Where is the ink?

Dayhjawk · June 15

IDK why the vendor inside the script place doesn't sell ink for gold. The fact that this new awesome feature is gated behind RNG, horrible drop rates, and bugs totally kills how amazing this could have been. The ability to play around with the new skills to find a combination for your build is totally killed at the simple fact that you need to find ink. Really..... I question the decision that was made by this. I was super hyped but seeing how it's gated totally kills it for me. Again... why can't I buy what I need from the npc vendor? WHY is the drop rate.. actually ALL drops rates *monster trophies* horrible!? RNG has it's place, but doesn't feel good when it's not used properly.

Nathrai · June 15

EdjeSwift wrote: »

There is no empirical evidence to this or any of the other "issues" people have come up with to explain their less than ideal drop rates.

As long as we don't get access to the source code (gimme, gimme!

), we can only speculate, true.

BUT, statistics can be empirical evidence, too - though not quite as reliable as other methods, and causalities determined via statistics are hard to prove on their own.

The thing is, consistent outliers are a hint at a function not working correctly. Having bad luck three days in a row is statistically probable. Only having 20% of the average success rate constantly for over a year is HIGHLY improbable.

And we're starting to see this with inks, too, since we're slowly getting to a point were the sample size is becoming large enough that the results start to get relevant.

(The thing is, the higher the drop rates, the less obvious a potential flaw in the algorithm becomes. Most people affected by this won't ever notice with housing mats, since they still can farm enough to either craft or sell them. I wouldn't have known if not for a couple of group farming runs that started the whole year-long experiment. But with ultra rare drops like roe and inks, it becomes more obvious.)

LaintalAy · June 15

edited

XSTRONG · June 15

LaintalAy wrote: »

Nathrai wrote: »

EdjeSwift wrote: »

There is no empirical evidence to this or any of the other "issues" people have come up with to explain their less than ideal drop rates.

As long as we don't get access to the source code (gimme, gimme! ), we can only speculate, true.

BUT, statistics can be empirical evidence, too - though not quite as reliable as other methods, and causalities determined via statistics are hard to prove on their own.

The thing is, consistent outliers are a hint at a function not working correctly. Having bad luck three days in a row is statistically probable. Only having 20% of the average success rate constantly for over a year is HIGHLY improbable.

And we're starting to see this with inks, too, since we're slowly getting to a point were the sample size is becoming large enough that the results start to get relevant.

(The thing is, the higher the drop rates, the less obvious a potential flaw in the algorithm becomes. Most people affected by this won't ever notice with housing mats, since they still can farm enough to either craft or sell them. I wouldn't have known if not for a couple of group farming runs that started the whole year-long experiment. But with ultra rare drops like roe and inks, it becomes more obvious.)

I'd argue (without any supporting evidence) that, if your drop rate is really good, then you're unlikely to come to the forum and say this. Conversely, if your drop rates are bad, then coming to the forum to vent is a likely option. Are there any stats on how many players never come to the forum for any reason?

Can we have your liver, then?

People in this thread screaming about drop rates for ink are only a fraction of Eso players.

Chapter havent even released on Console yet.

Nathrai · June 15

LaintalAy wrote: »

I'd argue (without any supporting evidence) that, if your drop rate is really good, then you're unlikely to come to the forum and say this. Conversely, if your drop rates are bad, then coming to the forum to vent is a likely option. Are there any stats on how many players never come to the forum for any reason?

Sorry, I wasn't especially clear on that. Wasn't talking about the sample size in people, but rather in hours spent farming. Of course in this topic there's a heavy bias, though in this case it doesn't really matter. Outliers in either direction hint on an issue with the system - someone finding ink in every other node is just as buggy as someone getting no ink at all.

Then of course there's the problem with self-reporting - there's no way for any of us to know how much time has actually been spent, whether the amount of inks found is actually true and if people only went for activities that don't award inks (though most activities DO include killing stuff).

But I can go by my own experiments with housing mats which showed consistent results, as well as my own experience with ink, since I have a bit more time at hand right now. About to dump a couple of hours into specifically farming for inks in nodes, so I don't have to rely on other people's posts.

LaintalAy wrote: »

Can we have your liver, then?

I'ld advice against that. I'm old enough that you don't want it, believe me ...

XSTRONG · June 15

Nathrai wrote: »

LaintalAy wrote: »

I'd argue (without any supporting evidence) that, if your drop rate is really good, then you're unlikely to come to the forum and say this. Conversely, if your drop rates are bad, then coming to the forum to vent is a likely option. Are there any stats on how many players never come to the forum for any reason?

