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Please Make the Housing Grind Less Unbearable. You're Killing Me!

TeruKisuke
TeruKisuke
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The Housing experience has been a long-time insufferable grind. You have to:
—Get only a chance to salvage them from a resource node (while the materials to make gear are guaranteed, even though I don't make gear nearly as much as I do furniture)

—Deeply invest in crafting to do my Master Writs to also buy furniture and furniture plans. And the grind for Furniture Plans is so bad to the point that I invest in the RNG document pouches and don't look twice at the thought of starting a guild hall.

—Farm for furnishing plans. Many zones don't even have good "grinding spots," like I'm hearing about Fargrave. And when people do get plans, it is usually put in guild traders for hundreds of thousands if not millions of gold, and there are thousands of furnishing plans to begin with, so collecting all the plans will cost you a small fortune. And, before it is conjectured that the price could be a "community issue," well it makes sense for prices to be high when plans are so incredibly rare.

—Daily quests. I am not exaggerating when I say that it is the worst grind out there, the thought that you can only get certain style material once a day per character. This has consumed me and I am stuck doing daily quests every day instead of actually playing the game, to the point where I have made myself miserable just because I want to decorate my house. I play ESO for the Housing aspect, not for other aspects of the game. It is not a side thing for me. Everything else is. I want the game to stop limiting how much I interact with my house. Once a day to make 1-2 furniture? Seriously?

—An incredible gold sink. The houses themselves already cost an obscene amount of gold. Then we have achievement furniture that costs thousands? Lux furniture that costs hundreds of thousands? Can't you be a little bit more lenient with the gold prices? I already have to wait half a year for certain items to come back around. It's even worse when I can't even afford them, among other things.

—An incredible crown sink. To keep up with housing, I buy the new houses and the furnishing packs that come with them, and now Houseguests on top of that. It was already a lot, but it's becoming a bit much to balance. Not to mention that I already drain all my gold, now I'm expected to drain all my wallet? More housing slots is already locked behind a subscription. I am a paying sub. There are other things that I like from the store, too. I don't like how a single furnishing is costing 4,000+ crowns.

—Spend time. To be a Housing fanatic, you also have to play many other aspects of the game. Which is fair, as developers wouldn't want us to hole up in our houses and not see the world and therefore get bored. But it gets a little bit ridiculous when lately we are expected to do Vet Trials, and beat every other player to grabbing Volendrung (or, even rarer, killing someone who has it, as only the finishing blow counts), and taking years to get to max rank in PvP to get our hands on the namesake of the series, and Battleground achievements to unlock those if we just want something that'd fit our houses. Then there's long time sinks like Master Fisher. It's fine if there are some really rewarding things, but I'm noticing that every expansion is starting to lock furnishings behind extremely difficult and competitive content now. We already have skins and titles for that.

—Invest in the economy. It is no news to anyone that Housing is the most expensive gold sink in the game, which creates an even more need to play the economy, more of a necessity. Most Houses I know are starved for mats and gold. We just want to have fun and decorate. It's not fun to grind all the time...

I just want Housing to be fun again. Many players are turned away from housing because of how much it takes to get into it. It's intimidating, it's discouraging, it's heartbreaking. I'd love to get my friends into it but they don't want to spend the time, and the sad part is that I can't blame them with the state of Housing.

When it comes to other aspects of the game, I am filled with hope. You changed dungeons to where it is now guaranteed we will be able to get all the dungeon drops now. You made the Armory and hybrid sets so that I can be much more free with my builds. Most of my characters are delegated to Crafting Writ bots because I couldnt be bothered to farm gear for them because the game made it impossible anyways. I hardly touch dungeons because I considered them a waste of time, but now I can cut out some of the grind and actually have fun playing the game?

Can I have that feeling with Housing, too? I just want to decorate my houses, but most of them are empty because I'm in an endless loop grind. I have storage houses filled with furniture because there's no way to get the materials back, and there are also Crown-Only furnishings that should only make sense when it comes to Crown Packs.

I'm not even saying get rid of the grind completely. We just need a whole lot of quality-of-life improvements, and the ability to make Housing way more accessible.

—Up the drops of furnishing materials
—Add furnishing materials to surveys
—Add furnishing materials to daily crafting writ rewards
—Up the furnishing plan drop rate and give us more opportunities to get more, like as daily crafting writ rewards
—Make furnishing plans require less materials
—For the love of all that's holy, stop locking style material behind dailies. (I'm not playing the game, I'm playing the same 5 quests over and over and it is driving me INSANE). Let us just buy them from a vendor like with Solitude please... Deconstructing gear is not enough when I'm wanting to make entire cities. Stop staunching my creativity.
—Make a cheaper Master Writ tier for green plans.
—Make furnishings more affordable. I'm trying to fill up 700 slot houses. I don't need all of them to cost 20k+. And it can't be argued that crafting is "cheaper" when plans are so rare and expensive, and cost rare mats anyways... You're already getting my crowns.
—Make SOME KIND OF storage for furniture. I know it was already said that a Furniture Bag was impossible. But couldn't there be any other solutions? The amount of Furnishings with no efficient way to get rid of them, and deleting them would be a waste after how expensive they were to make them, is preventing me from decorating some houses.

Please... Normally I defend Housing. I have a lot of fun decorating and customizing my houses. But when it's 10% me having fun in a house vs 90% I'm out there grinding, there's a problem. I don't even hate grinding. I don't mind it. But my play time is filled up doing dailies than actually decorating, and there's only so many hours in a day.

Sorry if this post isn't as "professional" as my previous ones, but this one was born out of frustration. I want to have fun with Housing just like the other areas of the game, but I'm starting to experience some severe burnout, and I think most people wouldn't have even stuck with it this long. In fact, most don't even start. It can easily be improved with some quality of life changes. I love Housing and want to experience more of it. I cared enough about it to make this forum account. I see so much potential for it. I want to see it grow, instead of it just being niche.

To end it off, here's a relevant meme:
63kz7ronjsz2.jpeg
Edited by TeruKisuke on November 14, 2021 9:16PM
  • Ravensilver
    Ravensilver
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  • carly
    carly
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    In other games I've played with housing, the furniture plans were on the crafting vendors with each release and I wish they'd do that here. Housing should be fun and it should be profitable for crafters, not speculators that drive up prices to make a profit just because they can. I don't mind putting in the time for to complete quests or to harvest nodes but it shouldn't be that way for furniture plans.
  • TeruKisuke
    TeruKisuke
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    @Ravensilver Increasing the drop rate for plans and furnishings in any capacity is a good thing. They shouldn't be seen as some luxury that we have to partake in after hundreds of hours of grinding. Unfortunately, most are. And I agree that, with a lack of good grinding spots in some DLCs, we see less and less of the plans. There was a period after the Markarth Structural Plans dropped, before the Markarth Document Pouches came out, where I couldn't find any Markarth plans besides structures being sold at all. They were hard to come by. This is also true of Murkmire Green Plans, which should NOT be as much of a "luxury" as they are. They're green quality, for crying out loud.

    @carly That... is a very good point. Less and less it feels like Crafting is an actual profitable convention. We're at the mercy of those who find the plans who put them on the market for hundreds of thousands/millions, at the mercy of those who sell materials who constantly raise the market, and at the mercy of having to go through an insatiable grind.

    With Housers... It often feels like we don't profit at all. At best, we have artistic expression, but it is paved with hardship and mind-numbing grinds worse than other areas in the game, often joked about to being the true "endgame" of the game because of how costly and time-consuming it is, just to complete one house. They want to sell more houses, but make it difficult for us to even complete one...

    And, we see other areas of the game getting new systems and being reworked for convenience, but we do not see that for Housing. It will stay as it is: expensive, inaccessible, and persisted only by the few. I just wish I could see some kind of sign that they cared for this side of our concerns. We can be an ungrateful lot, but I want to be grateful for such an intuitive decorating system that inspires me... But I find I'm wasting more time than I am making good of it.
  • Cireous
    Cireous
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    Any changes that make housing a less convoluted and inefficient experience, I am all for.
  • katanagirl1
    katanagirl1
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    I am one of the frustrated ones too. My main complaint is furnishing plans in the new zones.

