We need to talk about furnishing mats/prices

CGPsaint

Haenk wrote: »

"not readily available" vs 1-10 across all traders - this means they are readily available. You just don't want to pay for them, being as rare as they are. I don't either, but that's another story.
And being available for housing? Ask someone who can craft it. You don't need that blueprint, you just *want* it. That's a difference.
And again, ESO is a long-term game, there need to be goals to reach (like having all motifs), and they shouldn't be reachable on day one. That would be extremely boring and will not make you or anyone else stay in the game.

1-10 is hardly what I'd call "readily available. I've easily spent over 100 million on furnishing plans that I got tired of farming, so it's not like I'm opposed to paying for them. I'm am opposed to having to pay so much for the plans just because ZOS gonna ZOS.

No, it's not just a matter of wanting the blueprint. I offer my crafting services for free to any of my guild mates, so I am the guy that people ask because they don't have the plans.

I agree that ESO is a long term game, and ZOS is always adding more furnishing plans and motifs. Just keeping up with the new plans is hard enough without being able to get the old plans.

chessalavakia_ESO

kargen27 wrote: »

Gruumsh1 wrote: »

Feels like working as intended so ZOS servers don't get so many furnishings in houses that it slows down the servers - hence the no way to increase furnishing numbers in houses. As an example, can you imagine if all furnishing mats were free, just how many furnishings would get made and put in houses? Cheap furnishings are not on ZOS's radar.

I don't see cheap materials increasing the overall amount of furnishing much if any. Once a house is full that's it. If you want to add something you have to remove something. Players are not going to fill up houses they haven't gotten around to decorating yet with crafted furniture just because it is cheap. They will make it when they need it.

I've got around ten houses I bought because I thought they'd be cool in the moment and then didn't actually bother decorating them when I realized the actual cost to do it.

With that said, my impression is that the furnishing issue stress point is more about the clients viewing the houses rather than the servers.

https://help.elderscrollsonline.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/49641/~/is-the-housing-furnishing-cap-going-to-be-increased?

I am kind of curious if the demand for the furnishing limit to be raised gets high enough if we'll see either split houses (One house that is technically made up of two houses with a load screen when you transition from one house to another.)

kargen27

Several people over the years have suggested splitting houses into different instances. The most popular example being outdoors/indoors. The problem I see is that would be unfair to players that own homes that don't have both. Some suggested splitting upstairs and downstairs but that hurts players that incorporate both into a build. For some being able to see the downstairs from an upstairs balcony is a key part of the build.

I would like to have the ability to merge a group of furniture into one piece. Like in photoshop how you can flatten multiple layers into one layer. So if you had a kitchen table with six place settings instead of it taking up fifty or more slots it would only take one.
You get the table just exactly like you want it then select every item that you want included and merge them. Then when you move the table everything merged with it moves. It is all just one piece. The downside is once merged you are stuck with it. You can't decide hey I want different mugs or that the roast duck isn't quite centered on the platter. Merging makes it one item.
What would work well for me until they figure out the server issue is more medium or large (not ultra large) homes that cost the same as the really huge ones because they have the same slots available.

valenwood_vegan

I thought I'd chime in from the perspective of someone who does a lot of farming and who was once quite heavily involved in trading and the mats market.

Lemme try my best to TL:DR this because a lot has been said in this thread already. I think what we're seeing here is a form of market failure. Basically, the market *should* balance itself out because higher mat prices should be motivating more people to farm and sell these mats (and / or to sell mats they've been hoarding).

But for a player who's been around for a while, there's little to nothing to spend the gold on. This problem has only grown as ZoS did not release a house for gold last year (we are getting one this year, but the cost is kind of a drop in the bucket and doesn't make gold worth more to me), and the majority of desirable new things are sold only in the crown store. Now crate gifting has been disabled for two months and for me at least, this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I've stopped selling mats entirely, and I farm only to supply my own needs, because gold is worthless to me. (I used to supply the market with millions of gold worth of mats every week). Prices could double from what they are right now and it wouldn't provide me with any additional motivation to farm and sell. It's not worth my time. I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.

This reduces supply and competition in the mats market and allows it to be more easily monopolized, driving prices up further but *without* the expected accompanying effect of bringing more suppliers into the market.

