Crafting Writ Feedback and Suggestions

GilGalad

Hello,

I would like to discuss some changes to the crafting writs introduced with One Tamriel:

Crafting & Harvesting

Survey Reports received from Crafting Writs may now send you to any zone throughout the world.
You may now pick up Crafting Writs from Writ Boards outside your home alliance.
Note: Deliveries sites are still determined by your original alliance.
When opening a Clothing, Woodworking, or Blacksmithing Writ reward box, you now have a chance to obtain a shipment of 25 refined materials from a previous tier of materials.
These shipments appear whenever you do not obtain a Survey Report.
You no longer need to be Champion 10 or above to obtain Crafting Writs for Craglorn and Orsinium.
Note: You still must have access to Orsinium in order to receive an Orsinium crafting writ.
All harvest nodes now scale to your combat level or applicable crafting passive rank.


Survey Reports

Fixed an issue that caused Lush plants at Clothier survey sites to produce more cloth than intended. This brings them back in line with similar nodes for other professions.
Furrier’s Traps are unaffected, with the result that Clothier surveys still provide more combined materials than Blacksmith or Woodworker surveys.

Some numbers from my experience, doing the writs on 8 chars for over a year:
At the moment survey reports cover about 40%-50% of the needed materials for the blacksmithing and woodworking writs and about 75%-80% of the clothier writs. With the changes to the clothing surveys the gold returns will decrease and crafters will have to farm or buy a lot more materials to do the daily writs. I would like to see the survey material coverage in the range from 50%-75%.


Gereral Feedback:
With smart management of materials and precrafting one can reduce the time to do the crafting part of the writs to few minutes per character. Actually the most time consuming part is collecting all the survey reports. My approach is to collect a few surveys of the same type and then go and collect them all at the same time, reducing teleporting and traveling to a minimum. With the removal of the region limitation the time to collect surveys will drastically increase, since you will likely only have one or two reports per zone even if you collect them for some days. At the moment crafting dailies are one of the most time efficient gold gain methods and the only real gold gain from crafting professions.

While I understand the exploring argument behind sending people everywhere to collect survey reports I think it will just discourage people to do the wirts. A low level character might not even have a wayshrine in a zone with the survey report, while a maxed character has seen most of the zones anyways and just has to travel more. You might have seen the discussion about crafting writs if they are worth doing or not even before these changes.

Compared to other farming methods doing writs has some high requirements: In order to be done efficiently you need to max out all crafting professions on several characters and spend a lot of skill points. Other gold farming methods don't come with such requirements, therefore crafting writs should stay the most time efficient.


Other Feedback:
There is still one blacksmithing writ that requires you to craft 5 instead of 3 items (the one involving daggers). This makes sense for the lowest level writs where daggers use much less materials than other items, but it makes no sense for the top tier writs.


Suggestions:
There is a simple, lore friendly solution I would like to present:
There are hirelings in the game, collecting materials for experienced master crafters every day. Why would a master crafter travel around Tamriel to collect materials, while he has hirelings?
What about introducing a rank 4 hireling for blacksmithing, clothing, woodworking and enchanting. When skilled, you are able to right click on a survey report and select "give to hireling". With some time delay (24-72 hours) you will get a mail with the survey materials. There might be some malus involed like not using the CP passive if unlocked, which results in about 10% less materials, or limitations like only one survey per hireling at the time, so you can't just move all reports to the character with the rank 4 hirelings skilled.This should not be too complicated to implement and would give people time to explore the new vet dungeons instead of traveling around and harvesting materials.

If anything like that is not possible to implement I would like to see the change reverted, at least for the top tier writs. Compared to lower tier writs they still have the worthless inspiration gain, that no one needs at max level, so give them at least a boost in efficiency.


How do you feel about the changes and my suggestions?

I'm going to tag @ZOS_GinaBruno and @ZOS_RichLambert since I'm not sure who is in charge of crafting and economy stuff.