    I have made little gold farming Leyawiin plans compared to even Markarth. At least Markarth had an area with more than 20 containers to farm. I still don’t have all the blues for myself, and I only very rarely have a duplicate to sell. The only way I can keep my guild trader slots full is by buying random furnishing envelopes and selling them, and I don’t want to use my hard-earned vouchers that way.

    Speaking of random furnishing envelopes, having the Vampiric and Markarth ones mixed has not helped much at all. It’s much easier to get blues already so they sell for virtually nothing, yet there are few purples of each and they go for 100k to over 1 M each in traders. Purple Vampiric plans don’t even show up in a search at most capital traders.

    I don’t mind farming plans either, but when it’s like Leyawiin and there is only one room in the whole zone with unowned containers, and most of them drop provisions ingredients instead, it is almost impossible to get anything other than the same green zone plans over and over again even if you farm there all day.
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  • LadyDestiny
    LadyDestiny
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    TeruKisuke wrote: »
    The Housing experience has been a long-time insufferable grind. You have to:
    —Get only a chance to salvage them from a resource node (while the materials to make gear are guaranteed, even though I don't make gear nearly as much as I do furniture)

    —Deeply invest in crafting to do my Master Writs to also buy furniture and furniture plans. And the grind for Furniture Plans is so bad to the point that I invest in the RNG document pouches and don't look twice at the thought of starting a guild hall.

    —Farm for furnishing plans. Many zones don't even have good "grinding spots," like I'm hearing about Fargrave. And when people do get plans, it is usually put in guild traders for hundreds of thousands if not millions of gold, and there are thousands of furnishing plans to begin with, so collecting all the plans will cost you a small fortune. And, before it is conjectured that the price could be a "community issue," well it makes sense for prices to be high when plans are so incredibly rare.

    —Daily quests. I am not exaggerating when I say that it is the worst grind out there, the thought that you can only get certain style material once a day per character. This has consumed me and I am stuck doing daily quests every day instead of actually playing the game, to the point where I have made myself miserable just because I want to decorate my house. I play ESO for the Housing aspect, not for other aspects of the game. It is not a side thing for me. Everything else is. I want the game to stop limiting how much I interact with my house. Once a day to make 1-2 furniture? Seriously?

    —An incredible gold sink. The houses themselves already cost an obscene amount of gold. Then we have achievement furniture that costs thousands? Lux furniture that costs hundreds of thousands? Can't you be a little bit more lenient with the gold prices? I already have to wait half a year for certain items to come back around. It's even worse when I can't even afford them, among other things.

    —An incredible crown sink. To keep up with housing, I buy the new houses and the furnishing packs that come with them, and now Houseguests on top of that. It was already a lot, but it's becoming a bit much to balance. Not to mention that I already drain all my gold, now I'm expected to drain all my wallet? More housing slots is already locked behind a subscription. I am a paying sub. There are other things that I like from the store, too. I don't like how a single furnishing is costing 4,000+ crowns.

    —Spend time. To be a Housing fanatic, you also have to play many other aspects of the game. Which is fair, as developers wouldn't want us to hole up in our houses and not see the world and therefore get bored. But it gets a little bit ridiculous when lately we are expected to do Vet Trials, and beat every other player to grabbing Volendrung (or, even rarer, killing someone who has it, as only the finishing blow counts), and taking years to get to max rank in PvP to get our hands on the namesake of the series, and Battleground achievements to unlock those if we just want something that'd fit our houses. Then there's long time sinks like Master Fisher. It's fine if there are some really rewarding things, but I'm noticing that every expansion is starting to lock furnishings behind extremely difficult and competitive content now. We already have skins and titles for that.

    —Invest in the economy. It is no news to anyone that Housing is the most expensive gold sink in the game, which creates an even more need to play the economy, more of a necessity. Most Houses I know are starved for mats and gold. We just want to have fun and decorate. It's not fun to grind all the time...

    I just want Housing to be fun again. Many players are turned away from housing because of how much it takes to get into it. It's intimidating, it's discouraging, it's heartbreaking. I'd love to get my friends into it but they don't want to spend the time, and the sad part is that I can't blame them with the state of Housing.

    When it comes to other aspects of the game, I am filled with hope. You changed dungeons to where it is now guaranteed we will be able to get all the dungeon drops now. You made the Armory and hybrid sets so that I can be much more free with my builds. Most of my characters are delegated to Crafting Writ bots because I couldnt be bothered to farm gear for them because the game made it impossible anyways. I hardly touch dungeons because I considered them a waste of time, but now I can cut out some of the grind and actually have fun playing the game?

    Can I have that feeling with Housing, too? I just want to decorate my houses, but most of them are empty because I'm in an endless loop grind. I have storage houses filled with furniture because there's no way to get the materials back, and there are also Crown-Only furnishings that should only make sense when it comes to Crown Packs.

    I'm not even saying get rid of the grind completely. We just need a whole lot of quality-of-life improvements, and the ability to make Housing way more accessible.

    —Up the drops of furnishing materials
    —Add furnishing materials to surveys
    —Add furnishing materials to daily crafting writ rewards
    —Up the furnishing plan drop rate and give us more opportunities to get more, like as daily crafting writ rewards
    —Make furnishing plans require less materials
    —For the love of all that's holy, stop locking style material behind dailies. (I'm not playing the game, I'm playing the same 5 quests over and over and it is driving me INSANE). Let us just buy them from a vendor like with Solitude please... Deconstructing gear is not enough when I'm wanting to make entire cities. Stop staunching my creativity.
    —Make a cheaper Master Writ tier for green plans.
    —Make furnishings more affordable. I'm trying to fill up 700 slot houses. I don't need all of them to cost 20k+. And it can't be argued that crafting is "cheaper" when plans are so rare and expensive, and cost rare mats anyways... You're already getting my crowns.
    —Make SOME KIND OF storage for furniture. I know it was already said that a Furniture Bag was impossible. But couldn't there be any other solutions? The amount of Furnishings with no efficient way to get rid of them, and deleting them would be a waste after how expensive they were to make them, is preventing me from decorating some houses.

    Please... Normally I defend Housing. I have a lot of fun decorating and customizing my houses. But when it's 10% me having fun in a house vs 90% I'm out there grinding, there's a problem. I don't even hate grinding. I don't mind it. But my play time is filled up doing dailies than actually decorating, and there's only so many hours in a day.

    Sorry if this post isn't as "professional" as my previous ones, but this one was born out of frustration. I want to have fun with Housing just like the other areas of the game, but I'm starting to experience some severe burnout, and I think most people wouldn't have even stuck with it this long. In fact, most don't even start. It can easily be improved with some quality of life changes. I love Housing and want to experience more of it. I cared enough about it to make this forum account. I see so much potential for it. I want to see it grow, instead of it just being niche.

    To end it off, here's a relevant meme:
    63kz7ronjsz2.jpeg

    Agree with this so much. Funny thing is this is one aspect of the game which should be more catering to the casual side of gameplay. This reduction in mats and plans and where to obtain is just getting out of hand now. Maybe to push players into the crown store? Well, furniture is way overpriced there and every furnishing in the crown store should be obtainable in the game in some form.
    Trading guilds are getting huge monopolies on high end furnishing plans that one can only dream of looting and if your rng is bad well, good luck. Housing stuff is becoming too rare and it's taking the enjoyment of it.
    They should add a standard set to the crafting table on every zone. New ones added every dlc that you can craft immediately. Mostly greens, a few blues and maybe one or two purple items. Then rework the zone furnishing venders to have better items besides sticks snd logs and a few weeds and a starter table and chair. I mean those venders are a joke. Achievements venders are fine I guess. But a bigger selection would be nice with more purple and gold items. More plants and trees from that zone as well.
    Put plans and mats back into containers and daily rewards. Tired of looting the same green one every day. Restrict plans in a zone to JUST THAT ZONES plans and furnishings! How many times do I have to get a nord bookcase everywhere!
    Be generous zos! Some people play this game strickly for housing only to get ripped off by guild traders because the loot table is so terrible and nerfed into the ground.
    And yes some furnishing items on venders are super overpriced. Cut those in half. It doesn't hurt anyone. Gold sunk? Lol, well your either too bloody rich to care or too poor to not afford and enjoy.
    There is nothing wrong with having a few highly sought after items be difficult in the end game. But stop making everything this way.........
  • TheImperfect
    TheImperfect
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    I know housing is mega expensive and I tend to buy furniture more often than crafting it.