Sorry, I wasn't especially clear on that. Wasn't talking about the sample size in people, but rather in hours spent farming. Of course in this topic there's a heavy bias, though in this case it doesn't really matter. Outliers in either direction hint on an issue with the system - someone finding ink in every other node is just as buggy as someone getting no ink at all.

Then of course there's the problem with self-reporting - there's no way for any of us to know how much time has actually been spent, whether the amount of inks found is actually true and if people only went for activities that don't award inks (though most activities DO include killing stuff).

But I can go by my own experiments with housing mats which showed consistent results, as well as my own experience with ink, since I have a bit more time at hand right now. About to dump a couple of hours into specifically farming for inks in nodes, so I don't have to rely on other people's posts.

LaintalAy wrote: »

Can we have your liver, then?

I'ld advice against that. I'm old enough that you don't want it, believe me ...

I remember when people where on the forum talking about the bad drop rate for anniversary style pages, some had been farming for days and days but they where parked at 1 geyser or 1 wb for hours.

While this person did his 3rd geyser of the day other people have done 18, when he done 10 other have done 60 geyser.

Hours of farming are not everything but you have to include the efficiency.

EdjeSwift · June 15

Nathrai wrote: »

I'd argue (without any supporting evidence) that, if your drop rate is really good, then you're unlikely to come to the forum and say this. Conversely, if your drop rates are bad, then coming to the forum to vent is a likely option. Are there any stats on how many players never come to the forum for any reason?

Can we have your liver, then?

I've brought this exact thing up previously(The forum posting). Your ESO account does not allow you direct access to the forums. You must "apply" and be "approved" to use the forums, quotes used because it's mostly a check and then boom. But waiting a short while is enough for people who wanted to post on the forums to not want to bother logging in/providing feedback.

With this in mind, I'd say we have a quite small fraction of the total playerbase coming to post on these forums.

Elsonso · June 16

I found another ink! It took only a week to get 2 more, and now I have 14 of them! Woo hoo!

LadyLethalla · June 16

Don't know if this has been reported since I last checked this thread but I got ink yesterday in Craglorn.

Stridig · June 16

I now have 20 for sale and 54 in my craft bag.

Quethrosar · June 16

I listed some for sale, no one buying, system is either useless or people are finding enough.

Oznog666 · June 16

Or you are too expensive.....

Aurielle · June 16

Quethrosar wrote: »

I listed some for sale, no one buying, system is either useless or people are finding enough.

How much are you selling it for? I personally refuse to spend the standard 70-100k people have been charging. Not spending that kind of gold on a skill that may or may not work out for me.

davelbier · June 16

Stridig wrote: »

I now have 20 for sale and 54 in my craft bag.

from node farming or re-running the main quest with alts?

manukartofanu · June 16

XSTRONG wrote: »

I remember when people where on the forum talking about the bad drop rate for anniversary style pages, some had been farming for days and days but they where parked at 1 geyser or 1 wb for hours.

While this person did his 3rd geyser of the day other people have done 18, when he done 10 other have done 60 geyser.

Hours of farming are not everything but you have to include the efficiency.

That's literally a lie. First of all, we didn't complain about bad drops; we complained about pure RNG, where the chance of a drop does not increase with the number of attempts. With a 1% chance, it's totally normal that a small number of people get the drop on their first try, but at the same time, there is a small number of people who get the drop on their 1000th try. You can easily experience this if you dissect 100k fish. The problem here is not bad RNG, but the decision to make style pages bound and at the same time not add an increased drop chance with more attempts. There will always be people who do not get a drop even after 1000 geysers.
Secondly, if there were any mythical people who stood and did not run between geysers, I personally never saw any, although I am one of those who got it roughly after 40 hours of farming. People were standing in Vvardenfell on bosses, but definitely not on geysers.
The problem in this case was that in Vvardenfell, with a 1% drop chance, you could finish one boss every 5 minutes if you stayed in one place. If you ran around, you could finish three bosses in 5 minutes, occasionally four. If the page dropped on the 150th boss, like it did for me, it required 4 hours of farming, but if it had dropped on the 600th boss, it would have taken 16 hours even with active farming. For those who stood at one boss, such bad luck would have required 50 hours. Now, transfer this to Summerset, where, with active farming, one geyser is completed on average every 4 minutes. People who got the drop after 600 attempts spent over 40 hours on geysers. You couldn't have spent less time with such bad luck. I suspect you just got lucky with geysers, which is why you might not understand why bad luck with geyser drops was a real torment.

manukartofanu · June 16

Nathrai wrote: »

EdjeSwift wrote: »

BUT, statistics can be empirical evidence, too - though not quite as reliable as other methods, and causalities determined via statistics are hard to prove on their own.

