I'm sure a majority of us have waited for the weekends in recent months, wondering what new delights await us in the Luxury Goods Vendor in The Hollow City. It's been a simply marvelous selection, from gorgeous glowing flowers to fancy lamps to gross strings of drying fish. Everything you could hope for, really! There's just a few little issues, a few minor details like thE cOsT OF EVERYTHING bEING TOO DaNG HIGH!!

Let me explain.
As a person who primarily PvP's in this game, the cost of goods at the luxury vendor seem simply ludicrous. Recently the Trueflame campaign ended and I got a whopping 35k gold or so for a month-long endeavor. This is swell and all, but then you look at the prices of some of the luxury goods and suddenly that whole month of work goes towards buying a single fancy skull statue. It's a nice statue, but what am I going to do next week? Or the week after that? Now I've been an industrious Khajiit and also take time to do crafting writs, some farming, and that sort of thing, but this barely kept me solvent with the sheer quantity and expense of the luxury goods. I am continually bottoming out every week despite playing an above-average number of hours, and that's a bit distressing.
Let's not forget that the past two weeks have seen a large increase in the
number of items up for sale. Normally it's just three or four, but the past two weeks we've gotten EIGHT. On top of this, most of the things don't have enough aesthetic weight to buy a single copy. Take the flowers, for instance. You'd have to buy a dozen of most varieties just to have the HOPE of getting a good arrangement in a large house. Never mind the eight sigil stands you'd have to have bought the last couple weeks to fit all your fancy altars on (assuming you only want a single alter per deity, and what kind of piety does
THAT show, huh??).
This, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg, because there's also a host of achievement furnishings you can buy which are every bit as expensive, sometimes moreso! I wonder how an average player is supposed to be able to save up enough to get even one of these things, like the 100k skyshard. I mean sure, I've had times where I'd be able to afford something like that, but not on top of these luxury goods! It's not like I can just turn my millions of AP into Sudden Gold or anything since almost nobody was willing to pay for Akaviri motifs previously, and they especially aren't going to pay after the anniversary event (which, to be fair, was actually really cool and fun). Of course, that's hardly exclusive to PvP. I hear it's pretty difficult to make any respectable money running trials and other PvE content that isn't mindlessly farming gold.
So with all of that out of the way, I have a few questions for the community in general and for the relevant folks at ZOS in particular.
- Should an average player be able to afford the luxury goods for each week? What about above average? What's the minimum number of hours someone should have to invest before time-gated content is essentially cut off from them?
- In relation to the above, should the type of play someone engages in matter? Grinding mindlessly for gold is hand-over-fist more lucrative than actually playing content with any degree of nuance, like dungeons or PvP. Do we really want to encourage that kind of gameplay over more engaging content? Is that what this game should be known for? (nothing against folks who like grinding, btw, but why should that be the most lucrative?)
- How much of a gold sink should the housing system be? What kind of metrics should be used to decide an appropriate amount? Average player's weekly income adjusted for total available goods? How can that even be measured when there's no cap on the number of goods to buy? Maybe base it on average available furniture slots in houses of average size?
- What is more important to the health of the game, gold sinking or creativity? What's the sweet spot for the balance between the two?
- How should noncraftable goods even be priced? Some system relating the size of the asset to vibrancy of the colors coupled with polygon complexity? Gut feeling?
- How many hours should someone spend per week to have a reasonable expectation to experience all of (or at least 95%+ of) the content? How is this affected by the need to grind four hours just to have some ability to work with housing system?
- How much should cross-system play be encouraged? Like, how much should we encourage PvE and PvPers to play each other's content, and how much should we encourage both to work with housing content? Should we encourage this at all? If we do want cross-system engagement, how is this being hurt by multiple extreme gold sinks, like the luxury goods vendor, achievement furnishings vendor, The Golden vendor, and general other economic hangups like furniture recipe availability/prices and furniture crafting material costs?
I am currently feeling that there is a significant divide between how much content is available and how much someone can reasonably expect to complete, and it centers largely around trying to juggle housing interests with literally anything else except gold farming. To address that issue, I have a probably-controversial but ultimately reasonable suggestion. I think when a noncraftable good is purchased (be it an achievement furnishing or a luxury furnishing) that asset should be permanently unlocked via the collections UI in a similar way to Undaunted trophies and pets. Unlike those objects, however, I don't think there should be a limit to the number of times they can be placed.
