wood, I received two Mastics and two Rosins. I faired a bit better on refiniing ore with about 700 pieces I received 3 Tempering Alloys. But really the point is that we should get some perks for working hard to level up our crafting professions. Having our hirelings bring us rare mats, tempers, and tanins was one of those nice perks.

And don't get me started on Enchanting if they are nerfing the hirelings for those. We are suppose to go out in the world and find Aspect runes for those? HA, what a laugh

Like you mentioned, they are giving us "busy work". And the only reason they are doing that is to try and keep us busy while they wait months before they can release new content.

Wreuntzylla

Sigtryggr wrote: »

In reality, people who will be mostly affected by this are the ‘relog crafters’ and that is a good thing, in my opinion, as I have always seen this as an exploit.

An exploit? In other words, it's your position that the devs are so naive and simple headed that it didn't occur to them that people would use alts to do things they couldn't do conveniently, or at all, with a single character? It's pretty hard to believe.

Let me list all the other exploits according to that logic.

1. Twinking low levels alts with crafted gear.
2. Running timered quests and dungeons on different alts under the timer.
3. Swapping account bound dungeon gear to an alt that only PvPs.
4. Leveling alts to 50 in every craft so you can make items without relogging.
5. Minimizing the time to 9 traits by researching on multiple alts.
6. Over farming motifs, recipes and other lootables using multiple alts.
7. Leveling multiple alts to have a needed class for any PUG.
8. Leveling multiple alts to have different classes for different dungeons.
9. Leveling multiple alts for roleplay (e.g., vamp, werewolf, different races..)
10. Leveling multiple alts of the same class to avoid respeccing.
11. Levelling multiple alts to always have the strongest class in PvP or PvE.
12. And so on...

I do not think the devs are simple, and there are many ways they could have avoided the issue if they thought an issue existed. For example, have a pool of hirelings per account from which to hire, with 1 top tier hireling, 2 next tier hirelings, etc...

osaceeub17_ESO

Hirelings are not a "cheat". Most people sell items they pick up (as they level) so they will have funds to buy pots, nice equipment or other objects. They prefer money. Crafters forgo selling equipment--they instead break it down to level their skills.

Getting to level 50 in any crafting skill requires a lot of sacrifice, time and effort. Crafters always have to balance their time between gathering mats, deconing equipment and making gear for trade (and friends); and the time they would like to be spending with our friends and guildmates completing dungeons.

Crafters have to make the decisions whether to level their skills in offensive/defensive path or put skill points into crafting so they can make the equipment their guildies/friends and acquaintances request as they level up higher and higher.

Crafters are not cheating when they use our hirelings -- they are using their resources wisely. Without hirelings there will be far fewer crafters as it would take ever greater time to fulfill the crafting requirement.

I_killed_Vivec

osaceeub17_ESO wrote: »

Crafters have to make the decisions whether to level their skills in offensive/defensive path or put skill points into crafting so they can make the equipment their guildies/friends and acquaintances request as they level up higher and higher.

Crafters are not cheating when they use our hirelings -- they are using their resources wisely. Without hirelings there will be far fewer crafters as it would take ever greater time to fulfill the crafting requirement.

I'm level 50 in all crafts on a single vr14 character that has not had to forego putting skill points into offensive or defensive attributes (class skills, all armour types, three weapon lines...).

It does not take long to fulfil crafting requirements. I'd love refining to be buffed, that way I'd be responsible for more of my own progress/attainments - rather than playing the random number game with crafting mules and multiple hirelings. Get materials, do the refining, get the bonus for doing it yourself.

Having said that, I've also "paid" for hirelings with skill points so I do expect them to deliver.

osaceeub17_ESO

During the last PTS i used my copied toons and maxed all my hirelings to level 50 with 3 hirelings. These are the numbers i got from the comparison of improvement mats between the PTS hirelings and Live ESO hirelings.


Live ESO

9--Rosin
16-Dreugh Wax
8--Tempering alloy

28-elegant lining
17-grain solvent
17-mastic

15-Dwarven oil
46-embroidery
17-Turpin

16-hemming
7--honing stone
12-pitch

PTS server

1--Rosin
8--Dreugh Wax
1--Tempering alloy

18-elegant lining
19-grain solvent
18-mastic

28-Dwarven oil
82-embroidery
20-Turpin

18-hemming
6--honing stone
9--pitch

osacee
v14 sorc, v14 templar, v10 (dedicated crafter) templar

BlueIllyrian

Crafting will be butchered in accordance with demands of the cash shop, no game was ever an exception to this.

Inco

Hirelings really do have crap drop ratios today. Dropping them lower is silly I agree.

The WRIT system needs a rework as RNG is terrible. If you are going to shaft he use of hirelings (IE: Kill the use off) then at least beef up the WRIT system rewards that is nothing but a time sink and mat drain (As intended).

utbackpacker911b14_ESO

I agree about your theory with the hirelings,but I have to say everything else is way off.As far as gathering there are a lot of players that like to farm and those that don't,it seems that the players who do not like to farm are the more outspoken ones,so games turn into WOW and they just hand the players everything.

Solariken

I would actually like to see hirelings removed altogether. I really dislike being required to have 7 alts whose only purpose is to farm mail. I also feel like the hirelings detract from the value of being a master crafter because anyone can reap the benefits without doing any actual crafting/gathering.

I like the concept of moving the materials to in-game crafting tasks - I also don't mind tying some of the boosters to writs.

HOWEVER, I actually think it's stupid that you acquire boosters from refining raw materials. Why would Dreugh Wax magically appear from a cotton plant? It makes NO SENSE.

I think the primary sources for boosters should be deconstruction, drops from NPCs/monsters, and perhaps non-gold vendors who would allow players to "trade up" a certain number of lesser boosters for a higher-quality booster. The drop chances/cost for all of these could be modified with skill points, essentially achieving the same value hirelings currently provide.

Also, I would like a 1g vendor value added to all trait/motif stones! (which are currently worthless)