Where is the ink?

darvaria · June 16

Average Listing Price is currently 99,000 ish

Average Selling Price is 69,000 ish

Got to figure in that these numbers are inflated by examples like someone currently listing ink at 10,000,000 and 2 listings for 5,000,000. They either want to drive the listing price up ... OR could be buying gold through this method (if I was Blizzard I would keep a close watch on AH)

Average selling price is also driven up by some trade guilds buying at higher prices to keep the average price up. Like you can buy between members and the guild gets the cut anyways. By doing this, prices "look" higher.

Keep waiting. Supply will catch up. Yeah, ink should be at most 5K. Really less. And of course, I've seen at least 10 bots farming. If nothing else, that will bring the price down. Really wasn't much reason for bots to farm resources before. And YES, when you see a character running in place against a wall, pretty sure it's a bot.

ZOS: Just add ink to rewards for TOS, Daily BG & Dungeon, Rewards for the Worthy. And this problem will be instantly solved. The smartest way would be to have ink sold at the vendor for like 50 gold.

Nathrai · June 16

darvaria wrote: »

And YES, when you see a character running in place against a wall, pretty sure it's a bot.

Or me watching YT to make farming for my experiments more bearable ...

+++++ on the script vendor selling ink at a reasonable price. Would be a fine gold sink AND make the system affordable to everybody.
+++++ on additional resources, too. Make ink drop at reasonable rates for simply playing the game. It's one of the things I love about the seals of endeavor. I never farmed those, I get them simply from playing ESO.

Btw, I'm sure prices will eventually go down, but as is they'll probably never reach 5k or lower. Compared to housing mats, they have a far lower drop rate (as in: inks from EVERY kind of node is less likely to drop than a housing mat from ONE kind of node, which is even worse) and you have to 1) buy the chapter 2) finish the Gryphon wing for raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaare kill drops and 3) finish the Netch wing for node drops.

XSTRONG · 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.

What I wrote is not a lie but a fact.

But do I care how people farm? No

I never mentioned how you farm I dont even know who you are but I was refering to a thread where some people talked about the bad droprate/rng then said they are parked at 1 geyser.

So simple math explain why some people spent 2 weeks to get the stylepages.

sarahthes · June 16

Ink will be dirt cheap without any intervention from zos in probably 4-6 weeks. There's no need to adjust drop rates other than what they're already planning.

virtus753 · June 16

@ZOS_Kevin Can you please check with the dev team to ensure that Plentiful Harvest is working properly on Ink dropped by enemies?

I'm at 9 Ink drops in a row from enemies with Plentiful Harvest maxed and slotted, all single drops (x1). None of my friends or guildies has had any luck either.

We know that Plentiful Harvest is working properly now for other mats, and we know it works on certain drops from enemies (leather scraps, poison solvents, etc.). 9 fails in a row with a 50% chance to succeed is highly suspect. Is it not working at all? Is it not using the right chance?

TYIA

darvaria · June 16

Well they have ruined the introduction of Scribing because of the ink. 3/4's of my guild members haven't bought the expansion because of the ink prices.

Do SOMETHING now. You have already ruined the excitement of Scribing. For some players "farming" is NOT an option. I buy all of my gold with crown sales. And NOW I will have to spend my gold to USE something I have purchased. I could easily buy ink but refuse to. I AM NOT RIDING AROUND GATHERING. This is beneath my time investment.

Aurielle · June 16

Jaraal wrote: »

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.

I would not at all consider 2,500 listings to be indicative of a “flooded” market — especially considering the sheer amount of ink that is required simply to explore the various skill combinations possible on one character, let alone a full stable of alts,

Elvenheart · June 16

BasP wrote: »

I've played at least a few hours per day since Gold Road dropped and, while I am not really interested in using any of the existing Scribing skills, I've done all of the Scribing quests on my main (

Nathrai wrote: »

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.

What a great post! This sums up how I feel exactly. I wish I could experiment with the new system, but with the lack/price of ink I can’t. I wish someone at ZOS would read this.

OsUfi · June 16

I'm now up to 50 hours of game time and I still only have the 12 inks that dropped from the original quest. I only play on one character.

As I said in the other thread, sure as heck happy I wasn't excited for this system, but it utterly sucks that I'm not able to engage with it at all.

BasP · June 16

darvaria wrote: »

ZOS: Just add ink to rewards for TOS, Daily BG & Dungeon, Rewards for the Worthy. And this problem will be instantly solved. The smartest way would be to have ink sold at the vendor for like 50 gold.

