We need to talk about Columbine

XSTRONG · February 29

Zos should add potions like Tri pots to Infinite Archive or up the amount of flowers you get from containers by alot.

I farmed Coldharbour during the crafters event and it feelt worth it because of double drop. Maybe a farming mythic or some kind of farming buff you earn in game.

Right now players that are litterly working in Imperial City to get flowers control the prices on flowers and bots controls the prices on other crafting mats.

From my point of view that seems to be what Zos wants.

Reginald_leBlem · February 29

sarahthes wrote: »

TybaltKaine wrote: »

What if I told you that you could pick Columbine without leaving Cyro

Crazy stuff, right?

I can't pick columbine in Rockgrove though.

You can if you loot the heavy sacks

reazea · February 29

Years ago I used to get upset when I'd see a resource bot farming and report them. Now days when I see this I just smile and and wonder if they're not helping to keep prices down on items like Columbine.

Necrotech_Master · February 29

Lags wrote: »

remove trading addons, problem solved

this wouldnt change anything

seeing what the avg price is has nothing to do with the supply/demand factor

you could disable the addon and the price could go higher because theres less tracking

chessalavakia_ESO · February 29

sarahthes wrote: »

I think the biggest issue is, the activities I spend my time on don't all give rewards that pay for the cost of doing the activities. I'm fine paying for tripots and heroism pots (which also use columbine) at current prices if I can generate enough gold to keep up with them.

My time is limited, and having to choose between either doing the thing that is fun, or farming to do the fun things at some later date, isn't really a great choice.

TLDR endgame raiding needs to provide more gold earning potential.

My impression is that the buyers of pots are generally endgame players.

Supplying them with more gold just means that the people selling the pots can charge more and get it since they have more gold.

Munkfist · February 29

That's the cost of using meta consumables. If you don't want to farm the materials yourself, you will have to pay the upcharge on the materials that you do not want to farm.

Heroism pots are running 9k+ on PC NA. If I don't want to pay the price of convenience, I just go farm some dragons for a couple hours, and pluck Columbine along the way.

tomofhyrule · February 29

I always enjoy that most peoples' answer is "just farm it yourself" as if Columbine is as plentiful overland as Rubedite.

The simple fact remains that alchemy plant nodes will 1) only offer 1 or 2 flowers, as opposed to the 3-8 you get from other mat nodes, and 2) there are 9 different flowers that could spawn instead of just always having the same node style.

Also some people just have lots of RNG. I know there's one person in my guild who seems to walk by a Columbine every other step. Mine tends to be Dragonthorn instead. I can't go anywhere without seeing three of those yellow flowers, but I rarely come across more than one Columbine in a three-day span, even when I'm actively farming stuff. I specifically make it a point to not harvest Alchemy surveys until it's got 3+ Columbine nodes.

An AP source of tripots would be great. People used to go on and on about Corn Flower being expensive, and then it stabilized nicely when a source of AP spell pots came out. But once again, tanks were left in the dust because we don't need the spell damage as much as we need the tri restore.

With the fact that tanking is the most expensive role (I've never got enough of the daily tripots since I use them all and more), and the most pressured role (one tank mistake can wipe an entire raid group, and there are a lot of people who are super toxic to their tanks), is it any wonder why there aren't enough tanks in the queue?

sarahthes · February 29

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

sarahthes wrote: »

I think the biggest issue is, the activities I spend my time on don't all give rewards that pay for the cost of doing the activities. I'm fine paying for tripots and heroism pots (which also use columbine) at current prices if I can generate enough gold to keep up with them.

My time is limited, and having to choose between either doing the thing that is fun, or farming to do the fun things at some later date, isn't really a great choice.

TLDR endgame raiding needs to provide more gold earning potential.

My impression is that the buyers of pots are generally endgame players.

Supplying them with more gold just means that the people selling the pots can charge more and get it since they have more gold.

Endgame PvE and endgame PvP. PvP has some revenue streams especially if you're good at farming tel var or get lucky rolling on gear coffers etc, but endgame PvE just has carries, which can be sketchy if you don't know the provenance of the gold.

erdYrrson · February 29

tomofhyrule wrote: »

I always enjoy that most peoples' answer is "just farm it yourself" as if Columbine is as plentiful overland as Rubedite.