Obviously there are a couple significant drawbacks to this proposal. First and foremost, this would undoubtedly be a pain in the boot from a development standpoint. Second, it takes an extreme gold sink and turns it into a lesser gold sink, which "is a slap in the face" to all those poor souls (myself included) who went and bought multiple copies of the luxury/achievement items.
To address the primary point of contention (dev time), I'd like to first point out that some kind of offloading of these goods out of the player's inventory is simply going to be necessary after a while. Like, we can't be getting up to eight new items each week and expect them to not start piling up in inventory, on alts, and in banks, even
with the ESO Plus double bank space coming. Something is definitely going to give, and whether that comes in the form of some kind of furniture warehouse/bag or through Collections or whatever, it will reach a significant pain point and it's better to start figuring out (and coding!) ways to address it sooner rather than later. This is of course something that would take a while to develop, but I fully believe it's in everyone's best interest to go this route.
As to the second issue, it's really just a matter of the scale of the sink changing, it's not actually going away. You could eventually buy access to all the current Achievement furnishings, sure, but it's not like they've stopped putting in new achievements with every update. Plus you'd still have to buy whatever new things comes in the luxury goods vendor every week, so it would still be a constant drain on your funds, just like everyone wanted! Yeah, it won't help the fact that you bought 50 of each kind of glowing flowers and a wealth of sigil stands for your prized Aedric idol stones, but gaming (and real life) are full of such post-hoc adjustments. When it gets down to it, we've had the opportunity to work with far more assets than someone who only bought one or two of the items, so we make up some of the difference by that early access to cool stuff. Therein lies the value of our early investment, which hopefully you've capitalized on!!
Now with those out of the way, let me tell you about the
Fully Automated Luxury Benefits of such a system!!
First, it would solve part of the truly dreadful inventory issues furniture is causing! Wooo!! Stick that in your bank and collect it! Second, it would give you more freedom to
Create Quality Content using assets that have traditionally only been available for a short time, forcing you to make rush decisions on how much you MIGHT need of a certain item, and hoping you aren't wrong. No more failed projects, you would always have what you need when it comes to noncrafted goods. You'd also, you know, be able to use the same asset in more than one house!! Aww, your voidbloom garden would look great in both the Ebonheart Chateau AND a little corner of your Earthtear Cavern? BAMCOW, do it up, we have granted access!! You want to build a theater stage in both the Daggerfall Overlook AND the Serenity Falls Estate, each geared towards the local culture's own unique theater traditions, but you just don't have the 600k gold for stage lighting in the form of activated skyshards? LOL who does?? BOOM, now YOU DO! And the vast majority of players will still be bottoming out on gold, but you could actually also afford, like, some tempering alloys or fancy rings from The Golden now and again! COMPROMISE,
YEAH!!
Ahem.
Anyway, I hope we can start a conversation on this matter. I am completely enamored with the possibilities of housing, but for myself and many others it looks more and more like a pipe dream than something we can really hope to keep up with.
Obligatory pre-cryhard soundoff
I notice that whenever anyone makes a thread suggesting any kind of change whatsoever, there will immediately be a series of disparaging remarks that completely ignore the content of the post and jump to a bunch of similar (and invariably false) conclusions. SO! I'm just going to list some counters to the most common low-effort petulance that I've seen, and if I find any responses of that type I'll just link this this and bold the relevant passages. :-)
- Actually, I AM a subscriber, and completely uninterrupted to boot!
- No, I DON'T want everything right now! I want the content to be realistically accessible without having to devote my whole life to gaming!
- No, I DON'T want everything for free with no effort! I just think the current balance between accessible content and player effort is skewed too much towards an abundance of effort and not enough towards enjoying content!
- Actually, I DID buy my houses with Crowns! I am no enemy of the Crown Store.
- Yes, your alternative solution has some good components. You should totally make your own topic on it so it can get the attention it deserves and the community can flesh out/expand on it more.
- No, your alternative solution is bad and you should feel bad. You should totally make your own topic on it so we can tear it apart properly.
Anyway, thanks for reading, I look forward to the community's thoughts on the matter! ^.^