The thing is, consistent outliers are a hint at a function not working correctly. Having bad luck three days in a row is statistically probable. Only having 20% of the average success rate constantly for over a year is HIGHLY improbable.

Statements of some people aren't statistics. Cognitive biases lead to some people not remembering that they received a drop, thereby underestimating their drop chance. Others, conversely, exaggerate it. If there is some kind of nodes counter, similar to a counter for dissected fish and the roe obtained from it, then we can say that we have at least started to collect some statistics.

LaintalAy · June 16

edited

Aurielle · June 16

LaintalAy wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Quethrosar wrote: »

I listed some for sale, no one buying, system is either useless or people are finding enough.

How much are you selling it for? I personally refuse to spend the standard 70-100k people have been charging. Not spending that kind of gold on a skill that may or may not work out for me.

This is exactly what proves that the market is working and largely player-driven.

The initial high price is driven by those with too much gold. These players now have a slight advantage of 'early access' but resistance from players with lesser cash reserves will eventually bring the price down over time. Players may unwillingly invest more time into harvesting their own and need to purchase less.

Let's not forget, the release was only two weeks ago, yes? Wait for the dust to settle.

Another classic example of this is those Treasure Maps associated with a Lead. These always pull in huge amounts of money when the release is new.

I’m personally just going to wait for ZOS to fix the drop rates… The feedback they’re getting so far is overwhelmingly in the “fix the drop rate” category. I’m now down to a whopping 13 ink because I (gasp) tried to use the system I paid for while figuring out a new build for my Templar. Guess I’m done experimenting for a while!

Lazarus_Rising · June 16

LaintalAy wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Quethrosar wrote: »

I listed some for sale, no one buying, system is either useless or people are finding enough.

How much are you selling it for? I personally refuse to spend the standard 70-100k people have been charging. Not spending that kind of gold on a skill that may or may not work out for me.

This is exactly what proves that the market is working and largely player-driven.

The initial high price is driven by those with too much gold. These players now have a slight advantage of 'early access' but resistance from players with lesser cash reserves will eventually bring the price down over time. Players may unwillingly invest more time into harvesting their own and need to purchase less.

Let's not forget, the release was only two weeks ago, yes? Wait for the dust to settle.

Another classic example of this is those Treasure Maps associated with a Lead. These always pull in huge amounts of money when the release is new.

It could turn out like jewelry tho. Summerset came out in 2018 and see how long they took to fix the price for jewelry material. We will have to see.

Still i cant really experiment with it and that takes the fun out. I mean we do not have any meanigful changes in terms of pvp except for the scribing skills but there you cannot really try stuff out...

Jaraal · June 16

Aurielle wrote: »

I’m personally just going to wait for ZOS to fix the drop rates… The feedback they’re getting so far is overwhelmingly in the “fix the drop rate” category.

I can count on one hand the number of times ZOS has changed things due to the complaints of players. Yes, some players may feel that the current drop rates may be punitive, but what if ZOS looks at the numbers and decides, 'Hey, we weren't expecting for so much ink to be flooding the servers so quickly, we need to adjust it so they drop less frequently!'

Until they acknowledge anything about drop rates (besides Kevin letting us know that alts have the same chance and that Plentiful Harvest does work on ink), we have no idea what their feeling is on the current drop rate.

Stridig · June 16

davelbier wrote: »

Stridig wrote: »

I now have 20 for sale and 54 in my craft bag.

from node farming or re-running the main quest with alts?

Node farming. Only 1 has come from a mob drop.

Nathrai · June 16

Started the experiment on dedicated node farming, and so far it seems to support the idea that nodes are MUCH more likely to yield inks than looting corpses is. I now have about 100h of killing stuff for 3 inks versus 4 hours of mats farming for 5 inks (one of which from plentyful harvest).

That's still a very low yield (and for 4h of being incredibly bored), but at least it's SOMETHING.

Of course 4h is far too low to be representative, so I'll have to do a couple more boring runs ...

manukartofanu wrote: »

Statements of some people aren't statistics. Cognitive biases lead to some people not remembering that they received a drop, thereby underestimating their drop chance. Others, conversely, exaggerate it. If there is some kind of nodes counter, similar to a counter for dissected fish and the roe obtained from it, then we can say that we have at least started to collect some statistics.

