The price for vouchers is steadily decreasing, due to a constant amount of mastercrafter writs entering the system, and very little to actually use the vouchers on.
The mastercrafter voucher merchant has one great flaw, which is that most of the stuff on him you only need to buy once, and then you're done with it. Like all the furniture recipes. Guilds also only buy the attunable set stations once for each set, until they have the full collection. Thus, the mastercrafter vendor needs some new items to sell, and preferably some consumables as well.
One obvious thing to put on the mastercrafter vendor is style mats required for crafting furniture. That would fit very well there, seeing that many mastercrafters would actually need those rare style pieces. The cost shouldn't be too high, since people would just pass on buying them and get them elsewhere instead.
- Culanda Laquer: 3 vouchers
- Dwemer Frames: 1 voucher
- Malachite: 1 voucher
- Bonemold Resin: 3 vouchers
- Vitrified Molondo: 1 voucher
All these items are used in the recipes sold by Rolis Hlaalu, thus it makes sense for him to sell the mats as well. Prices have been calculated roughly from the average MM prices over time. 1 voucher usually equals 800 gold, thus it's ~2400 gold for a Culanda or Bonemold, and ~800 gold for a Dwemer frame, Molondo or Malachite. These prices are a lot higher than the PC EU MM price, thus putting them for sale at Rolis wouldn't undermine the market.
Other consumables/ingredients he could sell:
- Perfect Roe: 12 vouchers
- Fortified Nirncrux: 2 vouchers
- Potent Nirncrux: 12 vouchers
- 12 x Alchemical Resin or 12 x Decorative Wax or 12 x Mundane Runes or 12 x Heartwood or 12 x Regulus or 12 x Ochre or 12 x Bast and Clean Pelt: 1 voucher
Perfect Roe is used in more and more furnishing recipes, thus is makes sense for it to be for sale at the mastercrafter vendor as well. 12 vouchers prices it a little above the MM average price, thus it wouldn't undermine the fishing market. The voucher prices for Nirncrux is also above the current market prices.
And finally, the prices for furniture crafting materials is fluctuating wildly, sometimes scraping the bottom with 3-4 gold per items for the cheapest, and sometimes rising wildly especially for runes and wax, whenever people sell less and the demand is higher. Pricing it at 1 voucher for 12 items is about 66 gold per item, which in most cases is higher than market price. It would have a stabilizing effect on the wild fluctuations of wax and runes, which seem to be the materials most in demand. Wax is the hardest to farm consistently, and runes are used in way too many recipes compared to the other materials. Having these materials for sale for 1 voucher per 12 items will at least leave a source for them without having to always rely on a fickle and fluctuating market that is prone to price fixing. Bast and especially Clean Pelts are always low in price, and the pelts couldn't justify a voucher cost, so I lumped them together so you can get both pelts and bast for 1 voucher.
Finally, loads of people are looking for the Ayleid and Dwarven recipes, especially the purples. For a quick sink of a lot of vouchers, you could introduce an Exotic Recipes document which gives you a chance for a random blue or purple Ayleid or Dwarven recipe. The document could be priced at whichever seems fair, something along 50 vouchers per document seems fair, since you can get both purples and blues from the same document. The loottable for Ayleid and Dwarven isn't large enough to justify documents for both blue and purple, but lumping them together will create enough of a loottable, sometimes you get unlucky and get a blue one, sometimes you get lucky enough to get a purple one. That's about 40k gold cost for every document, which seems like a good starting point. Thus:
- Exotic furnishing recipe document (random chance for a blue or purple Ayleid or Dwarven recipe): 50 vouchers
The documents would quickly remove a lot of stored vouchers from people, and the possibility to buy furnishing materials, roes, nirncrux and rare style mats would provide a steady sink of vouchers out of the system, in place of ingredients used in furniture crafting. The prices can be discussed, but for the materials, they really have to be somewhat competitive with the selling prices, otherwise people won't waste their vouchers on them. On the other hand, they can't be so cheap as to undermine the other avenues of the materials, or the selling and trade of them. All the voucher prices suggested above are above the selling price on the market, at least on my server.
Currently, the mastercrafter vendor only holds one thing that's valuable to me, and that's the new golden recipes that come now and then. Once I have bought those, I never go back to him. Large trade guilds buy the attunable stations, but only once, and once they have them all, they don't come back to him either. To make the vendor interesting, he needs to sell something that is continually in use and deman, instead of only one-time only things like recipes.
Selling things that are for the majority used in furniture crafting, makes sense for a crafter, and for a vendor that sells mostly furnishing recipes anyway.
I hope this idea can at least serve as a starting point in a discussion to make the mastercrafter vendor more relevant and attractive.
@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_MSchroeder @ZOS_Edward @ZOS_Chris @ZOS_Holden