This is a scary change. I do writs on 8 characters every day and I save up surveys for "Survey Saturday" when I do one character's complete survey route in one day. Now I will be spending lots of time finding random surveys and not playing the game. That's unfortunate.

I've been thinking of a possible workaround that would be beneficial. I have come up with a couple ideas; obviously I'm not a programmer so I have no idea how easy/complicated it would be to put these in:

1. Allow surveys to stack. Often times I am collecting 15-20 of the same survey and they take up tons of room
2. Allow players to pick up surveys anywhere; for instance, it could drop Wood Survey 2 and you could pick up that Wood Survey wherever you want. That is, assuming that each place has each survey. I don't know if some of the starter islands drop surveys, and if they did, they might not have enough space for all 15 surveys.
3. Allow players to pick up multiple surveys simultaneously. I wouldn't mind so much if I did not have to collect a survey, run away for 7 seconds, re-equip survey, run back and then harvest, and then repeat.

I'm not sure if the solution to this would be incorporated into fixing the problem that master crafters will not be able to pick up all mats, but perhaps, one problem would fix the other. For instance, what if picking up a survey in your home areas would give you iron, and silver areas a different metal and etc. That way players could grab a stack of iron if they needed to, or a stack of voidstone.


I worry that if a change does not happen, writs will be done much less frequently. As it is now, many times I lose money on writs. If I have to spend approximately 50 silk to make items, that costs me about 3-4k (as it is about 12 - 16k per stack). Sometimes when I turn it in, I get 600 gold, a 300 gold ornate drop and an almost meaningless gemstone. That's a net loss of 2-3k for those surveys. It's a gamble I take (most of us take) because we could get a survey (which would replace the mat that I used, and give me a chance at a gold upgrade material) or we get a gold upgrade material from the reward as well.

Additionally, it should make sense that something needs to be done about tempering alloy prices. They should drop more often, as the focus really goes to helping tanks out. ZOS seems like they are really trying to help out the tanks (correct me if I'm wrong) and this would be beneficial. I also believe that the number of gold mats to upgrade something should increase or the number you get for breaking one down should increase. Many of my guild mates are going broke buying flowers for potions and have no money to upgrade their endgame sets.

Just my two cents, hopefully it was a constructive read.