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The Luxury Goods Are Out Of Control

Recremen
Recremen
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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!!


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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.
  1. 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?
  2. 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?)
  3. 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?
  4. 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?
  5. 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?
  6. 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?
  7. 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! ^.^
Men'Do PC NA AD Khajiit
Grand High Illustrious Mid-Tier PvP/PvE Bussmunster
  • Orbital
    Orbital
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    wow maintenance really gets to some people
    Axphykz.
    Tank
    Proud Member Of Vitality
    Spotless Triumph
    Tick Tock Tormentor
    XB1 EU
    PC EU
  • Voxicity
    Voxicity
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    Well they are kinda called LUXURY furniture. Would be a bit weird to sell them for a piece of string and a couple of buttons
  • Rinmaethodain
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    Weekend luxury furniture vendor was supposed to be a gold sink. I hoped the way its going to be implemented will at least not make the problem of "rich people get richer" worse (I didn't expect it to solve that issue).

    Unfortunately, current implementation indeed makes it worse. Average player will buy item from this vendor because they genuinely want them in their house. Someone not interested at all in these items will just skip them. This is how gold sink should work.

    What is the problem? Rich people with abundance of gold will buy these items and feed on artificial rarity, reselling them after luxury vendor's inventory changes. I think I don't have to explain how bad is it when gold is being tethered to said individuals - we have already seen examples where bored rich people with a day decide to flip price of some random item twice or three times up just from their own amusement.

    In my opinion, this luxury vendor should always keep items they sell. No more "imited time" stock. It would arrive on weekend, sell items a, b, c then next weekend it would sell items d, e, f and a, b, c and so on and so on.

    This way it still functions as an efficient gold sink for people who are genuinely interested in furniture but this way it stops being abusable by rich players and wont backfire at rest of player community.
  • ParaNostram
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    Here's my answer - spend AP on valuable sets or motifs and sell that on a good guild store. There ya go, lots of gold.
    "Your mistake is you begged for your life, not for mercy. I will show you there are many fates worse than death."

    Para Nostram
    Bosmer Sorceress
    Witch of Evermore

    "Death is a privilege that can be denied by it's learned scholars."
    Order of the Black Worm
  • KingYogi415
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    I can resell you that same statue for 150k when you have the gold. I bought 7.

    Cheers!
  • Berenhir
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    If you get all your character slots to max level, you make about 48K gold every day just from writs, not counting the steady flow of mats and tempers, flowers and ingredients.

    35k gold as reward is the real joke, as you get that easily from one afternoon of random PvE. So no, the price is not out of hand. Only the PvP reward mails are pathetic.
    PC EU - Ebonheart Pact - Gray Host - Death Recap -#zergfarming -
  • Fuz
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    Berenhir wrote: »
    If you get all your character slots to max level, you make about 48K gold every day just from writs

    You also have no life.

  • Kiralyn2000
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    It does seem like the luxury goods (as well as the achivement furniture and the housing in general) are targeted towards the I Make Bank With My Trade Guild crowd.

    Which, if you think about it, makes a bit of sense - a gold sink would be targeted at the main supplies of gold.

    Doesn't make it any less frustrating to the not-making-piles-from-trade-guilds crew.


    I'm slowly gathering cash via vendoring, thievery, & Lots Of Alts. Not sure what the solution is for non-trader PvPers, as I've not even stepped into Cyrodiil yet (still have world PvE that I haven't done yet).
  • Prof_Bawbag
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    Fuz wrote: »
    Berenhir wrote: »
    If you get all your character slots to max level, you make about 48K gold every day just from writs

    You also have no life.

    What? It takes little or no time to lvl up crafts after 1 single time sink. Gather mats as you go and even better. At no time did i spend an entire day farming provisioner ingredients, glyphs or alchemy ingredients. I simply picked them up as and when. As for smithing etc, that's just a case of decon'n what i got rather than selling to a vendor. Both of which require the same amount of effort.
  • Stopnaggin
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    Fuz wrote: »
    Berenhir wrote: »
    If you get all your character slots to max level, you make about 48K gold every day just from writs

    You also have no life.