Thank you for reading,

Gil-Galad


Update (PTS 2.6.2):

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Crafting & Economy
Survey Reports

• Survey Reports now drop half as often from Crafting Writs, but rich nodes at survey sites now provide twice as many materials as they did previously. This should result in roughly the same amount of materials from Survey Reports overall, but each individual report is now more lucrative.
• Survey Reports are no longer unique items, and now stack to 200. Only one Survey Report will be used each time you approach and harvest the associated survey report site.

These is definitely steps in the right direction, but I think it is not enough. The most efficient way to collect surveys will now be to save some and move them to one character. While dropping the unique property is a nice change it actually doesn't matter that much and here is why:
We have 5 professions with surveys as writ rewards (Blacksmithing, Clothing, Woodworking, Enchanting, Alchemy). Every zone has 3 unique survey maps per profession and we have at least 16 zones with survey locations. Thats a minimum of 240 unique survey maps. Assuming they will all drop at the same rate, it is very unlikely to get two identical ones. This will still fill up the characters inventory or the bank pretty fast.

So as we see the problem is still that survey maps will drop for every zone, instead of only the one zone where you turned in the writ materials. I'm still waiting for an explanation why that was changed, since I see no real reasoning behind it. The changes made in 2.6.2 are really good but still don't solve the problems caused by removing the limitation to one zone. No one asked for that change and so far I've only seen one comment that was not against it. Keeping the 2.6.2 changes and reverting the change that survey maps drop for every zone would make a lot crafters happy especially on the console, where they don't have addons like "Lost Treasures", wich makes a nice red X on the map depending on the surveys in your inventory, so you just need to open the map to see all survey locations instead of every single survey.

This kind of remembers me of the Dark Deal changes, where Wrobel said that he wants it to feel awesome if you manage to use Dark Deal in combat. Do you want it to feel awesome if we find a survey location where we have never been before?

Alanar

This ^^. I've doing writs daily on 12 characters since we got 12 slots, and I've come to the same conclusions. Equipment writs are marginal at the moment with current materials prices, after the DLC, they won't be worth the time in their current form, so at the moment I'm planning to cut down to just the consumable writs.

It would also be helpful if the survey maps were not unique items. Right now if you happen to get two of the same map, you have to leave it in the container, which is manageable, but annoying. Removing the unique trait would be a quality of life improvement.

Beardimus

I can not even imagine getting surveys in different zones. Whilst leveling crafting it was a nightmare having drop offs and survey in all zones. Top tier should be in one zone only, as you have already explored!!

Honestly, its so efficient right now do pre-stock and do all 6 writs each day. And then after a few weeks do the surveys as you say in one hit.

Flak

Yes yes yes!
I'm doing Writs on 8 toons, started SoTH with 2.5k Ruby Ash, 2.4k Ancestor Silk and 2.4k Rubedite. I crafted nothing for myself in this Time, this is what I'm left with:
585 Ruby Ash (bought a stack cheap)
1.6k Ancestor Silk
200 Rubedite (bought like 5 Stacks)

Also this includes everything I deconstructed in that time and got from hirelings.
I think that is just way too much loss, and with prices going through the roof I really think about quitting the writs.
seems like I'll have to rely on selling my loot... oh wait all BoP now...
My best guess is that they want to drain as much gold as possible before Housing comes so we have to buy everything with crowns

code65536

I don't want to rezone and endure rezoning load screens just to collect my surveys. What a horrible idea...

Grileenor

Though I do writs I have to wonder, what drives you guys to log into the game. What you say feels like "working" a game, not playing it. Predo stacks of things? Doing all writs daily on 12 toons?

I sincerely hope they get the moneygains out of the writs. I do writs out of curiosity, Its the lottery motivation to get a crux in Craglorn or not while collecting a survey. I don't like working or farming, I prefer to play a game

Anyway, being send all over the world minimizes the chance to get a survey in craglorn thus being able to collect something special. I don't see the point in doing survey, when there is nothing but mats. As for the money part: we don't need it. I have never seen a game where money (currently) is as useless as in ESO.

