Four Dollars For A Fancy Cup

Recremen · January 2017

Don't get me wrong, I'm all about the Crown Store and I'm all about this fantastic housing system, but a single fancy cup for four dollars? Not exactly competitive pricing. Not that making a fancy cup is any easier in-game.

11 Regulus
7 Alchemical Resin
8 Decorative Wax
35 Adamantite
3 Grain Solvent

Keep in mind that Regulus, Alchemical Resin, and Decorative Wax are uncommon drops from their respective nodes. And that Adamantite only sometimes comes from deconstructing High Elf gear, or can be bought for 15 gold a pop at certain merchants. So if you wanted to decorate the Serenity Falls Estate with fancy cups you would be spending enough money on Adamantite alone to buy a whole new medium-sized home, let alone the hours and hours of gathering/multi-millions of gold you'd spend buying the other ingredients from other players.

So with neither the in-game nor Crown Store options looking very appealing, it seems that the vast, interesting housing system is going to take significantly longer to get going than previously believed. I'm not expecting all the decorations to be served on a silver platter (which, incidentally, has almost the same build requirements as that fancy cup), I'm just saying that there's a lot of room to improve on the base design. Other than Maelstrom weapons and PvP ranks this game has been remarkably anti-grind when compared to other MMOs, and it seems a waste to have creative flexibility on the scale of Minecraft but at the speed of trying to get WoW's Insane In The Membrane achievement (the old version, not the easy new one).

I would recommend attacking the issue from every angle simultaneously.

Bundle multiple copies items for Crown Store purchase, keep same price. I must admit that I'm not a pro marketer, so take this suggestion with a grain of salt, but from a lay player's perspective the current price scheme seems only suitable for the biggest, most decadent whales out there. And even then they might balk at four bucks for a single fancy cup. There should at least be some consideration for the size of an item.
Dramatically lower construction costs for items in-game.
Dramatically raise the chances of getting a Regulus, Mundane Rune, etc. from a node, with an obvious preference for 100%. These are mundane runes we're talking about here, we shouldn't be seeing fewer of them than the useful runes.

I really hope there is some consideration given to this, because it's putting a bit of a damper on an otherwise delightfully promising system.

By popular demand, I present: the $4 Cup!!! (banana for scale)

Incidentally the table it's on is also $4. Basically anything purple-quality is $4 for a single item, blue goes for $1.50, green for $0.50 and white for $0.10. I have to believe that these prices were just wholesale slapped on with a database action, with zero actual consideration for the size/complexity of the item, but who knows, maybe this really is the plan long-term.

leepalmer95 · January 2017

Theres been a few threads about the crafting costs.

They do seem very unnecessarily high.

I like the ability to design anything you want but i don't like the insane crafting costs.

I understand the price of the manor or large homes, that's basically end game housing,

But if I've bought a medium house i don't want to spend 10x - 20x more than it;s costs on getting basic furniture and such.

Most purple tempers on ps4 are like 700-1k per. So without the other mats that cup would cost me at least 3k just on the solvant.

They should definitely drop the prices of most of the crafting, they should be relatively cheap. May also boost the drop rates and refine rates of green - purple tempers.

Sigtric · January 2017

If it is THAT many crowns for a tiny little CS furnishing, they should be able to be duplicated, say up maybe 10 times. ex: one purchase of Fancy Cup gives you up to 10 fancy cups

Ra'Shtar · January 2017

We are talking about a company who has gone so overly greedy that in the past years they have almost doubled the price of the good costumes and in some cases even mounts! They want people to spend crowns to buy the furniture that is why they make all the mats so rare and require a large amount to craft the furniture. The first week of launch there will be many impatient people on live servers who will end up spending crowns to purchase some their furniture, that is what ZoS is aiming at, that moment of weakness in the first week of launch.

BlackSparrow · January 2017

Yeah, I agree. I don't mind saving my pennies for a while to afford a medium house, but the crafting system really put a damper on my excitement.

If every single furniture piece--no matter how small or rough--takes a week of farming, plus some pretty rare/expensive mats (it's amazing how many furnishings require a Kuta!), we're going to see a lot of people get frustrated and give up after two small pieces of pottery. And given how many people are aiming to purchase the manors, that means a lot of big, empty castles. It's just too expensive for a cosmetic system, when those style mats and tempers would be better spent on utility items like provisioning, potions, and gear.

idk · January 2017

@Recremen

If your buying racial style stones from an NPC vendor on live you deserve to be broke.

Soella · January 2017

We don't know yet crown prices for houses.

I hope ZOS will follow the same pattern as they did with gold prices: reasonable price for houses and the simplest furniture, up to sky prices for fancy (fancy! not basic!) furniture/decorations. It sounds very reasonable to me.

