Question: where are all the compulsive collectors?

Saucy_Jack

I don't know about everyone else, but when I was playing Morrowind or Oblivion or Skyrim, if there was a unique weapon or piece of armour or book or something else that could only be found in one place, I'd snag it and store it away or put in a display case or something.

With the myriad of motifs, furniture plans, style pages, etc. that can be found in the game, it seems like there aren't many people trying for "100% collection" of stuff like that - why is that? I would think behaviour from previous TES games would carry over into this one, no?

Starlock

My artificer has a collection of gears in his inventory. Does that count?

Royaji

Because if you start seriously trying to collect "all of something" in ESO you will very quickly run into Crown Store wall, storage capacity wall or just very-high-gold-price-due-to-being-extremely rare wall.

Danikat

I collected books in previous TES games, and I used 1/2 the item slots in my main house (200) for books in ESO, but it's just not the same buying a set of books from the mages guild. It was much more fun to be working my way through some cave somewhere, come across a book, read it and think "I like this one, I'm keeping it!".

Collecting all the motifs is one of my long-term goals in ESO, but it's one of those ones where I'm 1/2 expecting to never actually finish it, so I'm not feeling under pressure to get them all ASAP, it's more just as and when I have the gold I buy some, or if I find them that's a nice bonus.

Oh and apparently I still can't ignore a nirnroot plant, even though I know they're not as needed as in Oblivion, it's just ingrained in me to always, always pick up the nirnroot.

I know there's at least one person who collects all the furniture designs, and someone who has every horse in the game, but I think goals like that are rarer in ESO.

kargen27

A guild mate was trying to get all the named weapons in the game. Not sure if he finally did it because I haven't talked to him for a while.
I'm still wanting the achievements for trophy collections but I'm not keeping copies of the trophies, I might keep the Ogre Toe Ring if I ever manage to get that [snip] thing. Been after it for a very long time.
My provisioner has all the recipes in the game. I'm still undecided on trying for every in game available furniture recipe on my main crafter. He will eventually get all the styles. Problem with that one is when I get a rare one I stick it in the guild trader instead of learning it. I don't even need the gold I just can't help myself.
I do have every house in the game that can be purchased with gold and spent crowns from ESO+ on a couple of those houses. If they ever make it so houses can be gifted I'm going to be spending a lot of gold. Most the houses are empty or used for storage. I have big plans though!

virtus753

I think there are a few things going on that make ESO distinct from previous TES games and impact the way collecting carries over:

1) There aren’t truly unique weapon, armor, or jewelry pieces any longer, and there’s no place to display them. We’re limited to filling the museum quests for various DLC, and all the pieces are kept there, not in our homes. The furnishing limit also contributes to the lack of ability to display things in our homes, which is one of the driving forces behind collection in the first place. We can’t even display all the collectible furnishings in any single house in game, even though we could at one point with the largest houses with ESO+. No longer. Displaying a collection for public consumption is a huge part of collecting historically, and the inability to do that can seriously impact the satisfaction one derives from collecting in the first place.

2) Collecting things like mounts, pets, personalities, skins, and many other cosmetics is deeply tied in with excessive monetization. There is no way to calculate how much money would have to be spent to collect all of those, especially once you get to crown crates and gem-locked items, not to mention it’s impossible for people who did not earn, say, the tiger mount to do so now. Part of the appeal in collecting ALL the THINGS is, well, collecting them all. If you can’t, that puts a damper on the whole thing from the beginning. I once tried to collect all the senche-type mounts and pets in game, but then I found out I won’t ever be able to do that because of the tiger. I stopped trying. No point in me spending time and money on an impossible endeavor.

3) Style pages fall into #2 in some ways, because a lot of styles have been locked behind crown crates. So we have to limit ourselves if we’re not made of crowns or gold. The sheer amount of gold it would take to unlock all the crown crate-locked styles, in addition to the crown store exclusives and collector’s edition exclusives, is again literally incalculable. If you’re pulling in millions per day it might be feasible, but even fewer people do that than run endgame vet content. It’s just not feasible for the 99.9% of players to play enough to learn the markets well enough and generate sums like that on a regular basis, if ever. Without that, you’re looking at spending a truly staggering amount of real-world money on crowns.