Give us the chance to find rare things in surveys anywhere in the world, and the new system would be fun. I will not do any more writs once One Tamriel hits live with surveys all over the world which only offer more mats for more writs

STEVIL

I believe the writs need reworking too for equipment.

I have three master enchanter, three master provisioner, two master clothier, one alchemy, one blacksmith, one wood... i think thats it ... divided over six characters. I also run alchemy writs and provisioning even low level on each since the low level writs for those still provide useful mats.

I stopped doing any of the equipment writs when it became obvious that going to all ruby made it not worth it.

here is what i propose:
EQUIPMENT WRITS: Reduce each top-tier writ to ONE item of a GIVEN STYLE with a GIVEN TRAIT. that spreads the mats loss over all the resources - like the consumables do. it also encourages even master crafters to keep getting the motifs. it provides reasons for second and third crafters to still spend time to learn the styles and motifs. In short it encourages "master crafters" to be just that - masters - not just high end guys looking for better hireling drops and writ surveys. You can allow a crafter who doesn't have the style or trait to provide an additional item for each lost feature - so three generic items would be OK or two with EITHER trait or style or one with trait and style.

ALL TOP TIER "MASTER WRITS": At the top tier after the character has maxed the craft, inspiration gain is converted into enlightenment time making writs again a good way to advance the character.

SURVEYS TURN INS ETC: Any zone i can get a survey to go to SHOULD also be a zone i can get a survey from? So let us turn in completed writ stuff in any zone that there are crafting surveys for (that we can get.) make it more likely than not that when you get a survey it is for the zone you are getting it from.

nine9six

I do writs every day when I log in. If the new update will have me porting all over the world for the surveys I'll probably stop doing them.

I already have to motivate myself to running all over 1 map as it is.

Pass...

Carbonised

- Not a fan of surveys all over the place. On the other hand, also not a fan or only getting nirn with lvl 9 surveys. Come on, nirn should be a reward for having maxed out your crafting at level 10, not for deliberately staying at level 9. That's just silly. Solution? Scrap the 'all over the place' surveys, and have lvl 10 surveys end in Craglorn with a chance for nirn.

- Also not a fan of getting the lower tier mats on your writs. Why would I use ruby mats on my writs and end up with mats for level 35... From how I read it, these lower tier mats are an ADDITION to the current rewards, and not a substitute. However, if the introduction of lower tier mats in writ rewards is with the drawback that other, current, rewards will be more rare, then it's a stupid decision plain and clear.

worsttankever

Related post: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/290213/crafting-surveys-will-drop-everywhere#latest

Please don't release current version on PTS where survey locations are random. Not worth the effort to collect. Loading screens and needless travel suck.

BalticBlues

Having to switch zones and endure loading screens,
I will stop doing writs alltogether.

ZOS, a game is supposed to be fun, loadings screens are just tedious.

CadenceRowan

Gah. It's enough of a hassle to go pick up the surveys when they are at reliable locations, I don't want to be chasing all over the place for them.

In all honesty, once my crafts are maxed out, I can't be bothered with the writs. It was fun at first, an easy way to make some gold (assuming you have the mats) and get some crafting XP, but the rewards really don't make it worth continuing once you've hit the max level. Enchanting surveys are terrible now, you rarely get a Potency rune (and I still miss seeing the different colored rune stones out in the wild; have not forgiven you guys for that one). Clothing/weapons take too many materials once you get to the top tier.

A big NOPE on this change.

MasterSpatula

I don't get it. I just straight up don't get you guys sometimes, ZOS. Who over there comes up with ideas like this? Is there one guy/gal over there who is so important no one dares give him/her any criticism who is only comes up with terrible ideas?

I literally cannot believe that anyone on your team thinks that sending players all over Tamriel to do surveys is in even the tiniest way a good thing. I simply cannot wrap my brain around the idea of anyone thinking that.

I don't even have any constructive criticism to give. I shouldn't have to. The idea is that blatantly awful.

BenevolentBowd

BalticBlues wrote: »

Having to switch zones and endure loading screens,
I will stop doing writs alltogether.

ZOS, a game is supposed to be fun, loadings screens are just tedious.