Vaoh · January 2017

Not gonna lie, when it was announced that houses would not feature additional Storage, I was pushed away from Housing a bit. I never imagine they'd be so greedy on furniture too.

With these types of prices on furniture, the majority of players will not be able to decorate anything at all. Crafting all this stuff is out of the question,

Crown Store purchases seem to be highly encouraged with this system. Make it ridiculously grindy and almost impossible to craft everything you want, plus pay in the millions of gold which most players will never have and waste many hours in the process, or buy it in about 10sec with Crowns.

If storage was added to player housing, it'd probably be a sub-only perk or heavily monetized as well.

I'd loved to see furniture decrease significantly in crafting costs. Probably won't though

I'll be living in my guild hall it seems.....

MissBizz · January 2017

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

If your buying racial style stones from an NPC vendor on live you deserve to be broke.

I am absolutely POSITIVE that it was just explaining of the ways the item can be sourced.

Also, if you have a 10 place setting on a table.. that 350 style stones... now.. go add how many you possibly spent on the 10 altmer chairs, the table... the style stones add up REALLY quick. Even for folks who have 1000's.

Vaoh · January 2017

How in the world did the NPCs in this game purchase their houses and furniture at these prices!?

We're being ripped off

Recremen · January 2017

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

@Recremen

If your buying racial style stones from an NPC vendor on live you deserve to be broke.

Honey please. I literally said that they also come from deconstructing gear before I said that they can also be bought at merchants. And for what it's worth they also come from hireling mail on a rare occasion but that's so infrequent it didn't seem worth mentioning. I myself have somewhere around 1k copies of most style mats saved up just from deconstruction over the years.

So why did I mention buying them from a merchant? Normally I assume people can figure this out for themselves, but I guess you need it spelled out for you! I help, you trust. You can fit 700 decorations in the large homes, and all the high-end decorations require huge amounts of style materials, sometimes even more than 35. But 35 is a fine number so let's just go with that for now. 35 style mats times 700 items means you could need up to 24,500 style material items to furnish one nice house with nice items! Gee, I don't know too many people with that many style mats laying about. You? So obviously folks would turn to guild traders, who would also quickly sell out, and the prices would likely skyrocket either way to the point where you're about as likely to buy from a merchant than to try to find it in a guild store.

Anyway I hope that was educational, cheers and have fun.

Reverb · January 2017

I was really excited about housing, until I saw how time intensive it is to get furnishings and decor. Then I thought I would just buy my homes furnished since I have plenty of gold and the game seriously lacks gold sinks, but no, furnished homes will be crown store only. Now I'm pretty put off by housing altogether.

I feel like they need to substantially increase the drop rate of crafting mats and decrease the amount needed. The OPs 4 dollar / 1500 gold (based on solvent market value) cup puts this into perspective perfectly.

Hammy01 · January 2017

Vaoh wrote: »

Not gonna lie, when it was announced that houses would not feature additional Storage, I was pushed away from Housing a bit. I never imagine they'd be so greedy on furniture too.

With these types of prices on furniture, the majority of players will not be able to decorate anything at all. Crafting all this stuff is out of the question,

Crown Store purchases seem to be highly encouraged with this system. Make it ridiculously grindy and almost impossible to craft everything you want, plus pay in the millions of gold which most players will never have and waste many hours in the process, or buy it in about 10sec with Crowns.

If storage was added to player housing, it'd probably be a sub-only perk or heavily monetized as well.

I'd loved to see furniture decrease significantly in crafting costs. Probably won't though I'll be living in my guild hall it seems.....

A blind person could see that ZOS is doing everything they can to push people into spending more and more money in the crown store but they are very greedy and doing it the wrong way. If they really want people to buy and spend crowns then make the items we can buy with crowns really cheap and most people would be more than happy to spend a few bucks here and there.

Whiphid · January 2017

To make it worse, most furniture is either (grind for a week and) craft or crown store only.

Not so much options for buying stuff with in-game gold. Only rough stools and wood blocks...
Why call it a "home goods" vendor when 90% of their inventory is plants and rocks?

austinwalter87ub17_ESO · January 2017

Another thing people aren't considering is that Furniture is going to drain a lot of crafting mats. Which means all necessary crafting mats to make furniture will go up in gold price on traders.

Basic econ 101. A lot of crafting mats are cheap due to them being used to produce less things. Furniture expands their usage. Which means supply goes down. Which means demand goes up. Which means price goes up.

WillhelmBlack · January 2017

Hilarious. Even more hilarious, people will pay for this pointless, uninteresting tat. Housing does not offer anything to someone who wants to play the game, only a skeleton that you can hit.

I'm not dissing role playing or anything, I understand this patch will offer a lot more in terms of that but you can't even sit on a chair, a lot is left to the imagination still.

I'd probably go to the trouble of obtaining the free apartment if you could actually store stuff in it, can't even do that!

