Hi Everyone!
I'm sure that all of you avid furnishers and guild house owners have experienced the pain of collecting all 62 sets of crafting stations (will be 65 as of Blackwood). Not only does it take an enormous amount of resources (62,000 writ vouchers or their equivalent in gold), but also take up an inordinate amount of space in our homes and, worse yet, too many of our precious and limited furnishing slots. Add to this the painstaking task of rearranging up to half of our crafting stations every time a new crafted set is added, just to keep everything in alphabetical order and easily accessible. The fact that every expansion brings with it 3 new crafted sets also ultimately means that this system is unsustainable, unless ZoS is willing to raise the furnishing cap in housing or revamp the system altogether.
It is for these reasons that I'm starting this thread, for everyone to put in their two cents and propose ways to improve the current system, and to petition ZoS to bring this change about for the player base. The one obvious caveat of coming up with a new, more practical system is how to compensate those players that have already collected enough attunable crafting stations for all current sets. This is one of the challenges that needs to be properly and fairly addressed, and I would urge you all to consider this in your contributions to this thread.
That said, here are a couple of my own ideas, which I'm sure a lot of you have already considered:
1. Make attunable crafting stations integral, where 1 station (for each crafting skill line) can accumulate all the different crafted sets, conveniently displayed and selectable from a dropdown list. This would result in any home needing only one of each station type, which in turn will allow you to select the desired set to craft. Here are the details of how to balance this out with the current system:
- Create a new item "Attunement Stone", purchasable from the writ vendors for 250 writ vouchers each, which you can then attune at each of the world's crafting workshops to a specific set, which can then be fed into your home's Attunable Crafting Station in order to add that set to its list of craftable sets.
- Attunement Stones would not be bound, so they can be bought and traded, just like current Attunable Crafting Stations are, but once a stone has been "attuned" to a specific set, it would become bound, in order to disallow players without access to DLC areas and their respective crafting workshops from collecting such sets.
- In order to compensate players who currently own a large amount of already attuned crafting stations, there should be either an npc that can convert already attuned stations into the new attunement stone item, or simply remove the attuned crafting stations from players' homes and grant them an equal amount of attunement stones directly in their inventory upon login once the system goes live.
2. Add crafted sets to the existing collections UI, and allow players who have collected these sets to craft them in an integral version of the attunable crafting station, similarly to the above proposition. This approach would be much more aesthetically pleasing, as it wouldn't require a dropdown list in stations. Basically, you would use the same UI being used in transmutation stations to reconstruct items, but including only crafted sets and only when utilising the new version of the attunable crafting station.
The main issue with this approach is that I don't see a way to adequately compensate players who already own all the current stations. Refunding the equivalent cost in writ vouchers would be a start, but a lot of players have acquired them with gold as well, and there are not currently enough offerings from writ vendors to make a 62,000 voucher refund worthwhile. I'd be interested in hearing everyone's thoughts on this.
I'm hoping my fellow players and ZoS will both see the long term utility in revamping this system and how it would free up so many furnishing slots for us to finally decorate personal and guild homes the way we want, without having to designate a huge space for only crafting stations. I'll be happy to read all of your comments and ideas on the topic.