    I don't know if this is a viable option but what about farming gold instead of mats and using the gold to buy the furniture mats or furniture directly? You could run public dungeons or dungeons and use the gold to buy mats.
  • kind_hero
    kind_hero
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    @TeruKisuke Good post!

    I am a big housing fan myself, so I can relate.

    First of all I would try to give you some advice to make things easier for yourself.
    Yes, it is very very hard if you try to collect most of the furnishing plans. Few people can achieve such a thing, and it is usually people who are very good at making gold, they run guilds, or have been playing a lot for many years. I remember one guy, a collector, who was lacking 7 plans (back in Summerset days), and he spent 3.3 mil gold on the Dwarven Pew blueprint.

    My advice is to buy only the blueprints that are important for you, things that you build often, like structural furnishings or chairs. But why spend 500k on a plan when you will craft only one or two pieces? Most furnishings sell, but the profit you make is quite low (except for times like this, when we have a fresh DLC with new and desirable furnishings). This brings me to the next advice, to play the market a bit when there is a new DLC. Then you can flip items and make millions of gold in a week. Some years ago I was very excited with every plan I got, I learned it quickly, and tried to make profit by selling the crafted item.

    However, when the DLC is new, the style material also costs a lot, and the base mats, like the mundane runes, heartwood or deco wax are very expensive. So, the profit can be low if you do not stock up before the DLC. Experienced players also spend time on the PTS to learn what mats they need, where to farm recipes, and so on. For two years, each time we get a new DLC/Chapter, I tend to sell every blue and above recipe I find, including the style material and the daily rewards. I got lucky once with Deadlands, because I found a purple blueprint for a lighning rod that sold for 2.3 mil. After that someone bought all the lightning rods blueprints on the market and sold them for 5 mil each. Yeah.. some people can do that :) I usually am very unlucky with drops, so if it happened to me, it can happen to you. You just need to play more when the new content arrives. I also sold the Kynmarcher and Hexo's gear for tens of thousand of gold in the 1st days, because people want to add them to the sticker book ASAP. Yeah, I know that we are after furnishings, but the prices will drop a lot in a month or two, and with the money you make in the 1st days you can buy far more recipes and mats later than by selling furnishings.

    As a beginner tip, the way you can make money on a steady rate is by farming mats and selling "tempers", expecially deugh wax (the most costly). I think deugh wax is about 15k a piece on the EU server right now. So, selling these weekly, helps you build up funds quickly. Ofc, for this you need to do dailies (I do not bother with enchanting, provisioning and alchemy anymore), because the rewards can include tempers and writs.

    Second, yeah... I dislike the model myself. Housing is very much a resource sink, including real cash. Fortunately I have enough houses to keep me busy, but I would enjoy the system even more if it could be more friendly in terms of resources. For what it's worth, housing should include far more items than we get. My biggest problem is with this, not with the costs (that is on a 2nd or 3rd place). Since ZOS is asking for so much money on housing and/or makes the system so grindy, they should offer much more items. By this I am referring mostly to structural items for all architectural styles, and of course, to the long list of items requested by the community for years. There is little excuse not to have these items, because of the large amount of money people sink in housing, and in ZOS' accounts.

    Some items could be rare and hard to build, that's how the system stays interesting, but the basic stuff should be very easy to make. We already have the dirt cheap list that vendors sell, like stone blocks, tarps, stool, and the occasional trees or filler items. That list should be extended to some structural items like platforms, columns, roofs, etc. People like to build, not to grind. Next if people want to add things like desks or carpets, ok, those should be harder to get depending on style or quality.
    [PC/EU] Tamriel Hero, Stormproof, Grand Master Crafter
  • Raideen
    Raideen
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    I agree with just about every point here, but you are missing one thing.

    This is a game, made by a publicly traded company whos primary goal is to make money. The easier the plans are to get, the easier the materials are to get, etc etc, the less crowns are spent on furnishing (because it often seems to be the only "realistic" way to obtain things.

    Now mind, I am not arguing for the reason I just listed as I personally believe making a game fun first will result in money being spent on the game, but that is not the case with ESO. The game designers have the best intents I imagine, but they have to meet the demands of the people who head up monetization.

    I guess my point is, I can understand and agree with your plight, but I highly doubt MS/ZOS is going to change anything that could result in them losing money.

    Let me state again. I am not championing the current game design in regards to housing, in fact my primary reason to play ESO is because of housing, so I understand clearly your desires and if housing was not a thing in this game, I would not be playing it, but this does not change the idea that you could be speaking to deaf ears.
  • James-Wayne
    James-Wayne
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    Totally agree, please help ZOS!

    It takes me like 2-3 years of grinding for mats and recipes to be able to fully decorate a home, it's a full time job when I'm not playing the content.

    I would suggest quick wins would be:
    - reduce the amount of mats needed to craft furniture
    - increase the drop rate of plans which in turn lowers the gold sink at the traders
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  • TeruKisuke
    TeruKisuke
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    Cireous wrote: »
    Any changes that make housing a less convoluted and inefficient experience, I am all for.

    Amen to that, brother/sister/otherwise.
    I am one of the frustrated ones too. My main complaint is furnishing plans in the new zones.

    I have made little gold farming Leyawiin plans compared to even Markarth. At least Markarth had an area with more than 20 containers to farm. I still don’t have all the blues for myself, and I only very rarely have a duplicate to sell. The only way I can keep my guild trader slots full is by buying random furnishing envelopes and selling them, and I don’t want to use my hard-earned vouchers that way.

    Speaking of random furnishing envelopes, having the Vampiric and Markarth ones mixed has not helped much at all. It’s much easier to get blues already so they sell for virtually nothing, yet there are few purples of each and they go for 100k to over 1 M each in traders. Purple Vampiric plans don’t even show up in a search at most capital traders.

    I don’t mind farming plans either, but when it’s like Leyawiin and there is only one room in the whole zone with unowned containers, and most of them drop provisions ingredients instead, it is almost impossible to get anything other than the same green zone plans over and over again even if you farm there all day.

    This is true, and can be a problem in DLC areas. I'm sure the intent is for us to stumble across them while on our travels, but then they place one central Valhalla grinding spot while placing maybe the occasional lootable backpack in the rest of the zone, usually with dirt chances. So, to grind for furnishing plans, we'd have to go out of our way to anyways. This gets even worse when a desired grinding spot is discovered, only for it to be nerfed immediately.

    Luckily, in Blackwood I bought Water's Edge and was able to port there after each daily session and try my luck at the lottery nextdoor. Unluckily, you can guess my luck with plans.

    Markarth was... odd, when it came to plans. There are a few ideal areas that went on so long that the containers eventually don't have drops at all. Maybe it's just me but I had very few drop for me, and on Xbox NA it probably explains their eventual settling at 2 mil+ before the document pouches came out.

    Personally, I am also tired of getting green plans all the time (often base game.) I don't object to getting base game purples because they're hard to come by nowadays, but there needs to be a better ratio on getting DLC drops to base game drops. So I would say up the chance completely.
  • TeruKisuke
    TeruKisuke
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    TeruKisuke wrote: »
    The Housing experience has been a long-time insufferable grind. You have to:
    —Get only a chance to salvage them from a resource node (while the materials to make gear are guaranteed, even though I don't make gear nearly as much as I do furniture)

    —Deeply invest in crafting to do my Master Writs to also buy furniture and furniture plans. And the grind for Furniture Plans is so bad to the point that I invest in the RNG document pouches and don't look twice at the thought of starting a guild hall.

    —Farm for furnishing plans. Many zones don't even have good "grinding spots," like I'm hearing about Fargrave. And when people do get plans, it is usually put in guild traders for hundreds of thousands if not millions of gold, and there are thousands of furnishing plans to begin with, so collecting all the plans will cost you a small fortune. And, before it is conjectured that the price could be a "community issue," well it makes sense for prices to be high when plans are so incredibly rare.