I'd definitely like it if Ink was a lot easier to acquire than it is now so that those that want to experiment with Scribing can do so without worrying if a certain skill or combination is worth their Ink.

On the PTS, I've spend more than 50 Inks thus far testing some of the skills on multiple characters. If I would have to do my testing on the Live server instead, I would first have to spent dozens of hours farming Ink (taking my crap RNG into account), complete all of the Scribing quests on 4+ characters, or spent millions of gold on Ink at Guild Traders. Just to experiment with a new system a bit.

What makes it worse for me is that I still haven't found a Scribing skill that I want to incorporate into my builds, so I'd have wasted millions of gold or spent multiple evenings acquiring Ink (doing things I don't enjoy) for naught.

Haenk · June 16

virtus753 wrote: »

@ZOS_Kevin Can you please check with the dev team to ensure that Plentiful Harvest is working properly on Ink dropped by enemies?

I had two double-drops - so it works as intended (at least for me).

CoronHR · June 16

the ink drop rate is abysmal. i run around farming it because it does drop on the rare occasion and sometimes it's a double drop, but mainly because i can at least appreciate the extra mats, which i can sell or refine. but in terms of needing it for scribing, it's just abysmal, extremely expensive and on top of that, the scribing skills are very very meh. i'm fairly let down by the uselessness of scribing, and the horrid ink drop rate is the anti-icing on this hollow cake

Quethrosar · June 16

ink drop rate sucks but i managed to get 51. but guess what, scribing sucks so there's nothing for the majority to scribe, nothing for trial dps. the price of ink will be 100 gold in few weeks.

Onomog · June 16

While I agree that the drop rate is too low, by far, I find it more puzzling than frustrating. I would assume they want engagement on this new system they've introduced, but they aren't going to get it from the majority of the player base if the needed crafting ingredient is too rare. I know for me if a material is rare it makes me loathe to use it unless I'm *really* sure it's worth it. Otherwise I end up hoarding it, "just in case"; I'm sure I'm not the only one that thinks that way.

If they want people to play around with and actually use the system, they need to relax the drop rate and even make it available on vendors, as has been mentioned. Otherwise all the development time spent on it becomes lost and scribing will sit largely unused.

Elvenheart · June 16

Onomog wrote: »

While I agree that the drop rate is too low, by far, I find it more puzzling than frustrating. I would assume they want engagement on this new system they've introduced, but they aren't going to get it from the majority of the player base if the needed crafting ingredient is too rare. I know for me if a material is rare it makes me loathe to use it unless I'm *really* sure it's worth it. Otherwise I end up hoarding it, "just in case"; I'm sure I'm not the only one that thinks that way.

If they want people to play around with and actually use the system, they need to relax the drop rate and even make it available on vendors, as has been mentioned. Otherwise all the development time spent on it becomes lost and scribing will sit largely unused.

Agreed. I’ve been playing since the beginning, and the first time I ever golded out an armor set in this game was when I was building my IA build just for that extra oomph. I’ve golded weapons for some time for that benefit, but armor just never seemed worth it. If gold mats had been cheaper, I would have probably considered it.

But with this system, it’s all or nothing, I can’t use a lesser level ingredient to make a lower powered version of a skill to try out and not feel like I’ve lost an arm and a leg for nothing if I don’t like it.

virtus753 · June 16

Haenk wrote: »

virtus753 wrote: »

@ZOS_Kevin Can you please check with the dev team to ensure that Plentiful Harvest is working properly on Ink dropped by enemies?

I had two double-drops - so it works as intended (at least for me).

Thanks! Appreciate the reply. Two follow-up questions:

1) Are you sure it was two from a single enemy? I saw a friend of mine pull 2 from a group of mobs yesterday, but it was two individual drops consolidated by the setting for consolidating area loot. (You can always change the setting for looting before taking anything to determine this, unless you're sure there's only one enemy around.) And while the drop chance is small, I have gotten two (single drops) within 11 kills, which means it’s quite possible with a trash pull in a trial like that was.

2) Two double drops out of how many total ink drops from enemies? Plentiful Harvest when maxed gives a 50% chance to proc successfully. We know it works properly now on most things, but for most of its time in game it has not worked as intended. For several years it gave 10% less chance than shown, so it doubled some drops at Stages 2-5, but not as many as it should have. Just getting a double drop wasn't determinative in that case, since it didn't reveal the issue with the chances being off. (It likewise definitely works but definitely not as intended on Pulverized Titanium from jewelry nodes, for example.)