In addition to the above, I'm not liking the impact of non-stackable survey maps and non-stackable crafting containers containing survey maps will have on my inventory.

Perhaps, reducing the number of survey locations per zone would help. Some zones only have 1 location per profession and other three. Heh, if so, please don't eliminate the ones nearest the wayshrines.

STEVIL

MasterSpatula wrote: »

I don't get it. I just straight up don't get you guys sometimes, ZOS. Who over there comes up with ideas like this? Is there one guy/gal over there who is so important no one dares give him/her any criticism who is only comes up with terrible ideas?

I literally cannot believe that anyone on your team thinks that sending players all over Tamriel to do surveys is in even the tiniest way a good thing. I simply cannot wrap my brain around the idea of anyone thinking that.

I don't even have any constructive criticism to give. I shouldn't have to. The idea is that blatantly awful.

Well the idea is more world wide content. more world wide play.

this has been happening and coming.
See TG crime sprees.
See DB hits.
See upcoming guild dailies.

Now to be fair...

The way i do writs now is i run them and run them and run them and then at some point i take a character with a bunch of surveys of one spot ans send them off to go get stuff.
One trip harvest a bunch over and over then one trip.
It almost always involves wayshrines.

if multiple chars have the same, i use my banker-in-a-pack to swap out in etc.

That really wont change with OneT and global writs.

When i have 3-4 or more Glenumbras i will trek one guy off to glenumbra.

it might take longer to get a clutch of one location but hey thats about it.

So i dont see it as a major problem but not a benefit either.

i am FAR MORE CONCERNED with MAKING EQUIPMENT WRITS GREAT AGAIN!!!

Should be IMO:
Craft One (ITEM) with (TRAIT) and (STYLE) but if you use a different trait or a different style you must turn in two.

This spread the cost in mats out between all the elements of crafting like the others do.

Vangy

Agree with OP. NO WRITS ALL OVER THE WORLD PLEASE. TOO MANY LOAD SCREENS. Too inefficient.

Writs need to change. Need at best 1 or 2 items to craft for turn in. Right now the time vs reward margin is way too slim. The 5 item blacksmith writ is also borderline waste of time and mats.... ZOS help crafters out by not effing over crafting dailies please. To benefit off these, you need multiple toons with all crafts level to 50 which is a pretty big investment. At least reward us for the time spent.....

Altaire

MasterSpatula wrote: »

I don't get it. I just straight up don't get you guys sometimes, ZOS. Who over there comes up with ideas like this? Is there one guy/gal over there who is so important no one dares give him/her any criticism who is only comes up with terrible ideas?

I literally cannot believe that anyone on your team thinks that sending players all over Tamriel to do surveys is in even the tiniest way a good thing. I simply cannot wrap my brain around the idea of anyone thinking that.

I don't even have any constructive criticism to give. I shouldn't have to. The idea is that blatantly awful.

I couldn't have said it better...
Lets hope this 'feature' doesn't make it to 'live'.

I'm still searching the forums for things that are 'Good' about OneTam.

Beardimus

I'm pretty sure, they just want rid of trading.

It sounds drastic, but I've seen the economy in provisioing go (writ recipe selling) enchanting, (ease of farm / Glyph / Kuta price drop) dungeon sets going BOP and currently Writs leading to a mat loss and now surveys scattered all over.....

Just feels that they don't want people logging on to work for gold... Shame. Brilliant part of the overall rounded game.

Mike_IG

Survey reports from any location is a big NO NO for me.

I like to save a load of them and then do them all at once (with say 4 or 5 surveys in 1 place) as it's so much quicker than doing them 1 at a time. Having them available from any location is a horrible idea as it will take ages to do them with constant load screens etc.

Eleusian

I like the change other than RNG with the writs zone.
Giving surveys for the zone we turn them in at would make better since in my opinion. I'm not sure who this would appeal to since it's completely inefficient especially on console. I'm sure PC has a add on already.

STEVIL

Beardimus wrote: »

I'm pretty sure, they just want rid of trading.