    —Daily quests. I am not exaggerating when I say that it is the worst grind out there, the thought that you can only get certain style material once a day per character. This has consumed me and I am stuck doing daily quests every day instead of actually playing the game, to the point where I have made myself miserable just because I want to decorate my house. I play ESO for the Housing aspect, not for other aspects of the game. It is not a side thing for me. Everything else is. I want the game to stop limiting how much I interact with my house. Once a day to make 1-2 furniture? Seriously?

    —An incredible gold sink. The houses themselves already cost an obscene amount of gold. Then we have achievement furniture that costs thousands? Lux furniture that costs hundreds of thousands? Can't you be a little bit more lenient with the gold prices? I already have to wait half a year for certain items to come back around. It's even worse when I can't even afford them, among other things.

    —An incredible crown sink. To keep up with housing, I buy the new houses and the furnishing packs that come with them, and now Houseguests on top of that. It was already a lot, but it's becoming a bit much to balance. Not to mention that I already drain all my gold, now I'm expected to drain all my wallet? More housing slots is already locked behind a subscription. I am a paying sub. There are other things that I like from the store, too. I don't like how a single furnishing is costing 4,000+ crowns.

    —Spend time. To be a Housing fanatic, you also have to play many other aspects of the game. Which is fair, as developers wouldn't want us to hole up in our houses and not see the world and therefore get bored. But it gets a little bit ridiculous when lately we are expected to do Vet Trials, and beat every other player to grabbing Volendrung (or, even rarer, killing someone who has it, as only the finishing blow counts), and taking years to get to max rank in PvP to get our hands on the namesake of the series, and Battleground achievements to unlock those if we just want something that'd fit our houses. Then there's long time sinks like Master Fisher. It's fine if there are some really rewarding things, but I'm noticing that every expansion is starting to lock furnishings behind extremely difficult and competitive content now. We already have skins and titles for that.

    —Invest in the economy. It is no news to anyone that Housing is the most expensive gold sink in the game, which creates an even more need to play the economy, more of a necessity. Most Houses I know are starved for mats and gold. We just want to have fun and decorate. It's not fun to grind all the time...

    I just want Housing to be fun again. Many players are turned away from housing because of how much it takes to get into it. It's intimidating, it's discouraging, it's heartbreaking. I'd love to get my friends into it but they don't want to spend the time, and the sad part is that I can't blame them with the state of Housing.

    When it comes to other aspects of the game, I am filled with hope. You changed dungeons to where it is now guaranteed we will be able to get all the dungeon drops now. You made the Armory and hybrid sets so that I can be much more free with my builds. Most of my characters are delegated to Crafting Writ bots because I couldnt be bothered to farm gear for them because the game made it impossible anyways. I hardly touch dungeons because I considered them a waste of time, but now I can cut out some of the grind and actually have fun playing the game?

    Can I have that feeling with Housing, too? I just want to decorate my houses, but most of them are empty because I'm in an endless loop grind. I have storage houses filled with furniture because there's no way to get the materials back, and there are also Crown-Only furnishings that should only make sense when it comes to Crown Packs.

    I'm not even saying get rid of the grind completely. We just need a whole lot of quality-of-life improvements, and the ability to make Housing way more accessible.

    —Up the drops of furnishing materials
    —Add furnishing materials to surveys
    —Add furnishing materials to daily crafting writ rewards
    —Up the furnishing plan drop rate and give us more opportunities to get more, like as daily crafting writ rewards
    —Make furnishing plans require less materials
    —For the love of all that's holy, stop locking style material behind dailies. (I'm not playing the game, I'm playing the same 5 quests over and over and it is driving me INSANE). Let us just buy them from a vendor like with Solitude please... Deconstructing gear is not enough when I'm wanting to make entire cities. Stop staunching my creativity.
    —Make a cheaper Master Writ tier for green plans.
    —Make furnishings more affordable. I'm trying to fill up 700 slot houses. I don't need all of them to cost 20k+. And it can't be argued that crafting is "cheaper" when plans are so rare and expensive, and cost rare mats anyways... You're already getting my crowns.
    —Make SOME KIND OF storage for furniture. I know it was already said that a Furniture Bag was impossible. But couldn't there be any other solutions? The amount of Furnishings with no efficient way to get rid of them, and deleting them would be a waste after how expensive they were to make them, is preventing me from decorating some houses.

    Please... Normally I defend Housing. I have a lot of fun decorating and customizing my houses. But when it's 10% me having fun in a house vs 90% I'm out there grinding, there's a problem. I don't even hate grinding. I don't mind it. But my play time is filled up doing dailies than actually decorating, and there's only so many hours in a day.

    Sorry if this post isn't as "professional" as my previous ones, but this one was born out of frustration. I want to have fun with Housing just like the other areas of the game, but I'm starting to experience some severe burnout, and I think most people wouldn't have even stuck with it this long. In fact, most don't even start. It can easily be improved with some quality of life changes. I love Housing and want to experience more of it. I cared enough about it to make this forum account. I see so much potential for it. I want to see it grow, instead of it just being niche.

    To end it off, here's a relevant meme:
    63kz7ronjsz2.jpeg

    Agree with this so much. Funny thing is this is one aspect of the game which should be more catering to the casual side of gameplay. This reduction in mats and plans and where to obtain is just getting out of hand now. Maybe to push players into the crown store? Well, furniture is way overpriced there and every furnishing in the crown store should be obtainable in the game in some form.
    Trading guilds are getting huge monopolies on high end furnishing plans that one can only dream of looting and if your rng is bad well, good luck. Housing stuff is becoming too rare and it's taking the enjoyment of it.
    They should add a standard set to the crafting table on every zone. New ones added every dlc that you can craft immediately. Mostly greens, a few blues and maybe one or two purple items. Then rework the zone furnishing venders to have better items besides sticks snd logs and a few weeds and a starter table and chair. I mean those venders are a joke. Achievements venders are fine I guess. But a bigger selection would be nice with more purple and gold items. More plants and trees from that zone as well.
    Put plans and mats back into containers and daily rewards. Tired of looting the same green one every day. Restrict plans in a zone to JUST THAT ZONES plans and furnishings! How many times do I have to get a nord bookcase everywhere!
    Be generous zos! Some people play this game strickly for housing only to get ripped off by guild traders because the loot table is so terrible and nerfed into the ground.
    And yes some furnishing items on venders are super overpriced. Cut those in half. It doesn't hurt anyone. Gold sunk? Lol, well your either too bloody rich to care or too poor to not afford and enjoy.
    There is nothing wrong with having a few highly sought after items be difficult in the end game. But stop making everything this way.........

    Agreed. That seems to be the... intended model. The thing is, there are enough crown-exclusive Furnishings to get me in the Housing editor anyways. There are also crown furnishing packs too which I spend a lot on. So they are already getting my cash flow. There should be at least some enjoyable way of getting them in-game.

    I like your idea. The whole Furnishing Plan grind often feels grueling compared to other areas of the game because, often times, we are not guaranteed anything from drops. It is pure RNG. I think the only guaranteed ones we have is MasterCraft Plans, although they permanently changed a lot of them to be in unpreviewable clusters despite our outcry. As far as Document Pouches, we have to wait over a year, usually when the hype for new furnishings is dead.

    I just wish Housing wasn't this inaccessible lofty endgame thing. If it was more accessible to players, we would have a better experience and probably have un-turned away players who would then give them more money.
  • kind_hero
    kind_hero
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    I am one of the frustrated ones too. My main complaint is furnishing plans in the new zones.

    I have made little gold farming Leyawiin plans compared to even Markarth. At least Markarth had an area with more than 20 containers to farm. I still don’t have all the blues for myself, and I only very rarely have a duplicate to sell. The only way I can keep my guild trader slots full is by buying random furnishing envelopes and selling them, and I don’t want to use my hard-earned vouchers that way.

    Speaking of random furnishing envelopes, having the Vampiric and Markarth ones mixed has not helped much at all. It’s much easier to get blues already so they sell for virtually nothing, yet there are few purples of each and they go for 100k to over 1 M each in traders. Purple Vampiric plans don’t even show up in a search at most capital traders.

    I don’t mind farming plans either, but when it’s like Leyawiin and there is only one room in the whole zone with unowned containers, and most of them drop provisions ingredients instead, it is almost impossible to get anything other than the same green zone plans over and over again even if you farm there all day.