Miaura · January 2017

I think both the crown prices and crafting costs are just crazy as they are now and should be heavily revamped

Especially the craft costs.
Homestead could be a beautifull update and it will also draw in many new players- how are those new players going to even afford to start normal armor or consumables crafting when older players are hogging up all mats from guild stores and prices for tempers, ingredients etc. skyrocket? And guess how frustrated will the new players get when they see the furniture crafting (or crown prices for that matter), it looks crazy frustrating for older players too!
Then, immersion; Im not a heavy roleplayer, but I sort of like to feel part of the beautifull world of Tamriel, see my chars as part of the world, not some alien called "player character" in a world of npcs... But poor commoner npcs have furnishings and food in their humble house that all put together could cost a player the equivalent of a medium house or more

Not to mention that players are the only people who use fake food made of such ingredients as wax, kutas, and many sacks of food shrunk into the fake item...The poor player can not even place down a real apple if she/he tried.

Immersion wise, if the current costs are not changed , might as well revamp the quests to start with :" Hello Player. This NPC would like you to ..." Oh, and: "You may also pay 400 crowns to skip this part of the quest and recieve your reward, and 4000 Crowns for the whole quest chain."

But yes, Im still very exited about housing, just hoping this part will be changed a lot. ESO is a beautifull game with the most immersive quests Ive seen in an MMO, hopefully this update will make it even better after all.
@ZOS_GinaBruno Wonder if we shall hear soon if any changes to craft costs are planned, there has been very much critisim from testers?

Lookstowindwards · January 2017

Recremen wrote: »

[...] at the speed of trying to get WoW's Insane In The Membrane achievement (the old version, not the easy new one). [...]

My friend... after reading through all the topics on the insane grind housing will most likely become, I can assure you:

Getting Insane in the Membrane

was fun!

And yes, I did it twice! (the old version of course)

P.S. And you could combine it with Exalted with the Bloodsails, as I did, while you were at it... The time spent in the Badlands did not even feel that bad, believe me. ;D

Edit: Almost forgot to ask my question: We can steal a lot of things ingame: furniture, deco etc. - but it seems to me, that we can not place anything of this in a house, did I understand that correctly?

And if yes: ZENIMAX, please make us at least able to place stolen (and laundered) goods. Thanks

Personofsecrets · January 2017

Every update, since the crown store, is necessarily a crown store update.

SanTii.92 · January 2017

Aren't this fancy cups the fanciest of them all? aren't there like another 1k adornments of diverse cost range to pick up from? If that's the case, i'd be ok with a few of them being extremly expensive to get.

Also, were the crown costs published? Where did you get this four dollar cost from?

MythicEmperor · January 2017

Fancy cups are not for the feint of heart.

MissBizz · January 2017

WillhelmBlack wrote: »

Hilarious. Even more hilarious, people will pay for this pointless, uninteresting tat. Housing does not offer anything to someone who wants to play the game, only a skeleton that you can hit.

I'm not dissing role playing or anything, I understand this patch will offer a lot more in terms of that but you can't even sit on a chair, a lot is left to the imagination still.

I'd probably go to the trouble of obtaining the free apartment if you could actually store stuff in it, can't even do that!

@WillhelmBlack Uhm, actually you CAN sit on the chairs.

That's new and comes with the housing update.

MissBizz · January 2017

SanTii.92 wrote: »

Aren't this fancy cups the fanciest of them all? aren't there like another 1k adornments of diverse cost range to pick up from? If that's the case, i'd be ok with a few of them being extremly expensive to get.

Also, were the crown costs published? Where did you get this four dollar cost from?

@SanTii.92 crown stores costs for furnishings are published on PTS, just not the crown costs of the houses themselves.

FleetwoodSmack · January 2017

Honestly, if it's not magey themed; I won't be pulling anything from the crown store aside from the crown exclusive homes.

Recremen · January 2017

The cup in question, with banana for scale.

DeadlyRecluse · January 2017

Recremen wrote: »

The cup in question, with banana for scale.

Dang, I really need that cup now. BRB buying crowns.

Seriously that's 4 dollars in crowns? Like, I was planning on using crowns to decorate, but I was expecting things like that to be more in the range of 50 cents. Any way someone could post the PTS prices for those of us who do not indulge in that storied land...

Nestor · January 2017

I am going to have a big house with nothing in it. I will just tell everyone it's a Zen Thing.

Charming-minimalist-living-room-design-red-armchairs-and-nice-pendant-lamps-also-glass-walls-design.jpg

Charming-minimalist-living-room-design-red-armchairs-and-nice-pendant-lamps-also-glass-walls-design.jpg

Recremen · January 2017

DeadlyRecluse wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

The cup in question, with banana for scale.

Dang, I really need that cup now. BRB buying crowns.