    Doing writs takes less than 5 mins, has nothing to do with having a life it's about using your time wisely. After 3 years 8 characters that are able to to do max writs is nothing.

    Back to the op, there are sought after items from pvp that you could sell for good amounts of gold. The motifs Akavari sell for good amounts of gold and you could easily make 4 times what you made in a month, in a week by selling 1 or 2 motifs.
  • Absalon
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    I didn't care reading all of this, but it's luxury right, it's supposed to be expensive.
    CP 810 (PC-NA)
    Harnak - Magplar Healer (PVE)
    Gavin - Magsorc DPS (PVE)
    Manthys - Magplar DPS (PVP)
    Adrya - Stamblade DPS (PVP)
    Targesh - Stamplar DPS (PVP)
  • Tasear
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    It's gone a bit too far lately, I say this even as a rich player
  • idk
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    PvP players can make bank buying items with their AP and selling it to other players. An active PvP players can make out fine.
  • fred4
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    I must confess I stopped reading halfway through. I make tons of gold via PvP and currently have 1.5 million in the bank, so perhaps that is an answer for you, sort of.

    ParaNostram is right. If you PvP in Cyrodiil, you should be making lots of AP. On PC EU these convert to gold at a rate of between 10 and 5 AP to 1 gold. The best rate is to be had when the Golden sells something worthwhile for 500K AP, such as gold Necklace of Necropotence or gold Elegant rings recently. These resell around the 100K gold mark.

    Other than that farm bosses in IC. Tel Vars convert at a rate of between 2 to 3 gold per tel var stone. Either you buy and resell Impenetrable Black Rose body pieces, or you buy Apothecary parcels and make potions, which can yield higher rewards.

    There. Problem solved?

    I make in excess of 200K every week, and I am by no means the most dilligent at this. I'm in a guild that sells in Craglorn. Gotta keep that trader busy, so I'm not kicked from the guild.

    By the way, I bought some luxury items hoping to resell them at inflated prices later, but I note that prices for that stuff aren't going up that much. This means you can always buy stuff you want later, at guild stores, provided you can find it. Search ALL guild stores via this web site:

    https://tamrieltradecentre.com/
  • Nickernator
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    I usually just do some quests, PvP and some basic trading. Earning around 30k / day with it. But PvP ain't a good source of income, unless you do the town daily quests, some of those drop a nice 20k item.
    ESO player since release
    EU - PC

    Meet the CP 350+ family:
    Nickernator, Imperial Dragonknight, EP
    Dar'Dur, Khajit Nightblade, AD
    Elidur, High Elf Sorcerer, DC
    Gagane, Breton Tempelar, EP
    Remos Hlaalu, Dark Elf Dragonknight, EP
    Bazugor gro-Mazgulub, Orc Tempelar, EP
    Halcan, Redguard Sorcerer, EP
    Entros Longshot, Bosmer Nightblade, EP
  • F7sus4
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    Recremen wrote: »
    The Luxury Goods Are Out Of Control (...) thE cOsT OF EVERYTHING bEING TOO DaNG HIGH!!
    Do you know what luxury good is? And how is luxury being a luxury if it's available to all peasants?
    (...)







    Exactly!
  • Chilly-McFreeze
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    fred4 wrote: »

    By the way, I bought some luxury items hoping to resell them at inflated prices later, but I note that prices for that stuff aren't going up that much. This means you can always buy stuff you want later, at guild stores, provided you can find it. Search ALL guild stores via this web site:

    https://tamrieltradecentre.com/

    That is not how ttc works. You won't be able to search ALL guild stores. Only the stuff that someone who is using this addon searched for recently.
  • Takes-No-Prisoner
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    Orbital wrote: »
    wow maintenance really gets to some people

    Nah, like I totally see where the original post is coming from. As someone who only PvPs, the Luxury Vendor saps all of my gold resources from PvP.