The simple fact remains that alchemy plant nodes will 1) only offer 1 or 2 flowers, as opposed to the 3-8 you get from other mat nodes, and 2) there are 9 different flowers that could spawn instead of just always having the same node style.
[...]

Well then:

freespirit wrote: »

Some other sources besides farming....

Waxed Apothicary Sacks, 500 Tel Var(pretty good drop rate)
Alchemy Surveys(reset until at least one Columbine is showing)
Daily Chest in Dragonguard Sanctuary(frequently drops 3 columbine, drops rheum and dragon blood too, sell and buy columbine)
ToT reward coffers(I see a fair amount in the green NPC daily rewards)
Alchemy Daily rewards(make sure you use less expensive mats to make the potions for these dailies)

🙂

VisitHammerfell wrote: »

freespirit wrote: »

Some other sources besides farming....

Waxed Apothicary Sacks, 500 Tel Var(pretty good drop rate)
Alchemy Surveys(reset until at least one Columbine is showing)
Daily Chest in Dragonguard Sanctuary(frequently drops 3 columbine, drops rheum and dragon blood too, sell and buy columbine)
ToT reward coffers(I see a fair amount in the green NPC daily rewards)
Alchemy Daily rewards(make sure you use less expensive mats to make the potions for these dailies)

🙂

Also the alchemy satchets from the Archive![...]

Arizona_Steve · February 29

Get rid of the guild trader system and I think more people would be willing to sell.

I_killed_Vivec · February 29

Arizona_Steve wrote: »

Get rid of the guild trader system and I think more people would be willing to sell.

Why?

sharquez · February 29

Arizona_Steve wrote: »

Get rid of the guild trader system and I think more people would be willing to sell.

So invest company time, money, and effort to dismantle a functional trading system so people can some how trade more? How does that make sense?

TybaltKaine · February 29

The counterpoint to the 1-2 flowers argument is that 1 flower makes 4 potions. You aren't making 4 weapons with 1 ingot.

Even just taking the time to farm 20 columbine gives you 80 potions.

Necrotech_Master · February 29

Arizona_Steve wrote: »

Get rid of the guild trader system and I think more people would be willing to sell.

if it was switched to a global auction house there will be multiple ramifications to that:

no large gold sinks which will inflate prices
more prone to flippers which will inflate prices

so if it was switched then prices would probably increase to 5x what they are now

Daoin · February 29

this is a joke right, everyone uses columbine so its broken because your not getting enough or the sellers sell it for a high price ? i use columbine for all of my 8 characters i use alot and i make the prices work. couple of motifs and theres your stack of columbine paid for so i think the market is working, maybe not in the land of strictly pvp but its working dont get me wrong i dont like the prices but if it were cheaper then everyone would be forced to go collect the things themselves, i collect when i can but need more and i think the gather yourself to price ratio is honestly fair at the end of the day, then theres also the good days when you get plenty from writs too, but i do not buy in stacks of 20 or less say something like a low amount for that price. today was around 340k for 200 thats 800 potions

Jaraal · February 29

Dekrypted wrote: »

I humored the people here on the forums and spent 2 hours just doing that. Got a whopping 20 of them and a ton of other mats that aren't going to allow me to make tri pots. Not everyone has the time to do writs and surveys.

20 columbine in 2 hours, that's 80 tri pots. Sell the rest of the mats you harvested on a guild trader and buy another 20 columbine, that's 160 tri pots. Also, I can guarantee you that I can go pick up more than 20 columbine off the ground in 2 hours. Come group with me and place your wager.

You just proved that it's not a matter of supply and demand. It's a matter of cost and effort.

CrashTest · February 29

Dax_Draconis wrote: »

CrashTest wrote: »

Nothing needs to be done because this isn't a problem. Columbine is plentiful all over Tamriel and drops from various activities or just sell what you have and use that gold to buy it.

If you don't like the Columbine price, then farm it yourself. If you don't have the time or hate farming, then you're going to have to trade with those who use their time to farm.

How can something so plentiful be so expensive then? It seems ZOS needs to flood the market with these "plentiful" items to drive down the price of them.