It is possible I’m just very unlucky here. It happens, and it's going to happen to someone. Lots of someones, eventually. But for comparison, if somebody tossed a coin they claimed was fair (or other supposedly 50-50 RNG) 9 times and it landed on heads every single time, that would be concerning to me. It would not be definitive, but I would be asking for some way to be sure the chances were really fair. So here too I want to make sure the chances are what’s advertised, since any number of things could go wrong, and we've seen quite a few already with Plentiful Harvest since the new CP dropped.

RicAlmighty · June 16

It is completely and absolutely mind boggling to me that there are people defending the current ludicrously low drop rate for Luminous Ink. Why in the world would you die on a hill of gatekeeping the tentpole feature of the latest chapter? The only, and I mean only case where I can see someone doing this is if they are currently profiting from the sale of ink to the players that are desperate enough to pay for it just to be able to use the new key feature that they were promised but can't actually use past a cursory experimentation.

Ink should be as plentiful as Epic Level materials. They should be rewards for daily writs, Dungeons, Trials, Arenas. Players should be excited and eager to play with the new Scribing system and theorycraft by trying new combinations of scripts. Instead they are frustrated and demoralized by being able to gather all of these scripts every day, but not actually make use of them without grinding for hours. That... is a failure of game design. To wave a shiny new exciting feature in front of players and then pull it back and tell them that they cannot actually play with it until they grind nodes for dozens of hours. How anyone that plays this game can in good conscience defend this decision is dumbfounding.

This is all I am going to say on this matter.

noblecron · June 16

I find it ironic that they changed jewelry crafting because they didnt want it to no longer be for endgamers only but they did it for scribing where it's meant for endgame lol

Aurielle · June 16

RicAlmighty wrote: »

It is completely and absolutely mind boggling to me that there are people defending the current ludicrously low drop rate for Luminous Ink. Why in the world would you die on a hill of gatekeeping the tentpole feature of the latest chapter? The only, and I mean only case where I can see someone doing this is if they are currently profiting from the sale of ink to the players that are desperate enough to pay for it just to be able to use the new key feature that they were promised but can't actually use past a cursory experimentation.

Ink should be as plentiful as Epic Level materials. They should be rewards for daily writs, Dungeons, Trials, Arenas. Players should be excited and eager to play with the new Scribing system and theorycraft by trying new combinations of scripts. Instead they are frustrated and demoralized by being able to gather all of these scripts every day, but not actually make use of them without grinding for hours. That... is a failure of game design. To wave a shiny new exciting feature in front of players and then pull it back and tell them that they cannot actually play with it until they grind nodes for dozens of hours. How anyone that plays this game can in good conscience defend this decision is dumbfounding.

This is all I am going to say on this matter.

Amen. I’ve just spent the last four hours grinding a dungeon for sets before the ESO plus trial runs out. Know how much ink dropped from the dungeon mobs during that time?

One. One single ink. In four hours of gameplay.

This insanely low drop rate is a prime example of why I no longer subscribe year-round.

I agree that the only reason I can think of for defending this drop rate is guild trader profit. It makes absolutely no sense to defend a drop rate that keeps people from actually engaging with one of the main draws of the new chapter.

Nathrai · June 16

RicAlmighty wrote: »

It is completely and absolutely mind boggling to me that there are people defending the current ludicrously low drop rate for Luminous Ink. Why in the world would you die on a hill of gatekeeping the tentpole feature of the latest chapter?

Back in sociology class we called them the "one-eyed kings". People with no power and no standing in society that still feel allmighty and powerful as long as there are people they can talk down to. They feel better by boasting how good they are at XY (even though this is none of their doing, they just benefit from an alledged bug) and how pathetic everybody else is.

The sad thing is, they themselves would profit from this getting fixed, they just don't realize it. More people using the system means a higher chance developers will spend time further improving it. More people getting the chapter because of Scribing means more money to be put into servers. More acceptance of this system might result into more systems players have been asking for.

If Scribing fails (and the way it works right now it WILL fail), nobody wins. From the point of view of the developers, they gave us a system we had been asking for, and now we're not using it. Why spend time and money on player requests going forward when nobody uses the one we already got?

But that's the tragedy of game theory - people are far too self centred to realize they would benefit MORE from sticking together.