    Maybe it is time to have "curated" furnishing drops from daily rewards, same as the system they introduced with Deadlands for gear. This way people could aim for collecting all plans if they do the dailies.
    [PC/EU] Tamriel Hero, Stormproof, Grand Master Crafter
  • TeruKisuke
    TeruKisuke
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    I know housing is mega expensive and I tend to buy furniture more often than crafting it.

    I don't know if this is a viable option but what about farming gold instead of mats and using the gold to buy the furniture mats or furniture directly? You could run public dungeons or dungeons and use the gold to buy mats.

    Your intentions are good and the thought is sound, and I admit I had thought of doing this years ago, and I tried doing this. But it is inefficient for a few reasons. I will explain.

    I have an Imperial character who I have purely to grind stuff out in the world. As people know, Imperials get a 1% bonus to gold drops. Back in the day I'd grind the Malabal Tor public dungeon, Crimson Cove. I'd also grind places like the Vvardenfell Forgotten Wastes for that elusive Sixth House Tapestry that nobody has seen on Xbox to confirm its existence, and the Orcrest public dungeon in Northern Elsweyr.

    After 1-2 hours of grinding I would maybe get about 20-30k gold, closer to 2-3 it'd be 40-50k. The thing is that gold farming, at least the normal way, is probably one of the slowest ways to make gold. I think people prefer to murder farm if it is from PVE sources, but I think one notable spot even got nerfed. There's also bear farming, something that has killed the Xbox NA market for Dreugh Wax due to bots on console.

    The fastest way to make gold is to do crafting writs on multiple characters, do surveys, and then sell the materials in traders. But from what I'm hearing, PC players have a vastly different market than us console people. If I want to sell things legitimately then I have to sell things in the 3-5k range. Bots have run all the markets into the ground, except for housing mats because they are still rare and expensive. A fact that a lot of Xbox players defend because without bots we'd be paying the same prices PC people do. Then the top merchant guilds monopolize gold and expect you to sell for even less when in bulk, to the point it's dirt cheap. As a seller I'm disheartened by it because the advantage is completely in those buying and I constantly get jipped for lower prices simply because bots have ruined it for all the legitimate sellers, but nobody thinks about us.

    Anyways, rant over. I hope that is insightful as far as making gold.

    When it comes to buying mats, on Xbox it is about 80k per stack of Mundane Runes and 50k for Heartwood. I try to snag the lower ones but this is the standard price. To use in a 700 slot house I will need at the VERY least 2,000 of each mat because 200 furnishing mats will get you maybe 10-20 furnishings, and there's 700 in a house... It is even worse when people are using a lot of structures, which tends to cost a lot of mats.

    If my math is correct, then to fill up a 700 slot house with craftable furniture using housing mats alone, I am needing somewhere along the lines of 3-5 million gold, if I am buying the mats exclusively through traders. Of course I also grab Resource Nodes on the way to my daily quest locations, but I end up with maybe 20 housing mats after every venture. And even then, I am not always satisfied with my selections. I switch out and try different furniture in a spot. I am not a perfect being. That's what all my storage houses are for, the stuff I made but didn't end up using.

    And if I were to wait for events with 2X double node drops... Well it still takes me a whole night to get a stack of a furnishing material, something I find is very inefficient. I gave up doing that a long time ago. I try it occasionally, but it still manages to be a not worth-it time sink.
  • TeruKisuke
    TeruKisuke
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    @kind_hero Thank you. You have a lot of good advice here that I've heeded over the years, and I appreciate your sentiment in wanting to help. Also I appreciate all the discussion. Even though it's been years I didn't want to give up on the topic, because I want the game to be better. Trying to respond to everyone's points but it takes me time because I'm very long-winded lol. Anyways.
    kind_hero wrote: »
    My advice is to buy only the blueprints that are important for you, things that you build often, like structural furnishings or chairs. But why spend 500k on a plan when you will craft only one or two pieces? Most furnishings sell, but the profit you make is quite low (except for times like this, when we have a fresh DLC with new and desirable furnishings).

    This is good advice and something that I've followed for the past few years. This is precisely why I am maybe at 1600/2000 plans (not including Deadlands. That comes out for us console people tomorrow.) It feels like I am getting further and further behind as more plans come out though.

    I think the only issue is that I build very often, and there is not always a crafter online to help me, so I'm at the whim of waiting for them or running to traders (the latter is usually for something I foresee as being a bit more affordable, like in the 30-100k range). It definitely feels a little disheartening when I dedicate a night and want to be creative but do not have the means to. If it's from Editor the only thing I buy from it from my own pockets without going to anyone else is cheap Crown plants or Crown-Only hearth items, because those seem to be the only affordable things to me.
    kind_hero wrote: »
    This brings me to the next advice, to play the market a bit when there is a new DLC. Then you can flip items and make millions of gold in a week. Some years ago I was very excited with every plan I got, I learned it quickly, and tried to make profit by selling the crafted item.

    This is also good advice. Unfortunately I don't really tend to heed it because I tend to want to eat it as soon as possible to help the Housing community by being able to craft from the getgo, considering they're so rare. And chances are, I will never see that plan again. This is the case with many purple plans to the point where they become inaccessible, and so the good thing that was in my hands ends up not appearing again.

    I think Markarth was one of the worst recent examples of this. It was impossible to find any purples less than 2 mil for months on end, or even find plans in traders at all. Specifically, I wanted the tea kettle plan, because I use a lot of common household items in my homes. After months they were all gone because everyone moved on to Blackwood plan farming. I'm scared that will happen again every time. And unfortunately we do not have a guarantee DLC stuff will always be moved to document pouches.
    kind_hero wrote: »
    However, when the DLC is new, the style material also costs a lot, and the base mats, like the mundane runes, heartwood or deco wax are very expensive. So, the profit can be low if you do not stock up before the DLC.

    This is also true. Unfortunately when the Leyawiin structure plans came out, I had about 400 Ivory Brigade Clasps. I ran to one of my mansion builds and began replacing all the walls with the Wainscot walls because my goodness, they're beautiful. I ran out of clasps and Mastic before I could even finish lol. One single house destroyed my mats. I had to build it up again and now I am at 200 something clasps after doing soul-sucking dailies every day. I'd buy the style mats instead but they're also expensive. Sigh.
    kind_hero wrote: »
    As a beginner tip, the way you can make money on a steady rate is by farming mats and selling "tempers", expecially deugh wax (the most costly). I think deugh wax is about 15k a piece on the EU server right now. So, selling these weekly, helps you build up funds quickly. Ofc, for this you need to do dailies (I do not bother with enchanting, provisioning and alchemy anymore), because the rewards can include tempers and writs.

    That is what I do too. I do Crafting Writs every day on like 12 characters and save up surveys for the mats to sell. Except I do all of them, and make 5k per character. It sucks up about two hours of my night every night. Unfortunately, in a comment I made just before this one I explain in detail where on Xbox, it is the exact opposite. Dreugh Wax is actually the cheapest gold mat at about 3k per. So... unfortunately I get dirt for them, and get badgered if I don't include bulk discounts on top of that. The bot owners control the markets on console and it's gonna stay that way for a long time.

    Over the course of me playing I think Dreugh Wax started out as 3k per, then rose to 6k per over time, and recently the market crashed with bot farmers exploding the market so it's back to 3k again, over the course of maybe 4 years. Hah, we've gone full circle.

    Over the course of a week I can make a mil from my sellings, but it's a little rough as decorating a house costs way more than that, and we've got things like expensive lux to afford every week that doesn't come back around for at least half a year. And I have many houses I want to decorate. In fact, I have some houses I want to decorate for my friend too. (He's not a houser like I am, but would love a Vampire lair.)
    kind_hero wrote: »
    Since ZOS is asking for so much money on housing and/or makes the system so grindy, they should offer much more items. By this I am referring mostly to structural items for all architectural styles, and of course, to the long list of items requested by the community for years. There is little excuse not to have these items, because of the large amount of money people sink in housing, and in ZOS' accounts.

    This. Unfortunately we are lacking a lot of basics. I just want basic windows for my cottages... All of them have been really big, fancy, and niche. Would welcome a lot of styles. Thankfully as far as what we're wanting, I think they're starting to listen a bit more, but that is only a feeling considering all the other things we really need worked on. Things like how bad this grind is.