I understand rare items being expensive, but as you said, it is plentiful, so why are they so expensive?

Demand. It's used in top tier endgame.

DrNukenstein · February 29

Jaraal wrote: »

20 columbine in 2 hours, that's 80 tri pots. Sell the rest of the mats you harvested on a guild trader and buy another 20 columbine, that's 160 tri pots. Also, I can guarantee you that I can go pick up more than 20 columbine off the ground in 2 hours. Come group with me and place your wager.

You just proved that it's not a matter of supply and demand. It's a matter of cost and effort.

That's only 80 potions, for 2 hours of "WORK" in a video game. 80 tristat pots is like 5 battlegrounds, which is at most an hour and 15 minutes. To sustain a build that regularly uses tristat pots you would have to spend almost 2/3rds of your play time "working". If you count stuff you can sell from AP, and other farmed goods during the time it maybe gets down to 2/5ths of your time in game "working" on sustaining your potion use.

I don't know what you consider fun or if you think this game should primarily be focused on fun, but walking around the open world looking for Columbine is not fun and isn't even productive for how unfun it is.

Jaraal · February 29

DrNukenstein wrote: »

I don't know what you consider fun or if you think this game should primarily be focused on fun, but walking around the open world looking for Columbine is not fun and isn't even productive for how unfun it is.

I've made hundreds of millions of gold looking for (and finding) stuff. So, I guess you could say it's fun for me. Most of my time is spent in Cyrodiil PvPing and playing the map. But I use a lot of tri pots and eat Sugar Skulls on most of my characters, but have never bought a single columbine. So I can't say what your idea of fun in the game is, but mine is varied. I like doing different things. And I'm glad the game gives me a lot of choices.

sarahthes · February 29

DrNukenstein wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

20 columbine in 2 hours, that's 80 tri pots. Sell the rest of the mats you harvested on a guild trader and buy another 20 columbine, that's 160 tri pots. Also, I can guarantee you that I can go pick up more than 20 columbine off the ground in 2 hours. Come group with me and place your wager.

You just proved that it's not a matter of supply and demand. It's a matter of cost and effort.

That's only 80 potions, for 2 hours of "WORK" in a video game. 80 tristat pots is like 5 battlegrounds, which is at most an hour and 15 minutes. To sustain a build that regularly uses tristat pots you would have to spend almost 2/3rds of your play time "working". If you count stuff you can sell from AP, and other farmed goods during the time it maybe gets down to 2/5ths of your time in game "working" on sustaining your potion use.

I don't know what you consider fun or if you think this game should primarily be focused on fun, but walking around the open world looking for Columbine is not fun and isn't even productive for how unfun it is.

This is exactly it. The farming time is greater than the fun time.

It wasn't a problem when mag dds and healers used spell power pots, stam dds used weapon power pots, and tanks/PvP used tripots because demanded was balanced around multiple different mats. But now everyone is using tripots (or heroism/mag/stam lots), and nobody is using those other pots unless their group is very bad. I go thru 200-400 tripots a day. I play for 4ish hours a day doing fun things, and don't really have time for anything more outside of weekends. I would need to farm for 6+ hours a day to keep up with the mats I need.

All I want is for the fun things I do to be a little more rewarding in terms of making it easier to buy the mats or the potions. I'm not even asking for prices to come down or drop rates to increase.

kojou · February 29

My theory is that the Arcanist class increased the price of Tripots. They get Brutality/Sorcery from slotting scholarship and Prophesy/Savagery from slotting Hunter, so there is no need for Weapon or Spell Power potions. Sure you can run heroism potions, but those are way more expensive, and don't do that much for you, but Tri-Pots give you all the resources you need and are cheaper to use.

My stacks of free crown Tri-Pots are now way lower since running an Arcanist and soon I will have to craft some, but I am sure players that were already through their free ones and are now crafting are consuming Columbine along with PvP'ers and Tanks that were already using them.