4) Furnishing plans are at least achievable with gold instead of buying crowns, but when not a few plans go for 400k+, that’s again not feasible for the majority of players. To a “collectionist” mindset, missing even one may well defeat the purpose of trying to get them all. Or if you aim to collect all furnishing plans, you’ll likely not have the gold to collect all motifs and/or provisioning recipes as well. (I’m in that camp: I have all motifs, as well as all recipes, but I don’t have the time to make enough gold to pursue all the furnishing plans as well — not to mention most just don’t appeal to me. I will just never be excited enough about Argonian style to spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of gold on a green Murkmire plan.)

5) Motifs are similar to plans — doable if you limit your focus and have enough time to concentrate on making gold — but they’re also tied in to the Lore Library, another collection that is frequently impossible to complete, in this case due to bugs. Each update we see a couple bugged books fixed only to find another couple bugged from the new content, so we’re not making too much headway there. I’d be more excited about learning all the new motifs if I knew that would help me complete the Lore Library, but it feels bad to collect them all only to realize I’m three books short because post-quest locations are not always a thing.

6) Provisioning recipes are probably the most easily collected of this list. They have come down a lot since the anniversary event began dropping them. There is one major outlier that’s a pretty penny to get and is entirely dependent on your and/or others’ RNG, so if you can pony up 1-1.5 million once, while farming recipes from provisioning dailies and snagging others as they become available cheaply, you’re set. But that’s still a big if — a million is not easy to get for most players, and if you find it easy to make you’re already in the top fraction of a percent of money-makers in the game. (That’s a general you, of course.) This collection also has the advantage over furnishing plans and motifs because it doesn’t change. There is a set list, and you can work on it over time.

I’m sure I’m missing a few things in there, but those are my initial thoughts.

SidraWillowsky

Because I'm not able to do anything with the stuff I find that I'd want to collect

I'd love to display some of the stuff that I pickpocket, including my Nix-Guar-Thing, Chicken-Mudcrab-Thing, Taxidermied Kitten, Disturbing Argonian Portrait, etc. I'd collect the crap out of stuff like that if i could DO anything with it.

Gilvoth

because the stuff we found in Morrowind was Awesome and really cool items with awesome names ands awesome effects like "the boots of blinding speed:" had massive totaly awesome speeds with it.
in eso those type of items and things dont exist.

Cirantille

Too much time consuming - I dont like grinding

Plus we can not hoard everything we want because limited inventory, bank, storage

Finedaible

Nothing in ESO is truly "unique." Unique gear pieces are simply renamed pieces of existing set pieces with the worst trait possible attached to them and MAYBE a change to a generic racial motif style from the base game. I don't understand why they even bothered with "unique" set pieces tbh, especially now that outfits are a thing and style mats are largely irrelevant.

Besides, it's impossible to collect stuff with how horrible the inventory system is, even with ESO+ it's a chore to try and store a lot of stuff across mules. Every new update or event also brings with it more and more inventory-fodder to get f2p players to subscribe to ESO+ so it's nigh-impossible and hardly worth anyone's interest to collect or hoard interesting stuff.

Nestor

I would horde everything, but inventory limitations stop me.

If we had some way to store or display that would be awesome. Even if the storage was offline.

Anhedonie

I'm like that as well, but then I saw clown store exclusive motifs, mounts, skins and kinda got over it.

WiseSky

I was collection all the maps for future use ... then I realize I have storage problems, so now I sell them ofc. And buy them when I need them.

Even Winning the lottery I would not collect all the things... imagine how many loot crates you have to but to get all the collectible mounts...

StormWylf

Royaji wrote: »

Because if you start seriously trying to collect "all of something" in ESO you will very quickly run into Crown Store wall, storage capacity wall or just very-high-gold-price-due-to-being-extremely rare wall.

This is the correct answer.

Langdon64

The Crown Store. Plain and simple. It is impossible to be a collector when mounts, houses and armor are behind a paywall. I love obsessively collecting things in games but it's really discouraging to try to do it in this one.

redspecter23

I did try a bit harder to 100% motifs on my main a while back but I found that they just release them too fast for my desire to acquire them. Staggering the DLC motifs until months after the release of the actual DLC is also a turn off.

I pick them up when I have time and when the prices drop.