    As far as more slots, well there are rumors that they're testing it on the PTS. I have no proof of this. Take it with a grain of salt, and even if they wanted to, I'm not sure they'd even go through with it due to performance.
    kind_hero wrote: »
    Some items could be rare and hard to build, that's how the system stays interesting, but the basic stuff should be very easy to make. We already have the dirt cheap list that vendors sell, like stone blocks, tarps, stool, and the occasional trees or filler items. That list should be extended to some structural items like platforms, columns, roofs, etc. People like to build, not to grind. Next if people want to add things like desks or carpets, ok, those should be harder to get depending on style or quality.

    Thiiiis. What's killing me is that furnishings require so much materials to craft. ESPECIALLY with the structurals. They eat mats more than anything else, even with just blues. I'd really love if we had the plan requirements more closely to the new Vampiric lab stuff we just got. They're very affordable, and I hope we can get more cheap plans like that moving forward.

    And, yes, regarding the bold. People like to build, not to grind. Our creativity is being drowned and stifled. More mats means more builders means more builds means more hype means more advertisement means more money!
  • TeruKisuke
    TeruKisuke
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    Raideen wrote: »
    I agree with just about every point here, but you are missing one thing.

    This is a game, made by a publicly traded company whos primary goal is to make money. The easier the plans are to get, the easier the materials are to get, etc etc, the less crowns are spent on furnishing (because it often seems to be the only "realistic" way to obtain things.

    Now mind, I am not arguing for the reason I just listed as I personally believe making a game fun first will result in money being spent on the game, but that is not the case with ESO. The game designers have the best intents I imagine, but they have to meet the demands of the people who head up monetization.

    I guess my point is, I can understand and agree with your plight, but I highly doubt MS/ZOS is going to change anything that could result in them losing money.

    Let me state again. I am not championing the current game design in regards to housing, in fact my primary reason to play ESO is because of housing, so I understand clearly your desires and if housing was not a thing in this game, I would not be playing it, but this does not change the idea that you could be speaking to deaf ears.

    Don't worry. I completely understand you and how you feel. In fact I think most people would give up and wallow in despair with a grinding system like this. "It is simply how it is."

    I simply didn't want to be one of those people.

    I have been decorating dedicatedly for roughly three years now. I enjoy Housing, but I hate the grind for it. I don't mind other grinds in other games, in fact they can be kinda rewarding. But it's bad when we're punished for wanting to be artistic.
    Raideen wrote: »
    This is a game, made by a publicly traded company whos primary goal is to make money. The easier the plans are to get, the easier the materials are to get, etc etc, the less crowns are spent on furnishing (because it often seems to be the only "realistic" way to obtain things.

    This seems to be the intent we can glean, yes. The unfortunate part is not that they want to make money. It's that they don't know how to do it.

    The community has asked for plenty of things to make it into the game. Certain things like Velsa's Hairstyle gets constant requests on the Crown Store forum, and it hasn't made an appearance in all those 5 or so years, despite people wanting to pay money for it. I sent in a ticket for that Crown Store horse, the Christmas-y one with the wreath around its neck, last year in November because I wanted to use it in my Christmas build. They turned me down, despite me wanting to pay money for it. I thought it was simply because it would come back to the store anyways, so I waited. It didn't lol. Certain houses take years to come back to the crown store, despite people wanting to pay money for it. Personally I am in the camp that thinks they will make more money if houses weren't limited to short weekend-to-week windows with at least yearly gaps of them being seen. I would've bought 5 of those Sweetwater bathhouse furnishing packs if I simply had a bit more time to amass the money for it. Same with a lot of the houses the first time around. If they made bodies of water the size of swimming pools, I'd pay money for that too. Weather effects, same deal.

    The kicker here is that they are making improvements to the game regarding grinds that wouldn't cost them a dime not to improve, like with dungeon and trial gear farming. Meanwhile we have a vast housing market here, and I think they would bring in more money if more players thought housing was appealing. And I think they've caught onto that because giving away the Psijic Villa ended up being successful, so they've started giving us free Notables more often. Houses that would normally cost us 13k+ crowns. They want things to be accessible. They just haven't realized how.
    Raideen wrote: »
    I understand clearly your desires and if housing was not a thing in this game, I would not be playing it

    Me too. I just wish that the developers would make it more enticing to stick with this side of the game or else they might lose me. I've already considered taking a break to rest my poor wrists from this grueling grind every day, and have even considered taking a break and playing some other games, which is a worst case scenario for them. If I'm not playing, they're not making money. I just want to be creative and design stuff in my houses.

    You might be right, and my complaining might be falling on deaf ears. But in case they are listening... Well, you know what they say:

    Don't settle for less. Fight for more!
  • TeruKisuke
    TeruKisuke
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    Totally agree, please help ZOS!

    It takes me like 2-3 years of grinding for mats and recipes to be able to fully decorate a home, it's a full time job when I'm not playing the content.

    I would suggest quick wins would be:
    - reduce the amount of mats needed to craft furniture
    - increase the drop rate of plans which in turn lowers the gold sink at the traders

    This. Something that should be fun should not feel like a full-time job. When I explain it to people who don't play the game, it definitely feels like it. So I really hope they can improve the player experience, because it has been like this for years. I just want to have fun designing, not grind all the time and get burnt out before I even start.
  • SilverBride
    SilverBride
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    TeruKisuke wrote: »
    —For the love of all that's holy, stop locking style material behind dailies. (I'm not playing the game, I'm playing the same 5 quests over and over and it is driving me INSANE). Let us just buy them from a vendor like with Solitude please...

    THIS!

    And it gets more time consuming with every new chapter, when even more new styles are introduced requiring even more dailies.
    PCNA
  • TeruKisuke
    TeruKisuke
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    TeruKisuke wrote: »
    —For the love of all that's holy, stop locking style material behind dailies. (I'm not playing the game, I'm playing the same 5 quests over and over and it is driving me INSANE). Let us just buy them from a vendor like with Solitude please...

    THIS!

    And it gets more time consuming with every new chapter, when even more new styles are introduced requiring even more dailies.

    This is what made me make the post in the first place, honestly. Nothing gets me more burnt out on doing dailies than the ones that give important style mats. I feel like daily quests should be something extra instead of mandatory, but it feels like it if you want to do any Housing. And if you want to circumvent it by buying from other players, prepare to pay a small fortune because they have to go through what you skipped out on.

    I've kept up with dailies to some capacity every day. I was able to take a break from Alinor and Elsweyr for a while since I had saved up from events. Then I started needing a lot of Markarth's so I started doing those, but they literally can take an hour, made even more burdensome if nobody's doing Harrowstorms, which they likely aren't because the DLC is old news. The beetle world boss isn't bad but the Void world boss is insufferable. Leyawiin there are the insufferable bosses occasionally, like War Chief and lately Ghemvas because he does a lot of damage for some reason. Elsweyr is fine in this aspect, the world bosses aren't too bad (although Zalsheem can suck a bag of pipes for being annoying).

    Summerset is the #1 most annoying with dailies though. With no gear decons to get Culanda, dailies are mandatory, and it has some of the hardest and longest-winded world bosses in the game. I'm looking at you, B'Korgen and Gryphons. Thankfully, after Summerset they learned not to make them AS bad, but it's still insufferable. Thankfully antiquities you can get them sometimes, but I'd still prefer other less time consuming, less frustrating guaranteed ways to get them. Clockwork is okay, but honestly I haven't needed to do them very often.

    Oh, I forgot about Murkmire. That's because I don't do them anymore. They made Walks-Like-Thunder impossible to do, so why bother...

    In any case, I'm getting sick of dailies. It's tiring. Finally after three years, I'm going to put my controller down and take a break for a while... I'll pay the fee if I need to...
  • maximusrex45
    maximusrex45
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    This thread speaks to so many of my housing and furnishing frustrations. I don't even mind farming for stuff, but the drop rates are aggravatingly terrible.
  • CrystalShard
    CrystalShard
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    I couldn't agree more with the OP. The grind is horrible! I would love to buy more houses and decorate them but the sheer amount of time, effort and money it takes to finish them is just too much. These days I've restricted myself to only buying houses that I absolutely adore and see myself visiting often.
    There are some additional things I would like to add to the frustration list:
    - the drop rate of base game dwarven and ayleid plans is atrocious and I'd like to see a writ document for them
    - some furnishing plans are also too difficult to get, like Redguard Cannister, Gilded or Daedric Fence, Section, with the Daedric Fence actually being a blue plan and still selling for 1M+
    - Vampiric plans not being included in the Skyrim Furnishing Documents from the writ vendor
    - the never officially confirmed but noticed by farmers cooldown on blue and purple plans once your character finds one
    Edited by CrystalShard on November 16, 2021 9:06AM
  • katanagirl1
    katanagirl1
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    kind_hero wrote: »
    I am one of the frustrated ones too. My main complaint is furnishing plans in the new zones.