    What I think needs to happen is either;

    1. An option for exchanging AP for Luxury housing items or
    2. Make gold more accessible in PvP zones, especially Cyrodiil.
  • CaffeinatedMayhem
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    What is the problem? Rich people with abundance of gold will buy these items and feed on artificial rarity, reselling them after luxury vendor's inventory changes.

    This is the problem with the Luxury Items, not the price. They should be bound at purchase.
  • Kodrac
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    25346838.jpg
  • raj72616a
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    "luxury" furnisher items are dirt cheap compared to achievement furnishers and compared to crafted furnitures.

    how much mats do you need to buy to craft a single candle?
    in comparison, the sword sconces only sell for the low price of 5k per piece. and i bought 50pcs of that to build an Iron Throne.
  • fred4
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    Is it what someone searched for? Master Merchant is able to scan sales history ... but that's something else. The game client won't scan all that's on sale, unless people search for it. I see. At any rate, it helps finding stuff, wouldn't you agree?
  • cyberjanet
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    Luxury goods? I went looking the first time, and bought one of each SO THAT I COULD SEE WHAT THEY LOOKED LIKE. Meh. The trellis was nice. I found a place to hang the curtain. A guidie took the lights off me. But I don't even look any more. The price is too high to buy something sight unseen.

    Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me.
    Favourite NPC: Wine-For-All
    Mostly PC-EU , with a lonely little guy on NA.
  • Kiralyn2000
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    re: selling AP/TelVar items

    What's the option for PvPers who aren't in a trade guild (or in a bad one)?

    Gotta keep that trader busy, so I'm not kicked from the guild.

    As mentioned, I'm no pvper, but the above is part of why I'm not in a trade guild - I don't have enough things to sell weekly to make up quotas/dues. I'm a very inconsistent seller - in other MMOs I've played, I might toss 3 items on the AH in a week, or none. I've never had a steady supply of salable goods. "Commodity trader" is not why I play games, it doesn't interest me. ESO's trade guild system seems to require you to either Really Commit, or just not bother. So I'm just not bothering - but as a pve'er, I at least can vendor/fence/quest/writ for some cash. Not sure what a pvp'er can do.

    (been slowly saving up for one of the higher-end houses. Managed 1.2mil in the last two months, with six characters.)
  • Kiralyn2000
    Kiralyn2000
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    cyberjanet wrote: »
    Luxury goods? I went looking the first time, and bought one of each SO THAT I COULD SEE WHAT THEY LOOKED LIKE. Meh. The trellis was nice. I found a place to hang the curtain. A guidie took the lights off me. But I don't even look any more. The price is too high to buy something sight unseen.

    Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me.

    The weekly "luxury furniture vendor" thread is helpful for this. It generally includes a picture of the new stuff. (I grabbed six of the sigil stands, they seem like they'll be useful for decorating.)
    how much mats do you need to buy to craft a single candle?

    None? You just craft it with the stuff in your bag. ;)
    (hmm, which could be another difference re: pve/pvp.... how much opportunity to harvest mats is there in pvp?)
  • F7sus4
    F7sus4
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    Also... Calling 15k or 25k items "expensive" and "out of control"... Really? ;)
  • Hope499
    Hope499
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    I have never have used crowns, and have only used Gold to buy my house and all furnishings.

    I have no problem with any of the costs. It should be priced as is.

    It is called LUXURY items, go to the home furnisher if you want cheap and easy.
    Tripped over my friends bra.....
    ....
    ....
    ..she is always setting booby traps!
  • Hope499
    Hope499
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    Also want to ad, I made like 20k last night in PvP doing sewers...so the option is there for you.
    Tripped over my friends bra.....
    ....
    ....
    ..she is always setting booby traps!
  • Vivecc
    Vivecc
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    simple answer...its called "luxury" goods:)
    pc/eu
  • WalksonGraves
    WalksonGraves
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    359px-Robespierre_crop.jpg
    I has a plan...
    Edited by WalksonGraves on May 2, 2017 2:50PM
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