Achievement Furnishing Cost

Apollosipod

Zeni, why do you force us to pay a gold cost in-game to purchase achievement Furnishings? Forcing us to pay 100k gold for a statue really undermines the feeling of accomplishment you get from earning the achievement. If anything, give us the option to pay out the gold without the achievement so we don't have to lose everything we earned along the way to buy a trophy commemorating the adventure

prof-dracko

Agreed. Either that or lower the prices to the thousands at most, not tens of thousands. If I go to the trouble of getting the achievement, I should not also have to save up 25-50k just to be allowed my "reward".
On a similar note, some things from the vendors really have no place being there. Mnemic egg from Shadowfen? Fair enough. Unique story-relevant item. Daedric Brazier from Auridon? Really should be craftable instead. I was happy with the Psijiic stuff, selling the blueprints instead of the items individually. Why not go back and fix some of the more glaring examples in your vendors?

Mix

I whole-heartedly agree that achievement furnishings are too expensive. They shouldn't be free but they also shouldn't be as expensive as they are.

@prof-dracko I have yet to find achievement furnishings that weren't linked to the zone in some fashion. There is a daedric presence in Auridon.

I wish the Psijic stuff wasn't Bind on Pickup - unless the recipe actually said the item would be, many of us crafters purchased the plans to craft for guildies and then found out the items were bound as well. If it is going to be BOUND to me anyways - just put the item on the vendor as achievement requiring rather than me having to spend gold and then mats to make it!

prof-dracko

@Mix I understand that they're always tangentially related, but not exclusive. Daedric Braziers appear in many zones. It isn't unique to Auridon.

Mix

Hmm yeah, after looking at this "Mehrunes Dagon Brazier" it is kind of bland - i am guessing the red symbol on the corners is related to Mehrunes Dagon himself rather than being generic Daedric.

VaranisArano

Housing is a gold sink in general, and achievement furnishing are as well.

Wreuntzylla

Apollosipod wrote: »

Zeni, why do you force us to pay a gold cost in-game to purchase achievement Furnishings? Forcing us to pay 100k gold for a statue really undermines the feeling of accomplishment you get from earning the achievement. If anything, give us the option to pay out the gold without the achievement so we don't have to lose everything we earned along the way to buy a trophy commemorating the adventure

You can buy as many as you want, so it isn't really equatable to a trophy. More like memorabilia, which is typically not cheap and often sold at auction.

Apollosipod

But you can't sell them to other players so what's the point? The achievement that allows you to purchase them is singular to you so what does it matter if I want to take 50 Breton Grave watcher statues and fill my house?

Wreuntzylla

Apollosipod wrote: »

But you can't sell them to other players so what's the point? The achievement that allows you to purchase them is singular to you so what does it matter if I want to take 50 Breton Grave watcher statues and fill my house?

There are a multitude of possible dominant personalities. Probably the most common, and the one that MMOs cater to, is the builder personality. A builder is motivated by a continuous stream of successes acquired through strife and pain.

Interestingly, builders typically don't know what actually motivates them and believe they will be satisfied by easy wins, when the reality is that they subsequently just lose interest. They might even fail to connect the easy wins to the loss of interest. If you search around the internet, you can find some very interesting psychological studies on which MMOs are based.

So, if a builder could easily fill their house with 50 grave watcher statues, grave watcher statues would lose not only monetary value but also builder value. For example, in the past, people typically only used the free Daedric luxury vendor chairs to build oddball structures. I have yet to see them used in any player's property as a ... chair. Well, except in the oddball structures. One guy built a pretty awesome Dwarven war machine and used the chairs inside of it as pilot/passenger chairs.

At any rate, you might have a different dominant personality type, and in that case, it's anomalous that you aren't off playing an FPS or some other game better tailored to your dominant personality.

Interestingly, once you know how game companies use data, things that don't make sense, like the daily reward, the huge crown store splash screen that irritates just about everyone and the late-in-the-life-of-the-game addition of new player systems, suddenly make great sense. ZoS is shotgunning a variety of things that nobody asked for and would seem to be low priority, in order to gauge player reaction. They are beta testing features for future games. For example, do the free crates result in players paying for more crates than they otherwise would? Or do they lower the population by providing rewards too easily?

Daily rewards are just a constant irritant to me because I don't want any of the consumables, am vaguely interested in disceet items like the pet, and constantly have to destroy the items I don't want to keep up with the reward cycle.

prof-dracko

@Wreuntzylla I got lost on how your comment in any way addresses the issue here. The complaint is that earning the achievement required to purchase the furnishing should be enough, as in some cases the subsequent prices are ridiculous. No-one here is saying you should just be given them, nor would it diminish their value to a "builder", whatever that's meant to mean. The struggle comes in getting the achievement, not amassing an exorbitant amount of gold to grab the specific things you might want.
Speaking personally, I'm very interested in furnishing my home. I struggle enough finding materials for crafting. Having the cost of achievement furnishings reduced wouldn't diminish my entertainment, it would enhance it by allowing me to get what I need in a more efficient way. Grinding for gold doesn't make me appreciate things more, it makes me resentful that I'm only getting a single thing out of it before needing to grind again.