    I have made little gold farming Leyawiin plans compared to even Markarth. At least Markarth had an area with more than 20 containers to farm. I still don’t have all the blues for myself, and I only very rarely have a duplicate to sell. The only way I can keep my guild trader slots full is by buying random furnishing envelopes and selling them, and I don’t want to use my hard-earned vouchers that way.

    Speaking of random furnishing envelopes, having the Vampiric and Markarth ones mixed has not helped much at all. It’s much easier to get blues already so they sell for virtually nothing, yet there are few purples of each and they go for 100k to over 1 M each in traders. Purple Vampiric plans don’t even show up in a search at most capital traders.

    I don’t mind farming plans either, but when it’s like Leyawiin and there is only one room in the whole zone with unowned containers, and most of them drop provisions ingredients instead, it is almost impossible to get anything other than the same green zone plans over and over again even if you farm there all day.

    Maybe it is time to have "curated" furnishing drops from daily rewards, same as the system they introduced with Deadlands for gear. This way people could aim for collecting all plans if they do the dailies.

    That sounds like something that I couldn’t even hope for, to be honest.

    I really don’t mind getting duplicates, it’s just at this point the furnishing plan drop rate in new zones is so low that I don’t get enough duplicates to sell to get gold to buy the ones I need from guild traders.
    Khajiit Stamblade main
    Dark Elf Magsorc
    Redguard Stamina Dragonknight
    Orc Stamplar PVP
    Breton Magsorc PVP
    Dark Elf Magden
    Khajiit Stamblade
    Khajiit Stamina Arcanist

    PS5 NA
  • Ravensilver
    Ravensilver
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    This! All of this!

    I love housing! I spend real money on it (though lately, I've been ignoring all the large houses - and have Sweetwater Cascades only, because it was gifted to me - since there is no way I can adequately furnish them with the current slot limit), both on houses and on furnishings.

    I also love crafting and enjoy being able to make my own furnishings for my houses. Not only because it is often a bit cheaper, but also this way I don't have to run all over the place, trying to find a table and four matching chairs... ^^;;

    I realize that ZOS seems to be inspired by artificially content-inflating grind, like in WoW. Game companies seem to still be of the opinion that if only they hide more and more content behind gatekeeping grinds, they will retain their customers, because the customers won't have a choice but to do the grind if they want to obtain whatever... weapons, armour, furnishing plans.

    [snip] Instead of offering interesting quests, exploration, excitement, we're being offered grind. Every day, the same thing. Yes, it cycles through the available content a bit, but by now I can run every delve in my sleep. And I don't even pick up the WB dailies anymore, because no one does them (except in The Reach, interestingly enough). The only daily content that's still really popular is the Hallowstorms in The Reach. Why? Because they drop the document cases that can include furnishing plans.

    I dared suggest that perhaps it might be a nice idea to expand the possible location of furnishing plans into Treasure Chests, safeboxes and Thieves Troves (https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/590599/include-furniture-and-other-recipes-in-treasure-chests-safeboxes-thieves-troves-please/p1) and have now been told that Housing is End Game and that I'm in the wrong for wanting "the high end rare recipes that are very hard to come by (has anyone considered that is on purpose?) and being able to decorate at the same level as those who have literally put thousands of hours in the game to achieve."

    So we, who are requesting higher drops, better availability and less gatekeeping of the furnishing plans, are the losers who aren't worthy of owning 'high end' recipes.

    But I digress...

    On the whole, the decision of ZOS to gatekeep furnishing plans (especially the higher quality ones) behind stealing and endless grind, may not be the best one. Housing players are some of the most dedicated customers here in ESO. I would even suggest that most of the shopping in the CS is done by Housing players.
    So why punish us and drive us out of the game by making the part that is central to our enjoyment of ESO so very, very difficult and frustrating?

    [edited for bashing]
    Edited by ZOS_Icy on November 19, 2021 12:14PM
  • TeruKisuke
    TeruKisuke
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    This thread speaks to so many of my housing and furnishing frustrations. I don't even mind farming for stuff, but the drop rates are aggravatingly terrible.

    I think that is the main problem here. I and most others don't even mind grinding. We wouldn't be playing an RPG if we didn't. But the problem is that the grind is even preventing us from doing the end result, which is decorating, the actual fun part, but we only get morsels of that fun part time. That is because we need so many materials that it makes it a chore to decorate even one house. It's disproportionate to the rest of the games' grinds.

    Why improve the experience of gear drops and not monetize cosmetics, but have only Housing fans forced to pay thousands of dollars? Why not make some cash off of the people who want to want to make their characters look cool (Ex: the people who've been wanting new hairstyles for years)?

    I don't mind it being expensive and grindy, but the way it feels now, feels more bad than it does rewarding. I've had people who have all the plans discourage me from doing so because they claim farming, getting, and buying all the plans is not worth it.
  • TeruKisuke
    TeruKisuke
    ✭✭✭✭
    I couldn't agree more with the OP. The grind is horrible! I would love to buy more houses and decorate them but the sheer amount of time, effort and money it takes to finish them is just too much. These days I've restricted myself to only buying houses that I absolutely adore and see myself visiting often.
    There are some additional things I would like to add to the frustration list:
    - the drop rate of base game dwarven and ayleid plans is atrocious and I'd like to see a writ document for them
    - some furnishing plans are also too difficult to get, like Redguard Cannister, Gilded or Daedric Fence, Section, with the Daedric Fence actually being a blue plan and still selling for 1M+
    - Vampiric plans not being included in the Skyrim Furnishing Documents from the writ vendor
    - the never officially confirmed but noticed by farmers cooldown on blue and purple plans once your character finds one

    That's the whole crux of it. The grind is not what keeps us Housing people engaged, it's actually decorating. Those of us who have fun doing so are essentially punished for the sake of the economy. Gold upon gold upon gold. I think I would buy even more crowns to decorate my homes if I was actually in them.
    These days I've restricted myself to only buying houses that I absolutely adore and see myself visiting often.

    This. With their current model, the grind is so inefficient that we have to pick and choose. I don't see how this model currently is making them more money. In fact, I'd be more than happy to give them money, if we tended to get what we wanted.

    Friend of mine, who is not a super engaged Houser, is constantly discouraged from buying the new homes because he has to make that choice. He has to finish decorating the homes he has, but furnishings are expensive and not easy to come by, on top of it taking a long time to dedicatedly fill a house. Housing is not accessible. It is only accessible to the most patient, which my friend assuredly is not, so more often than not I am undertaking this grind alone. He understands whenever I rant about it to him. He'd love to have a vampire lair, and I've offered to decorate it for him, but we need the materials first, so for over two years we haven't had the chance to touch it. It's a shame.

    In regards to your added frustrations, I agree. The scarcity of these plans only helps the few that do not care and monetize it. There was a time where I pulled a Dwarven Pew plan and the Collectors with all the money were trying to concoct a means to sweep it from me, simply to "keep the prices high." There was an auction for the plan at the same time, you see, but the seller accidentally ate the plan, and since I looked for a price check, he turned to me and asked to buy it off me, while the ones in the auction I knew already knew how to make the plan and were gloating about keeping things "exclusive." I chose not to encourage that and I sold to a more honest person who asked me first anyways. I fail to see how this scarcity helps anyone besides the rich, who go out and buy things only to flip it and make more gold.
    - the never officially confirmed but noticed by farmers cooldown on blue and purple plans once your character finds one

    Oh, this is assuredly very real. If it isn't, there still is a notable decrease in a chance after the fact. Which I agree is frustrating, and discourages me from throwing myself at it and farming.
  • NoodleESO
    NoodleESO
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    It would be nice, the other day I was trying to get into housing and I realized my main doesn't even know how to craft a candle.