There are probably other impacts as well that I haven't thought of, but in general it feels like the demand for Columbine has increased substantially, so unless there is some change that pushes players to lower prices this is probably the "new normal" for ESO.

sarahthes · February 29

kojou wrote: »

My theory is that the Arcanist class increased the price of Tripots. They get Brutality/Sorcery from slotting scholarship and Prophesy/Savagery from slotting Hunter, so there is no need for Weapon or Spell Power potions. Sure you can run heroism potions, but those are way more expensive, and don't do that much for you, but Tri-Pots give you all the resources you need and are cheaper to use.

My stacks of free crown Tri-Pots are now way lower since running an Arcanist and soon I will have to craft some, but I am sure players that were already through their free ones and are now crafting are consuming Columbine along with PvP'ers and Tanks that were already using them.

There are probably other impacts as well that I haven't thought of, but in general it feels like the demand for Columbine has increased substantially, so unless there is some change that pushes players to lower prices this is probably the "new normal" for ESO.

Every single class uses tripots for DPS in organized content now. You run camo hunter (or corresponding class skill) and the dk tank or zenkosh runs igneous weapons, and you have sorcery/prophecy and savagery/brutality covered.

In March, when I came back to the game after a 10 month break, I had something like 6000 crown tripots I had saved from daily login rewards over the years, because I rarely tanked.

Those have been gone since around June.

DrNukenstein · February 29

kojou wrote: »

My theory is that the Arcanist class increased the price of Tripots. They get Brutality/Sorcery from slotting scholarship and Prophesy/Savagery from slotting Hunter, so there is no need for Weapon or Spell Power potions. Sure you can run heroism potions, but those are way more expensive, and don't do that much for you, but Tri-Pots give you all the resources you need and are cheaper to use.

My stacks of free crown Tri-Pots are now way lower since running an Arcanist and soon I will have to craft some, but I am sure players that were already through their free ones and are now crafting are consuming Columbine along with PvP'ers and Tanks that were already using them.

There are probably other impacts as well that I haven't thought of, but in general it feels like the demand for Columbine has increased substantially, so unless there is some change that pushes players to lower prices this is probably the "new normal" for ESO.

You are correct on the correlation between builds that get their damage buffs through slotted skills, and tristat pot consumption. I too was a weapon damage pot enthusiast until I started back barring a 2h for Rally (one of the greatest skills in the game), and then I needed to drink tristats like water.

I think part of the recent spike, is the aging PVP community is mad sweaty and we are getting hammered on them all Whitestrake-fest. More people are PvPing the past 2 weeks, more people are buying Columbine, there aren't more people selling/generating Columbine.

Stefirex · February 29

DrNukenstein wrote: »

Below is a screenshot from Tamriel trade center. Pages and pages of Columbine going for upwards of 3500 per, with many going for over 4500

Just the columbine for a stack of 100 tristat potions costs an average of 100k. 1000 gold+ per potion, and they are a staple of PvP community play patterns. At this point it's completely impossible to sustain tristat pot consumption with the rewards from content, PvE or PvP.

Something's gotta give on these, and I'm not here to say @zos this is for sure a problem and needs to be fixed in your game that you say you own/run. But it's kind of a problem with this game that you own/run. While I know I will never be asked by an employee of ZOS how to fix this problem, here are some ideas on how to fix this problem:

-Give Columbine in rewards for the worthy, everyday and all year.
-Add one or several other reagents that can be used instead of Columbine
-Create more options for mag+stam pots that don't use Columbine or other current huge money reagents. The health restore is nice but is the least useful thing of these very useful potions
-price control through buying with AP. This is probably less than ideal though, since the biggest users are printing AP like mad men and getting the price right without killing off the buying and selling of herbs would be trickier than "fixing" cross healing.

Last idea: Just get rid of them. I love them, I love using them. But let's be real here, in the hybrid era these are like a top 5 enabler for do it all builds and drawn out fights, and no other potion option (except the rightfully even more expensive stam/mag/heroism) is close to being as universally useful.

For the record, I personally use the Purple Reward Tri-pots more than my own crafted Health, Magicka Stamina tri-pots. There's an abundance of them. Frankly they already take up the slack for me. Are they as good as crafted? Nah, Better! They're FREE!

sarahthes wrote: »

A solution that would put some downward pressure on columbine would be AP tripots.