It sounds drastic, but I've seen the economy in provisioing go (writ recipe selling) enchanting, (ease of farm / Glyph / Kuta price drop) dungeon sets going BOP and currently Writs leading to a mat loss and now surveys scattered all over.....

Just feels that they don't want people logging on to work for gold... Shame. Brilliant part of the overall rounded game.

From the whole game perspective, having more players able to be more self-sufficient and not dependant on other players selling thru non-multiple-searchable guild vendors is a GOOD THING for the game.

A player having what they need to do what they want is a happier player than one feeling forced to search thru vendor after vendor at the mercy of guild traders.

As for the BOP, I am holding judgement until i see how the new drops and such turn out to work. Its possible that so much BOP will psh a lot of people back to crafted sets. But that really depends on the difficulties, the drop rates for overland, chests, maps etc and several factors that we wont know until we see the whole in play.

Equip writs need work of course - i am in favor of each requesting one item with one trait of one style and you can supply extra items if you cant do the trait or style.

but i am not for "building up economy" by making folks dependent on the Guild vendors, even if it leads to good gold harvests.

Lord_Eomer

Travelling here and there for survey is hectic, will never do unless getting a good reward that worth my hassles.

Annalyse

Really annoying change. If this goes through I will stop doing writs altogether.

worsttankever

At least make the surveys non-unique - so we can pull them out of the containers and actually see how many surveys we have for X location. So we can decide when it is worth making the trip.

Currently, because writs are unique, I have 30+ on my character. When I eventually show up to Craglorn Alchemy Survey I, I have to go through each container one by one to look for more copies of the same. When I take it out and collect the materials, I need to go back through the 29+ unopened containers again (having lost my place). Very time inefficient and annoying - especially if they will be sending me all over the world now, just not a particular zone.

By the way - Craglorn has 3 alchemy survey locations. So even though all my alchemy surveys are for craglorn, it's a mix of I, II, and III.

GilGalad

Update (2.6.2), also added to the first post:

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Crafting & Economy
Survey Reports

• Survey Reports now drop half as often from Crafting Writs, but rich nodes at survey sites now provide twice as many materials as they did previously. This should result in roughly the same amount of materials from Survey Reports overall, but each individual report is now more lucrative.
• Survey Reports are no longer unique items, and now stack to 200. Only one Survey Report will be used each time you approach and harvest the associated survey report site.

These is definitely steps in the right direction, but I think it is not enough. The most efficient way to collect surveys will now be to save some and move them to one character. While dropping the unique property is a nice change it actually doesn't matter that much and here is why:
We have 5 professions with surveys as writ rewards (Blacksmithing, Clothing, Woodworking, Enchanting, Alchemy). Every zone has 3 unique survey maps per profession and we have at least 16 zones with survey locations. Thats a minimum of 240 unique survey maps. Assuming they will all drop at the same rate, it is very unlikely to get two identical ones. This will still fill up the characters inventory or the bank pretty fast.

So as we see the problem is still that survey maps will drop for every zone, instead of only the one zone where you turned in the writ materials. I'm still waiting for an explanation why that was changed, since I see no real reasoning behind it. The changes made in 2.6.2 are really good but still don't solve the problems caused by removing the limitation to one zone. No one asked for that change and so far I've only seen one comment that was not against it. Keeping the 2.6.2 changes and reverting the change that survey maps drop for every zone would make a lot crafters happy especially on the console, where they don't have addons like "Lost Treasures", wich makes a nice red X on the map depending on the surveys in your inventory, so you just need to open the map to see all survey locations instead of every single survey.

This kind of remembers me of the Dark Deal changes, where Wrobel said that he wants it to feel awesome if you manage to use Dark Deal in combat. Do you want it to feel awesome if we find a survey location where we have never been before?

Recremen

The new 2.6.2 change does not seem like a good idea to me. It is trading a better spread across the quartiles for a larger reward for the people who manage to get a survey. This is not player-friendly. I know it's a bit against MMO convention, but I strongly feel that systems with high variability should be phased out, not made even more variable. This change may be good for the people who end up getting rewards, but it also means that a greater number of players will not get rewards, even after some arbitrarily-high number of surveys. This of course assumes that the system is pure RNG, if it's not then I'll shut my naughty mouth.