As for things like achievements, I'll care more about those if they ever become account wide. I don't see any point in achievement hunting character based goals in a game that is designed around playing multiple alts.

You touched on collecting things to display in a case in your house, but unfortunately that's just not a thing in ESO. I can collect cases. I can collect items. However, I can't put those items in my house unless they are furnishings.

And to top it all off, anyone interested in hoarding, collecting or saving things has to deal with storage space limitations. I can't keep things I have no use for unless it goes to my craft bag where the storage is basically infinite.

NotaDaedraWorshipper

Once a TES hoarder always a TES hoarder.

I remember when I played Oblivion uuh *googles* 14 years ago?! I hoarded so many things. I tried get all the weapons, armour, clothes, books and unique nicknacks there was, but I also collected not so unique nicknacks. For example, I always ended up filling a basket or some other form of container in one of my houses with gems or pearls, so much they started to shake and rattle and then finally explode gems/pearls all over my house's floor. It always happened yet I still did it like some obsessed magpie.

Sadly, or maybe I shall say luckily I can't do that in ESO, but I can do a little of it. I can do a little hoarding with housing, like furniture that can only be obtained from stealing. Can't be the only one who collect bounty sheets right? Then there are motifs and styles, along with dyes, though it's unlikely I will complete that collection.

One hoard- I mean collecting I can complete though, which is one of my favourites one to do in an Elder Scrolls game is books. I might not be able to get physical copies of them all in ESO but that Eidetic Memory is slowly but steady getting completed to join the collected lore books.

Sylvermynx

No place to put it. I still play Skyrim with LotD plus other mods, and with the museum you do have a place for nearly everything you collect. And with the housing setup and mods there, stuff you don't have someplace for in the museum, you can usually find a way to display elsewhere.

Doesn't work here...

Zulera301

I'm a hoarder and I'm proud of it.
The collection I'm most interested in finishing is motifs, and since they all have neat little numbers, it's easy for me to remember them. (by contrast, style pages are stupid and I hate them and have no interest in them).

this coming from someone who captured all 721 Pokemon in the last game that had the national dex, so collecting things in a catalog is nothing new to me.
There's 81 style motifs currently known. Of those, 2 are unreleased (they're on the PTS though), 3 are crown store only (and I also have no interest in them), and of the remaining 76, I've completed 62 of them and have partials for 7 more.

I'm willing to buy my way to victory here, but I'm going to wait until after I've got my lion's share of motifs from the Anniversary Jubilee and then I'll try and scoop up any more that I still need while the prices are low. I'm a patient woman. I'm willing to wait a few months if it saves me money.

Salix_alba

If we had places to put all the things we wanted to collect people would be, we dont not by a long shot instead we
eventually you run out of room I have characters that keep certain things they um acquire that have a shall i say questionable ownership history like stuffed animals. or skooma related paraphernalia for my Khajiit

And every so often i find myself reviewing what I can keep because I need the room

JKorr

:shrug: The items I collected in Morrowind singleplayer were either limited, or unique. I had a named soul gem collection, for instance; kept on the balcony of the mage's guild in Balmora. One save I duped Azura's Star and killed Vivec to complete the collection. I had all the limeware piled in the fighter's guild. Items could be dropped anywhere, and, single player game, be perfectly safe. It took a lot of work to overload the cell and create an overflow loot bag.

Collecting stuff in ESO doesn't work the same, for me. Single player I can work with it, with ESO, no. House limits can be annoying, and yes, there are storage chests, but stuff in chests isn't exactly on display. I'll just stick with picking up every mat, chest, thieves' trove, and psijic portal I run across.

DragonRacer

Our guild founder knows every furniture plan in the game. It’s his thing.

I have every Pokémon Indrik mount and pet, does that count? LOL

Saucy_Jack

At the moment, I know all the recipes, all the furniture plans, and all the motifs except Refabricated, Z'en, and Honor Guard. In terms of style pages, I'm just missing the ones you can win from Battlegrounds. Took a heck of a lot of time and a heck of a lot of gold and a heck of a lot of pestering guildies and people in zone about trading plans/motifs for unknowns, but I got there.

It's just that I thought there'd be a lot more of us, given the historically-collectionist bent of previous TES games.

You all bring valid points to the table though, particularly when it comes to the discrepancy between games on being able to display things, and the "uniqueness" of items.