IMO, If the increasing worthlessness of gold isn't addressed, this problem of increasing prices for desirable mats isn't going away.

Northwold

kargen27 wrote: »

I would like to have the ability to merge a group of furniture into one piece. Like in photoshop how you can flatten multiple layers into one layer. So if you had a kitchen table with six place settings instead of it taking up fifty or more slots it would only take one.

I love the merging idea but in practice the game would still be loading exactly the same number of polygons, textures, etc in with the added complication of keeping them merged. So unfortunately I don't think it would help any with performance. I suppose you could have the engine perform a quick culling calculation but as far as I'm aware ESO's engine doesn't support this (I don't think most engines support this -- Unreal 5 in a sense does), and it would increase the performance load.

Jaraal

Northwold wrote: »

kargen27 wrote: »

I would like to have the ability to merge a group of furniture into one piece. Like in photoshop how you can flatten multiple layers into one layer. So if you had a kitchen table with six place settings instead of it taking up fifty or more slots it would only take one.

I love the merging idea but in practice the game would still be loading exactly the same number of polygons, textures, etc in with the added complication of keeping them merged. So unfortunately I don't think it would help any with performance. I suppose you could have the engine perform a quick culling calculation but as far as I'm aware ESO's engine doesn't support this (I don't think most engines support this -- Unreal 5 in a sense does), and it would increase the performance load.

This would actually be detrimental to performance as every item has a unique ID code that is stored on the server. Creating a new item (furniture group #4662277, et al) that takes up space on the server times how many potential hundreds of thousands of unique combinations would be a hinderance rather than a help.

Cheveyo

Global auction house would keep prices reasonable.

CGPsaint

Cheveyo wrote: »

Global auction house would keep prices reasonable.

How? Seems like it would make it even easier for people or groups of people to buy up all of the mats so that they can inflate prices.

NotaDaedraWorshipper

Cheveyo wrote: »

Global auction house would keep prices reasonable.

Ha!

No they wouldn't.

disintegr8

Everything that is put up for sale can be collected free of charge, all you have to do is put the time in to get it. If you farmed material instead of buying it, the prices will come down as a result. I don't craft furniture and don't actively trade material, so without checking I'd suggest I probably have thousands of every housing material in my craft bag.

If not already in place, why not do what most crafters do and have the recipient of the item provide the materials needed (or the gold for the materials) to the person crafting it. They can then choose whether they want to farm them or buy them, farming them will take longer but has always been cheap. Gold can be earned very easily in this game (which might also be part of the problem).

One suggestion I'd hate to see is my crafting surveys being diluted with furnishing materials. As there are no daily writs for furniture, I don't need to see furniture materials dropping from my surveys.

spartaxoxo

Cheveyo wrote: »

Global auction house would keep prices reasonable.

The platforms with less centralized trade have lower prices.

RodneyRegis

Meh.

There are various ways of getting mats.

1) farm them
2) buy low, sell high, keep what you need
3) just buy what you need from guild store.

1 and 2 take time, effort and/or skill/investment.

3 is very straightforward. You're paying somebody else for their skill, effort, time and investment.

If the price came down, people would stop putting in the time and effort and there would be scarcity. So the price would go up.

They should come up with a term to describe this phenomenon

Lumenn

I absolutely love when people point out how hard the poor farmers/newbies have had to work to sell their furniture mats. Yes, while their are some who do(although with the abysmal drop rates I'd venture more farm to keep rather than sell. Too painful and not cost/time efficient) so while some may do this, we're forgetting how much bot farmers are raking in. Auto farm, crafting mats with furniture mats as bonus. Xbox is lousy with them, and while I've not seen NEARLY the amount on pcna as I do Xbox na, I see them. Who knows, maybe PC can get more sophisticated and hide better. Put them on vendors and kill the bots ✊

spartaxoxo

RodneyRegis wrote: »

3 is very straightforward. You're paying somebody else for their skill, effort, time and investment.

If the price came down, people would stop putting in the time and effort and there would be scarcity. So the price would go up.

They should come up with a term to describe this phenomenon

If it was just down to what players were farming (there is no skill involved in picking nodes, just a time and effort), it wouldn't be an issue. But, there is actually an artificial scarcity created by low drop rates.