Jar_Ek

I agree with @STEVIL wrt writ crafting. What's the point of being able to craft an x trait, specific style and trait combo if you never use it? Solely for guild trading? I suggest that writs have a specific piece of equipment (style, trait, set) that provides the best rewards and then can be completed with lesser versions for lesser rewards. However I think all writs should at least break even wrt mats used and cost. Who pays for a craftsman and then once they've crafted your gear shafts them with 1/2 the costs... apparently npcs atm.

worsttankever

I'm glad they are non unique and can be traded among characters! But I play on console - no happy red x to mark the map for me.

Probably what this means is I'm going to stack all the surveys on an alt until there is absolutely no more room - then spend a weekend running down surveys all across Tamriel using Google/YouTube.

Gil.Galad wrote: »

This kind of remembers me of the Dark Deal changes, where Wrobel said that he wants it to feel awesome if you manage to use Dark Deal in combat. Do you want it to feel awesome if we find a survey location where we have never been before?

Does not sound fun to me. Sounds really lame.

STEVIL

worsttankever wrote: »

I'm glad they are non unique and can be traded among characters! But I play on console - no happy red x to mark the map for me.

Probably what this means is I'm going to stack all the surveys on an alt until there is absolutely no more room - then spend a weekend running down surveys all across Tamriel using Google/YouTube.

Gil.Galad wrote: »

This kind of remembers me of the Dark Deal changes, where Wrobel said that he wants it to feel awesome if you manage to use Dark Deal in combat. Do you want it to feel awesome if we find a survey location where we have never been before?

Does not sound fun to me. Sounds really lame.

maybe the first time you find a location it would be fun - having like successfully used google. :-)

With stacking it really means waiting to go to a given site until you have enough to make the trip worthwhile - like maybe 4-5. other than that i dont see much of a change to the way i play.

main diff will be not having tons of "boxes" with surveys in them i cant see so this will be nicer in that regard.

So instead of lotsa "unidentified boxes" holding surveys, i will have stacks of surveys and when i get any one at 5 i go to the zone or if another daily quest takes me to the zone then i grab them.

GilGalad

STEVIL wrote: »

worsttankever wrote: »

I'm glad they are non unique and can be traded among characters! But I play on console - no happy red x to mark the map for me.

Probably what this means is I'm going to stack all the surveys on an alt until there is absolutely no more room - then spend a weekend running down surveys all across Tamriel using Google/YouTube.

Gil.Galad wrote: »

This kind of remembers me of the Dark Deal changes, where Wrobel said that he wants it to feel awesome if you manage to use Dark Deal in combat. Do you want it to feel awesome if we find a survey location where we have never been before?

Does not sound fun to me. Sounds really lame.

maybe the first time you find a location it would be fun - having like successfully used google. :-)

With stacking it really means waiting to go to a given site until you have enough to make the trip worthwhile - like maybe 4-5. other than that i dont see much of a change to the way i play.

main diff will be not having tons of "boxes" with surveys in them i cant see so this will be nicer in that regard.

So instead of lotsa "unidentified boxes" holding surveys, i will have stacks of surveys and when i get any one at 5 i go to the zone or if another daily quest takes me to the zone then i grab them.

Ok lets do some math:
Say you get 100 blacksmithing surveys. What are the chances that you get 5 identical ones?
Result: about 4%.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binom(100,5)(47/48)^(95)(1/48)^5

Instead of reward boxes with double surveys you will now have different surveys blocking your inventory. The chances are pretty high that your inventory is full before you even get 2 identical surveys if you do all crafting dailies.

BergisMacBride

I do all max level writs each day on 6 chars. The only thing that bothers me a little about the changes is the survey drop rate will be even more at the mercy of the RNG gods, meaning there will be times my material inventory will suffer during periods when I am unlucky getting surveys. As for the changes to surveys stacking and being located all over the world, I will likely save them up and do them once a week.