Seriously that's 4 dollars in crowns? Like, I was planning on using crowns to decorate, but I was expecting things like that to be more in the range of 50 cents. Any way someone could post the PTS prices for those of us who do not indulge in that storied land...

@DeadlyRecluse I don't have a complete list but in general the most basic things of White quality (including most rocks and plants) are 10 Crowns, somewhat nicer Green-quality items are 50 Crowns, Blue items (getting into some truly cool stuff) is 150 Crowns, and Purple items are 400 Crowns, but this goes for all purple items no matter how big they are. That fancy cup costs exactly as much as an enormous Nibenese fancy column. It just seems like the pricing in need of a serious round of fine-tuning.

DeadlyRecluse · January 2017

Recremen wrote: »

DeadlyRecluse wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

The cup in question, with banana for scale.

Dang, I really need that cup now. BRB buying crowns.

Seriously that's 4 dollars in crowns? Like, I was planning on using crowns to decorate, but I was expecting things like that to be more in the range of 50 cents. Any way someone could post the PTS prices for those of us who do not indulge in that storied land...

@DeadlyRecluse I don't have a complete list but in general the most basic things of White quality (including most rocks and plants) are 10 Crowns, somewhat nicer Green-quality items are 50 Crowns, Blue items (getting into some truly cool stuff) is 150 Crowns, and Purple items are 400 Crowns, but this goes for all purple items no matter how big they are. That fancy cup costs exactly as much as an enormous Nibenese fancy column. It just seems like the pricing in need of a serious round of fine-tuning.

@Recremen Ah, I see. So would it be fair to say that overall the crown prices are reasonable (whatever that means) on furnishings, but some items just feel like they are in the wrong category? But if I wanted to buy a bunch of basic building components, I'll be in the 10-50 crown range?

Recremen · January 2017

DeadlyRecluse wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

DeadlyRecluse wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

The cup in question, with banana for scale.

Dang, I really need that cup now. BRB buying crowns.

Seriously that's 4 dollars in crowns? Like, I was planning on using crowns to decorate, but I was expecting things like that to be more in the range of 50 cents. Any way someone could post the PTS prices for those of us who do not indulge in that storied land...

@DeadlyRecluse I don't have a complete list but in general the most basic things of White quality (including most rocks and plants) are 10 Crowns, somewhat nicer Green-quality items are 50 Crowns, Blue items (getting into some truly cool stuff) is 150 Crowns, and Purple items are 400 Crowns, but this goes for all purple items no matter how big they are. That fancy cup costs exactly as much as an enormous Nibenese fancy column. It just seems like the pricing in need of a serious round of fine-tuning.

@Recremen Ah, I see. So would it be fair to say that overall the crown prices are reasonable (whatever that means) on furnishings, but some items just feel like they are in the wrong category? But if I wanted to buy a bunch of basic building components, I'll be in the 10-50 crown range?

Basically yes, though I'm still loath to spend four bucks on something that isn't, like, actually attached to the character. It's one thing if it's a fancy hat or adornment or hair style since your character is always in view, but on furnishings? I'm not too keen on that price. I'm keen on the idea in general, but I guess we'll see how it all pans out. I suppose I'm mostly glad that none of it is in the gambling boxes.

DeadlyRecluse · January 2017

Recremen wrote: »

DeadlyRecluse wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

DeadlyRecluse wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

The cup in question, with banana for scale.

Dang, I really need that cup now. BRB buying crowns.

Seriously that's 4 dollars in crowns? Like, I was planning on using crowns to decorate, but I was expecting things like that to be more in the range of 50 cents. Any way someone could post the PTS prices for those of us who do not indulge in that storied land...

@DeadlyRecluse I don't have a complete list but in general the most basic things of White quality (including most rocks and plants) are 10 Crowns, somewhat nicer Green-quality items are 50 Crowns, Blue items (getting into some truly cool stuff) is 150 Crowns, and Purple items are 400 Crowns, but this goes for all purple items no matter how big they are. That fancy cup costs exactly as much as an enormous Nibenese fancy column. It just seems like the pricing in need of a serious round of fine-tuning.

@Recremen Ah, I see. So would it be fair to say that overall the crown prices are reasonable (whatever that means) on furnishings, but some items just feel like they are in the wrong category? But if I wanted to buy a bunch of basic building components, I'll be in the 10-50 crown range?

Basically yes, though I'm still loath to spend four bucks on something that isn't, like, actually attached to the character. It's one thing if it's a fancy hat or adornment or hair style since your character is always in view, but on furnishings? I'm not too keen on that price. I'm keen on the idea in general, but I guess we'll see how it all pans out. I suppose I'm mostly glad that none of it is in the gambling boxes.

Thanks.

I'll be using housing primarily for guildhall related stuff, so this is all sounding better and better in my book (what we can't raise via donations I can buy with crowns without alerting my wife to my crippling addiction).