Wreuntzylla

prof-dracko wrote: »

@Wreuntzylla I got lost on how your comment in any way addresses the issue here. The complaint is that earning the achievement required to purchase the furnishing should be enough, as in some cases the subsequent prices are ridiculous. No-one here is saying you should just be given them, nor would it diminish their value to a "builder", whatever that's meant to mean. The struggle comes in getting the achievement, not amassing an exorbitant amount of gold to grab the specific things you might want.
Speaking personally, I'm very interested in furnishing my home. I struggle enough finding materials for crafting. Having the cost of achievement furnishings reduced wouldn't diminish my entertainment, it would enhance it by allowing me to get what I need in a more efficient way. Grinding for gold doesn't make me appreciate things more, it makes me resentful that I'm only getting a single thing out of it before needing to grind again.

I did ramble on and stray off topic at the end.

Alright, let me make an analogy. Many wealthy people belong to exclusive country clubs. They pay exorbitant initiation fees and annual fees solely for the privilege of access. Most of these clubs are centered around golf and they have first class golf courses on the premises. The annual fee doesn't cover greens fees, equipment costs and the like.

For example, one of these clubs is down the road from where I am at right now and the yearly fee is in excess of $100,000. I know some of the club members and... they don't golf. Don't even like the game of golf. They go to the club a few times a year, show their faces and drink at the bar. They get a kick out of the exclusiveness. Too each their own.

For members of the club, the entire reason for belonging would be destroyed if tomorrow the annual fees dropped to $50. You would never see their faces there again.

The reward for completing achievements is not furniture, which you seem to acknowledge. It's access to the furniture. In many cases, the items are among the best available in the game.









If you can't tell, I like statues....

In order to take them home you must pay a fee that at least theoretically scales based on desirability of the item. This is probably because the achievements themselves are faceroll. Spend the time and you are in. So, to somewhat compensate, the better items come with a larger price tag. If tomorrow everyone could take the items home on the cheap, the whole system is, at least in theory, devalued.

The only statement of personal belief I am going to share here is that I don't buy into the 'I can't furnish my home' arguments. Base furniture is not only cheap, it's plentiful. What folks mean is that they can't furnish their home with those awesome, high cost items. Unfortunately, treadmills are the basis of all MMOs.

withermane

I agree with this sentiment of removing absurdity in price for achievement furnishings. Why spend countless of hours working on a finishing achievement when you have to spend thrice that amount of time earning the gold to actually buy the achievement. Which, probably, nobody will actually see, save yourself [if you're mostly a lone-wolf]

Take for example the Preacher achievement that allows you to have all the sermons of Vivec. Coming in at a whopping 120,000 gold. That's two Kragenhomes. If the Bible was this expensive, nobody would've bothered with the religion. Ease of access to my Dunmeri religion is really a necessity you know, not a luxury.

prof-dracko

@Wreuntzylla Let me expand on your analogy. Having the achievement is being a member of the club. The furnishings are the drinks at the bar. Which, while likely pricier than other, less accessible bars, are not equatable to the cost of the membership.
Besides which, the more desirable items require more effort to obtain the prerequisite achievement. Even then, I'm still of the opinion some should be made in blueprints for free crafting instead. I'd happily pay full price for the ability to make infinite Gargoyle statues or Daedric Braziers instead of paying a huge amount for a single item.

Cardthief

100k really isnt a lot of money, you could make that in around 4+ hours, maybe even less.

Apollosipod

100k isn't really a lot of money when you have the time to grind for it. When you have already spent all the time working towards the achievement by grinding the quests, 100k is more discouraging than it is fulfilling. Not asking for it to be free, but I am a fan of the idea to make them blueprints.

Wreuntzylla

prof-dracko wrote: »

@Wreuntzylla Let me expand on your analogy. Having the achievement is being a member of the club. The furnishings are the drinks at the bar. Which, while likely pricier than other, less accessible bars, are not equatable to the cost of the membership.
Besides which, the more desirable items require more effort to obtain the prerequisite achievement. Even then, I'm still of the opinion some should be made in blueprints for free crafting instead. I'd happily pay full price for the ability to make infinite Gargoyle statues or Daedric Braziers instead of paying a huge amount for a single item.

I doubt ZoS will change this very much because it's a huge gold sink, and frankly the game doesn't have enough of them.

I had to think through the topic for a while before forming an opinion.

What I think would not be good for the game is for something superb like the Statue of the Mother being so common that people take 50 of them and make a mosaic wall of the mother, and that sort of shenanigans. And I say this as a person that, if they drop the price, will certainly do just that

At the same time, the issue with time sinks in ESO is not the individual timesinks, it's the number of time sinks. I doubt that a new player could complete all content before they shut down the servers at this point without dedicating their lives to it. I have been playing the game since release and built up a huge income generating enterprise, and even I have to wait to complete certain projects.

So perhaps a compromise might be to have a low price for the first one you buy and then it goes back to the current pricing.