RicAlmighty wrote: »

Players should be excited and eager to play with the new Scribing system and theorycraft by trying new combinations of scripts.

This, 100%.

They had something rather exciting going on - and then completely killed it by taking away the main selling point: Playing around with the thousands of possible combinations.

RicAlmighty wrote: »

That... is a failure of game design. To wave a shiny new exciting feature in front of players and then pull it back and tell them that they cannot actually play with it until they grind nodes for dozens of hours.

Worse yet.

It's not just that you have to grind nodes for dozens of hours. Even when you do, you might end up not getting enough, or getting none at all.

LaintalAy · June 17

For the record:

I don't buy chapter releases; I wait for the content to be available through ESO+.
I won't have access to Gold Road content for 11.5 months.

If we're talking about individual players "profiteering" off selling Ink, then there are two fundamental issues that people don't seem to understand:

These players harvest the ink themselves; or
Theses players buy the ink to flip.

On the first one, theoretically, they are subject to the same 'drop rate' as everyone else.
On the second, if they are stupid enough to pay cash and then onsell, then the amount of profit is substantially reduced.

If it seems that I am 'defending' the drop rate, well in fact, I don't really care about it. This is a feature that I'm unlikely to use anytime soon and I make enough gold through selling ordinary everyday items that people need and want.

Elvenheart · June 17

I’m really glad some people can see how disappointing the low drop rate for ink makes the entire system. I was so excited leading up to Scribing. I’m even OK with the scripts not being account wide although I wish that after you got one on one character, you could simply buy it anytime in the Scholarium. But I can live with the system the way it is now, except for the crushing disappointment I feel because I can’t experiment with all sorts of script/grimoire combinations. I really don’t even care about getting the scripts on my other characters that I had really wanted to try out some different things on because after playing through the entire chapter and doing all the side quests I’ve only gotten 10 ink from drops, mostly from nodes (just 1 from all the myriad enemies I’ve slain along the way). I used three of those inks to try out the shield throw skill, and instantly regretted it. So now it’s going to be a long time before I try any more skills, until the day that ink is plentiful and cheap. If that day never comes, Scribing is over for me.

Why ZOS decided to gate a system some people have been waiting on and praying for for 10 years, ever since players were inspired by that video on Spellcrafting, by something so ridiculous as low ink drops is really beyond me and just seems cruel.

TaSheen · June 17

I.... actually have a theory....

But I'm NOT posting it - because if I do, I WILL get whacked for "conspiracy".

LaintalAy · June 17

TaSheen wrote: »

I.... actually have a theory....

But I'm NOT posting it - because if I do, I WILL get whacked for "conspiracy".

Yep.

pklemming · June 17

The whole thing has been disappointing. The ink being the cherry on the cake. Buggy grimoires. Bugged quest line(still not addressed). Stupidly low drop-rate on the one of the Archival Riddles. Furnishing plans... Just the whole thing....

Some of these should have been hotfixed asap. I saw they had time to push a patch that actually benefited players, just not things like THE MAIN QUEST LINE.

LaintalAy · June 17

So where was the ink again?

sarahthes · June 17

LaintalAy wrote: »

So where was the ink again?

In the water node that the other person ran past while we were both farming the same area.

Ulvich · June 17

So far I have collect a few ink, however NONE of them have been from anything I've killed or from any type of container. They have all been from nodes. I do agree that the drop rate needs to be improved.

ShadowPaladin · June 17

I can confirm two things.

Plentiful Harvest does work! I looted two - yes, two (2) stacked - inks from a node.
Containers do drop ink. I am not sure which container it was, but I looted one ink from a container while going through the "Outcast Inn".

P.s.: At the moment I am at 25 inks in total, accoding to the achievement counter. This would mean I must have looted 13 inks while playing on my main char, since the chapter release and after doing the scribing questline.

KV_Tootn · June 17

I just wanted to drop my 2 cents about scribing... I have done the main quest when it came oyut , then after i made the scribing questline.. While doing those quests i got few inks.. And after that only one ink from random dungeon.
Now this whole week all i get is those gold script thingies that are piling up in my guilbank because they dont stack , but havent got no ink at all for all this time.. Have done delves, have done veteran runs, publick dungeons , archives nothing.. Why ? were are they? Isnt scribing suposed to be cool thing? for now its just a waste of time and realy anoying thing.
Atleast ZOS could think about a seperate container for Grimors and scribing things... or make the gold script stackable?