Again, Daily Reward Tri-Pots are free!

sarahthes · February 29

Stefirex wrote: »

DrNukenstein wrote: »

Below is a screenshot from Tamriel trade center. Pages and pages of Columbine going for upwards of 3500 per, with many going for over 4500

Just the columbine for a stack of 100 tristat potions costs an average of 100k. 1000 gold+ per potion, and they are a staple of PvP community play patterns. At this point it's completely impossible to sustain tristat pot consumption with the rewards from content, PvE or PvP.

Something's gotta give on these, and I'm not here to say @zos this is for sure a problem and needs to be fixed in your game that you say you own/run. But it's kind of a problem with this game that you own/run. While I know I will never be asked by an employee of ZOS how to fix this problem, here are some ideas on how to fix this problem:

-Give Columbine in rewards for the worthy, everyday and all year.
-Add one or several other reagents that can be used instead of Columbine
-Create more options for mag+stam pots that don't use Columbine or other current huge money reagents. The health restore is nice but is the least useful thing of these very useful potions
-price control through buying with AP. This is probably less than ideal though, since the biggest users are printing AP like mad men and getting the price right without killing off the buying and selling of herbs would be trickier than "fixing" cross healing.

Last idea: Just get rid of them. I love them, I love using them. But let's be real here, in the hybrid era these are like a top 5 enabler for do it all builds and drawn out fights, and no other potion option (except the rightfully even more expensive stam/mag/heroism) is close to being as universally useful.

For the record, I personally use the Purple Reward Tri-pots more than my own crafted Health, Magicka Stamina tri-pots. There's an abundance of them. Frankly they already take up the slack for me. Are they as good as crafted? Nah, Better! They're FREE!

sarahthes wrote: »

A solution that would put some downward pressure on columbine would be AP tripots.

Again, Daily Reward Tri-Pots are free!

I had 6000 of them a year ago. I now have none, I used the last of them back around June or July. The ones from a few days ago got used within 2 days.

I don't think you understand how fast they are being consumed. I would need to get a stack of them every single day from daily rewards, and it still wouldn't quite be enough.

Rowjoh · February 29

Columbine is easy to farm.

Put a good audio book on or whatever floats your boat and harvest away.

You'll have 50 in no time, which will make a stack (200) of Tristat potions

kojou · February 29

Rowjoh wrote: »

Columbine is easy to farm.

Put a good audio book on or whatever floats your boat and harvest away.

You'll have 50 in no time, which will make a stack (200) of Tristat potions

Doing daily alchemy writs and the surveys they give is generally more time efficient, but if you have time for that then more power to you.

I usually build up all my Alchemy materials during the Anniversary festival by doing daily writs on all 18 20 characters, and then consume them throughout the year.

Still, I think being able to buy the Tri stat potions with AP would be a good QoL improvement to introduce into the game and would take some of the pressure off of Columbine demand.

DrNukenstein · February 29

Stefirex wrote: »

Again, Daily Reward Tri-Pots are free!

Yes, all tri-pot enthusiasts are aware of and use the welfare potions we get. Some players even appreciate the welfare turkeys, they give big stats.

You don't get enough per month to sustain more than a few BGs/Dungeons and once you use them you either buy/make more or play at a huge disadvantage to your peers who are as good or better than you at the game. Alternatively you can spend what is your freetime WASDing around an MMO map picking flowers.

Imagine being told by other players that a clear issue in the game is not an issue. It is in fact an issue that the most widely used and useful consumable is as expensive as it is currently. The only way it is not an issue is if we are not intended to be using them like we do. Big landlord energy coming from some of my fellow gamers.

Think about it, should one BG really cost you, the involved player, 10-20k gold?

Alternatively if you use them regularly in PvE to keep your rotation up, should one run really cost 10-20k gold?

EF321 · February 29

DrNukenstein wrote: »

or play at a huge disadvantage to your peers who are as good or better than you at the game.

So where do they get their potions then?

DrNukenstein · February 29

EF321 wrote: »

DrNukenstein wrote: »

or play at a huge disadvantage to your peers who are as good or better than you at the game.

So where do they get their potions then?

They get a few for free every month, and pay huge bucks/time for the rest. And the bucks/time we pay shouldn't be as big as they are is all I'm saying.