Please re-read my posts - I have clearly stated where the 20% is coming from - from a year-long project of directly comparing housing mat drops with a friend. Yes, including counting the nodes and running the same zone at the same time.

You even (incorrectly, but it was there when replying XD) quoted why I myself consider only going by forum posts too unreliable.

Elsonso · June 16

Jaraal wrote: »

Yes, some players may feel that the current drop rates may be punitive, but what if ZOS looks at the numbers and decides, 'Hey, we weren't expecting for so much ink to be flooding the servers so quickly, we need to adjust it so they drop less frequently!'

"Be careful what you ask for."

That said, my feeling is that ZOS would probably not reduce the drop rate further. They would just suffer through it.

Eventually, Scribing will not be the shiny and people won't care that the drop rate is low because they won't be Scribing. I take the pessimistic road on this one. This was a not a revolutionary system that transformed the game. It is an auxiliary system. An outlier that can be used, or not used. Mainly the latter, at least on a regular basis.

I don't particularly like ToT but I expect it to eclipse Scribing by a wide margin in terms of popularity and regular use.

Right now, the ink drop rate is worthy of mirth. Once no one cares about Ink, even that will stop.

Aurielle · June 16

Jaraal wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

I’m personally just going to wait for ZOS to fix the drop rates… The feedback they’re getting so far is overwhelmingly in the “fix the drop rate” category.

I can count on one hand the number of times ZOS has changed things due to the complaints of players. Yes, some players may feel that the current drop rates may be punitive, but what if ZOS looks at the numbers and decides, 'Hey, we weren't expecting for so much ink to be flooding the servers so quickly, we need to adjust it so they drop less frequently!'

Until they acknowledge anything about drop rates (besides Kevin letting us know that alts have the same chance and that Plentiful Harvest does work on ink), we have no idea what their feeling is on the current drop rate.

One has to imagine that ZOS introduced scribing for more than giving some players the opportunity to make some gold for a brief period of time? Surely they want people to actually be able to use the system? Ink is hardly “flooding” the servers. There is a relatively small core of dedicated farmers doing nothing but farming ink to capitalize on fomo in the short term, and there are likely plenty more who aren’t interested in scribing whatsoever who’ve seen the going rates posted by the farmers and decided to sell off what they got from the quests. If you talk to people who actually play the game, not the economy, you’ll find that few people have felt able to truly explore scribing due to the low drop rate on ink. So many people I personally play with have given up on scribing entirely because it’s so grindy. I’m nearly at the give up point myself.

Sure, ZOS’s track record of listening to player complaints isn’t great, that’s true, but I have a feeling this will end up being one of those times they do listen. What would be the point of spending that time and effort on designing the system if no one ended up using it?

darvaria · June 16

And you don't think most of the node farming is done by bots?

Nathrai · June 16

Elsonso wrote: »

Eventually, Scribing will not be the shiny and people won't care that the drop rate is low because they won't be Scribing. I take the pessimistic road on this one. This was a not a revolutionary system that transformed the game. It is an auxiliary system. An outlier that can be used, or not used. Mainly the latter, at least on a regular basis.

The thing is, I think it COULD be a revolutionary system, but under two conditions:

It was regularily added to like with antiquities and ToT.
Fitting in with this topic, there was a way to actually take advantage of the advertised "thousands of possibilities".

Imagine there was no ink restriction (or at least normal gameplay would drop enough ink) and we were able to merrily try out different combinations, pair them with various other skills, experiment on builds tailored to our very own playstyle.

How much more "revolutionary" would this system be if every player down to the most casual one could take advantage of it (like they can with antiquities and ToT). For every major update we would be Khajiit on a hot skooma deal, eagerly waiting for the new scripts to find yet another dozen possibilities to create our new favourite skill.

The way it is now, ZOS is actively killing Scribing, and I'm totally with you: people will just save up on a couple of standard skills recommended on the various character builds sites, scribe them once, then forget the system even exists. Which is a shame, because it could be a lot of fun and would break up the usual "I know exactly what skill they are using and how to deal with it" strut.

Kallykat · June 16

manukartofanu wrote: »

XSTRONG wrote: »

I remember when people where on the forum talking about the bad drop rate for anniversary style pages, some had been farming for days and days but they where parked at 1 geyser or 1 wb for hours.