Sylvermynx

If there was some way to add "display" options to housing, crafting cabinets with glass and being able to set up weapon or collectable displays with name plates, I'd be happy.

There isn't, and considering the disregard of the devs for the housing community, I don't expect there ever will be. So my collection completionist self will remain in "real" Skyrim.

prof-dracko

I'm trying to collect all of the Boss unique drops. I doubt I have the bank space for them all, but I'm over halfway there now. Some of the drop rates are ridiculous, I've spent hours farming a single delve boss waiting for a drop before.

BRCOURTN

I had every motif learned at one point in time, but it's a moving goalpost and an expensive one at that.

huntgod_ESO

Only thing I am working on 100% on are crafting motif's, only a few short, really don't like the Coldsnap style and hate buying belts or maces, so there are 6 styles I don't have complete.

I hate there are a couple of crown store only I don't have like Grim Harlequin.

Aside from skyshards, 100% of the other collectibles just isn't practical.

furiouslog

Saucy_Jack wrote: »

I don't know about everyone else, but when I was playing Morrowind or Oblivion or Skyrim, if there was a unique weapon or piece of armour or book or something else that could only be found in one place, I'd snag it and store it away or put in a display case or something.

With the myriad of motifs, furniture plans, style pages, etc. that can be found in the game, it seems like there aren't many people trying for "100% collection" of stuff like that - why is that? I would think behaviour from previous TES games would carry over into this one, no?

I'm trying but my wallet ain't cooperating.

Neoealth

Sylvermynx wrote: »

No place to put it. I still play Skyrim with LotD plus other mods, and with the museum you do have a place for nearly everything you collect. And with the housing setup and mods there, stuff you don't have someplace for in the museum, you can usually find a way to display elsewhere.

Doesn't work here...

Yeah I'm currently playing the new version of LotD (Legacy of the dragonborn) and it's great. Wish we had something like it here in eso as well. I don't think it could ever match the levels of obsessive hoarding I do in Skyrim, but something similar in eso would be nice, perhaps housing items like mannequins which can display some of our armour. (Btw I'm using the british spelling of armour, so shut up spell check)

Do you play the new version? Version 5 is a huge improvement, the museum was totally re done.

myskyrim26

@Saucy_Jack , here I am - a compulsive, but hopeless collector. Just like you said, I was hunting avery unique piece in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. I created a simple personal mod for Skyrim, allowing me to have copies of quest items.

Here in ESO I was hunting motifs. Somewhere around Summerset chapter I realized that I will never catch up. It is impossible to farm DLC dungeon and trial motifs, and they are too expensive to buy with gold - I never have that much gold. I'm trying to obtain missing motifs during ESO Anniversary. But the new ones keep coming, and I have to wait till another Anniversary...

I was collecting recipes and did all but Mythic Aetherial Ambrosia. Aetheric Cipher is too expensive.

I was collecting furniture recipes and this seems to be just impossible to me.

I would like to collect achivements, but I understand that the list would never be complete - those vet DLC dungeons, vet trials, PVP and Battlegrounds...

What can I collect and have a full collection, really? Nothing! Maybe crowns store items, like Swamp Jellies and Guar mounts. Yet... again, it is expensive and the Crown Store has a lot of other items I want instead of all jellies and guars. I have a nice collection of guars, and no place to display them all.

Only Antiquities system gives me some hope.

Sylvermynx

Neoealth wrote: »

Sylvermynx wrote: »

No place to put it. I still play Skyrim with LotD plus other mods, and with the museum you do have a place for nearly everything you collect. And with the housing setup and mods there, stuff you don't have someplace for in the museum, you can usually find a way to display elsewhere.

Doesn't work here...

Yeah I'm currently playing the new version of LotD (Legacy of the dragonborn) and it's great. Wish we had something like it here in eso as well. I don't think it could ever match the levels of obsessive hoarding I do in Skyrim, but something similar in eso would be nice, perhaps housing items like mannequins which can display some of our armour. (Btw I'm using the british spelling of armour, so shut up spell check)

Do you play the new version? Version 5 is a huge improvement, the museum was totally re done.

No, because I refuse to use SSE. I have several installs of SLE, modded in different ways, all working perfectly. I am just not interested in SSE or CC.