    In most rpgs you can craft the basics right away and you only need the mats, In eso theres way too many furnishings for the RNG to be so low and the player economy is way too inflated to be buying them. Not a good look for newer players trying to get into the game.

    Green/blue furnishing plans need to have a guarantee drop from daily BGs and Dungeons imo.
  • Ravensilver
    Ravensilver
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    NoodleESO wrote: »
    Green/blue furnishing plans need to have a guarantee drop from daily BGs and Dungeons imo.

    And dailies. And WBs. And Delves.

    A lot of zones would be more populated, if the furnishing plans would drop from a much wider range of possibilities.
  • TeruKisuke
    TeruKisuke
    ✭✭✭✭
    This! All of this!

    I love housing! I spend real money on it (though lately, I've been ignoring all the large houses - and have Sweetwater Cascades only, because it was gifted to me - since there is no way I can adequately furnish them with the current slot limit), both on houses and on furnishings.

    I also love crafting and enjoy being able to make my own furnishings for my houses. Not only because it is often a bit cheaper, but also this way I don't have to run all over the place, trying to find a table and four matching chairs... ^^;;

    I realize that ZOS seems to be inspired by artificially content-inflating grind, like in WoW. Game companies seem to still be of the opinion that if only they hide more and more content behind gatekeeping grinds, they will retain their customers, because the customers won't have a choice but to do the grind if they want to obtain whatever... weapons, armour, furnishing plans.

    [snip] Instead of offering interesting quests, exploration, excitement, we're being offered grind. Every day, the same thing. Yes, it cycles through the available content a bit, but by now I can run every delve in my sleep. And I don't even pick up the WB dailies anymore, because no one does them (except in The Reach, interestingly enough). The only daily content that's still really popular is the Hallowstorms in The Reach. Why? Because they drop the document cases that can include furnishing plans.

    I dared suggest that perhaps it might be a nice idea to expand the possible location of furnishing plans into Treasure Chests, safeboxes and Thieves Troves (https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/590599/include-furniture-and-other-recipes-in-treasure-chests-safeboxes-thieves-troves-please/p1) and have now been told that Housing is End Game and that I'm in the wrong for wanting "the high end rare recipes that are very hard to come by (has anyone considered that is on purpose?) and being able to decorate at the same level as those who have literally put thousands of hours in the game to achieve."

    So we, who are requesting higher drops, better availability and less gatekeeping of the furnishing plans, are the losers who aren't worthy of owning 'high end' recipes.

    But I digress...

    On the whole, the decision of ZOS to gatekeep furnishing plans (especially the higher quality ones) behind stealing and endless grind, may not be the best one. Housing players are some of the most dedicated customers here in ESO. I would even suggest that most of the shopping in the CS is done by Housing players.
    So why punish us and drive us out of the game by making the part that is central to our enjoyment of ESO so very, very difficult and frustrating?

    Regarding the bold, yes, you worded it very well. For Housing, we are offered bland repetitive grinds. At least with quests, we are getting potentially thought-provoking voiced narratives. With dungeons, we get enemies to slay, also with their own narratives. Trials have deeply concerning conflicts. Cloudrest shows the struggle of the Wellynars, guardians of Summerset. Maw of Lorkhaj has deeper insight into the Dro'Mathra shadowcats. Trials are themed, which is why I assume people like doing them over and over. And the thing is, they are at least guanteed something.

    Housing, on the other hand... is not fun. It's not themed, there's no narrative to it. Just rifling through a random container day by day. Dailies are slog grinds made mandatory for making furniture. And at least 80% of the time, we are guaranteed nothing. Achievement Furnishings we even have to unload more gold after the fact, so it doesn't feel like much of a reward more than a "we'll allow you to buy this now." This was the issue with the Dragonhold achievement Furnishings, something that felt especially awful, and had to build up to like 30 dailies done? Just to simply gain access to buying the achievement furnishings. I stand by my thought that Southern Elsweyr was the worst when it came to their treatment of the Housing community, which thankfully they have learned from.
    I dared suggest that perhaps it might be a nice idea to expand the possible location of furnishing plans into Treasure Chests, safeboxes and Thieves Troves (https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/590599/include-furniture-and-other-recipes-in-treasure-chests-safeboxes-thieves-troves-please/p1) and have now been told that Housing is End Game and that I'm in the wrong for wanting "the high end rare recipes that are very hard to come by (has anyone considered that is on purpose?) and being able to decorate at the same level as those who have literally put thousands of hours in the game to achieve."

    I hopped over to your thread to see what the problem was, and I can see the issue. Unfortunately, when Housers or people who are interested in Housing in any capacity open up the discussion to the more General side for the forums, you are going to get the opinions of people who are unaffected by the frustrations of housing, because they do not partake in it, or even better, benefit off of making money off of Housers.

    The specific person you quoted was not a houser themselves, only quoting the grueling grind that their wife went through and the joy that she had from housing. They spoke from an outside perspective. Of course, I can't make assumptions without asking them further questions, which I might do so later if only to bolster and support your thread, but what I would ask them is this:

    "Is your wife enjoying the grind it takes to get there, or is she only doing the grind out of necessity to get to the fun part, which is the decorating portion that we rarely get to partake in? Would she be happier if the grind was a little less, instead of keeping it exclusive and expensive? Would she have more fun if Housing was accessible?"

    Similarly, there was another thread suggesting that basic housing mats get added to daily writ rewards (which is a fantastic idea, by the way. Housing is just as much a crafting profession as is crafting gear.) On that thread was a person against the lessening of the grind and making furnishing materials less expensive, because "housing being expensive helps the economy and encourages player interaction and trade." But this is also a limited perspective. Why must we be the only ones who "bolster the economy"? Why must we be the sacrifice on the pyre? Why must the artistic ones be punished for wanting to express themselves? Would you not want to encourage our creativity? "There are other ways for the economy to flourish," is what I told them.

    We should not have to put in hundreds of thousands of hours just to get to the "fun part." Just like how PvP and PvE people can quickly get to the meat of it, I think we should at least have better drops with furnishing materials. You know, the [White] quality materials that should be very common.

    It is also evident how outside the housing community views us. Even my friend who plays with me, I love him, I truly do, but he also views housing as "unimportant" in the grand scheme of things, as "dungeons and new content is what pulls people in." We Housers are seen as "unimportant" to the General folk who don't care for designing things, even though we are the ones who spend most. Unimportant, you say?

    In any case... Giving us quality of life improvements would make Housing more enjoyable on top of making it more accessible and therefore more money-making to them, if more people were partaking in it. I myself am very dedicated, but not everyone is as patient as I, in fact very few are. It definitely feels like we are even preyed upon, by both the system and the community looking to make money off of us, at times.

    [edited to remove quote]
    Edited by ZOS_Icy on November 19, 2021 12:15PM
  • Ravensilver
    Ravensilver
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    TeruKisuke wrote: »

    [snipsnippetysnip]
    In any case... Giving us quality of life improvements would make Housing more enjoyable on top of making it more accessible and therefore more money-making to them, if more people were partaking in it. I myself am very dedicated, but not everyone is as patient as I, in fact very few are. It definitely feels like we are even preyed upon, by both the system and the community looking to make money off of us, at times.

    Yes! All of the above, yes! You said it so much better than I did.

    I've felt frustrated for quite a while now, because while a thread on harder overland gets tacked on to the top of the page and feedback from the devs, all we got was a thread on housing slots, which was posted 21 months ago and which has since then been totally ignored.

    So yes, as part of the housing community, I feel ignored, neglected and treated as a player second class... but we're expected to shill out thousands of crowns (and thus $$$s) for Crown Store housing content.
  • malatorius
    malatorius
    ✭✭
    I Think a great help to lessening the grind would also be to:

    Have Furnishing materials (ie: Heartwood, Mundane Runes, etc) be harvestable from breaking down raw materials like you get tempers, etc. Being able to get that Heartwood from breaking down your stack of 200 Rough Ruby Ash or whatever would help IMMENSELY.
    And Fadomai said, "When Nirni is filled with her children, take one of them and change them. Make the fastest, cleverest, most beautiful people, and call them Khajiit."
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