While this person did his 3rd geyser of the day other people have done 18, when he done 10 other have done 60 geyser.

Hours of farming are not everything but you have to include the efficiency.

That's literally a lie. First of all, we didn't complain about bad drops; we complained about pure RNG, where the chance of a drop does not increase with the number of attempts. With a 1% chance, it's totally normal that a small number of people get the drop on their first try, but at the same time, there is a small number of people who get the drop on their 1000th try. You can easily experience this if you dissect 100k fish. The problem here is not bad RNG, but the decision to make style pages bound and at the same time not add an increased drop chance with more attempts. There will always be people who do not get a drop even after 1000 geysers.
Secondly, if there were any mythical people who stood and did not run between geysers, I personally never saw any, although I am one of those who got it roughly after 40 hours of farming. People were standing in Vvardenfell on bosses, but definitely not on geysers.
The problem in this case was that in Vvardenfell, with a 1% drop chance, you could finish one boss every 5 minutes if you stayed in one place. If you ran around, you could finish three bosses in 5 minutes, occasionally four. If the page dropped on the 150th boss, like it did for me, it required 4 hours of farming, but if it had dropped on the 600th boss, it would have taken 16 hours even with active farming. For those who stood at one boss, such bad luck would have required 50 hours. Now, transfer this to Summerset, where, with active farming, one geyser is completed on average every 4 minutes. People who got the drop after 600 attempts spent over 40 hours on geysers. You couldn't have spent less time with such bad luck. I suspect you just got lucky with geysers, which is why you might not understand why bad luck with geyser drops was a real torment.

For what it's worth, I got the style page by standing around on a geyser. I guess that makes me mythical.

Edit: Added bold

wolfie1.0. · June 16

Nathrai wrote: »

LaintalAy wrote: »

But I hate fishing; and for whatever reason, my drop rate is abysmal when compared to others.

But ... doesn't this directly contradict your statement about there being nothing wrong with drop rates?

That's exactly what's happening to a lot of people with inks - abysmal drop rates compared to others (who take advantage of that fact by selling ink at insidious prices).

Raising drop rates (thus dropping prices for inks) would help, as would taking account IDs out of the RNG in order to more evenly distribute the inks. But the way it is right now, I for one will never be able to enjoy the scribing system, and not for lack of trying.

Just curious but at what price would you consider ink to no longer be insidious? What price are you looking for?

Jaraal · June 16

Aurielle wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

I’m personally just going to wait for ZOS to fix the drop rates… The feedback they’re getting so far is overwhelmingly in the “fix the drop rate” category.

I can count on one hand the number of times ZOS has changed things due to the complaints of players. Yes, some players may feel that the current drop rates may be punitive, but what if ZOS looks at the numbers and decides, 'Hey, we weren't expecting for so much ink to be flooding the servers so quickly, we need to adjust it so they drop less frequently!'

Until they acknowledge anything about drop rates (besides Kevin letting us know that alts have the same chance and that Plentiful Harvest does work on ink), we have no idea what their feeling is on the current drop rate.

One has to imagine that ZOS introduced scribing for more than giving some players the opportunity to make some gold for a brief period of time? Surely they want people to actually be able to use the system? Ink is hardly “flooding” the servers. There is a relatively small core of dedicated farmers doing nothing but farming ink to capitalize on fomo in the short term, and there are likely plenty more who aren’t interested in scribing whatsoever who’ve seen the going rates posted by the farmers and decided to sell off what they got from the quests. If you talk to people who actually play the game, not the economy, you’ll find that few people have felt able to truly explore scribing due to the low drop rate on ink. So many people I personally play with have given up on scribing entirely because it’s so grindy. I’m nearly at the give up point myself.

There are over 2,500 listings for ink, many of them stacks of 5,10 or more on PC/NA according to TTC. Ink is plentiful, and prices are falling every day. Personally, I can't envision a scenario where ZOS would flood the market even more by increasing drop rates. But, I've been wrong when trying to predict what they will do before.

I guess we shall soon see.

Nathrai · June 16

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Just curious but at what price would you consider ink to no longer be insidious? What price are you looking for?

Comparable to housing mats, for example. 500-1k gold a piece or something in that price range. High enough to make selling them in bulk a viable income option for those who don't want to use them, low enough that scribing a skill and realizing it doesn't work for you doesn't feel like a month's income just went down the drain.

At the current price, scribing ONE skill would cost 200k+ gold, which is probably nothing to you - but it's a LOT of money for a casual player and keeps people from wanting to experiment with the system.