Banker and Merchant assistant cost too much - READ the OP before you comment

stitchesofdooom · August 2018

Indigo_Shade wrote: »

I got the Banker pretty early on. With 10 full character slots, it's a quality of life improvement.

I just bought the banker for a friend, after buying a huge chunk of crowns during the current sale. He is floored at how useful the Banker is, as he's been hording his freebie ESO+ crowns and was looking at another 2 months before he had enough for the Banker. 24 hours after getting the Banker, he was like OMG I should have done this already. And he only has 2 toons.

I'd venture to say that until you actually GET and USE the Banker, it's not easy to see how useful they can be.

Oh and, if you are heavy daily writs player, doing writs with multiple toons...the Banker is your best friend.

I like chocolate. Let's say that I like chcolate so much that it has magical powers to turn any frown upside down. Now let's say I feel the worst I have in a long time and I want chocolate. Someone knocks on my door and offers me a chocolate bar for £50. I don't even need to leave the house. It's just an ordinary chocoalte bar that did not cost much to produce or bring to me. Do I buy it? The guy has a portable payment card reader thing. *** no! It's not worth £50. Sure it's a quality of life improvement but if he greedy git wants my money he's gonna have to bring those excessive prices down.

Not the best analogy, sure. But I hope it make the point.

Delpi · August 2018

I bought the Banker with a 50% off on crowns. You just have to wait for the right moment to purchase it, like all of the purchases tbh...

stitchesofdooom · August 2018

Delpi wrote: »

I bought the Banker with a 50% off on crowns. You just have to wait for the right moment to purchase it, like all of the purchases tbh...

I'd be perfectly fine with a banker and merchant (and guildtrader) which were limited as home only if they were 1/5 the price.

Danny_UK · August 2018

Do not buy the merchant, why do people make this mistake? I saved up my crowns from ESO+ and bought the banker for 5000, this is the most useful as it gives you extra space, access to items on demand and place things in there. I'm mainly using mine for stuff I get from the writs, call the banker and everything is stored.

There is no reason to buy the merchant, there are lots of merchants along the way, far to many to count which means you'd only be wasting your crowns. I mean it is up to the individual, if you feel a merchant is more useful to you then go ahead but I certainly wouldn't buy the merchant.

warldcharacterb14_ESO · August 2018

vometia wrote: »

stitchesofdooom wrote: »

Tan9oSuccka wrote: »

stitchesofdooom wrote: »

Tan9oSuccka wrote: »

Save your crowns from plus. Merchant is very handy.

I’m still waiting on a premium banker. I want guild store access.

if you're happy paying a monthly subscription regardless of the crown income. Not everyone wants to do that.

If you can’t afford it or choose not to afford.....then don’t buy one?

You want one, but at a price you set in your mind.

I'm only saying that £25 is way too much for a single assistant.

Quite. I'm quite surprised that people are okay with this, regardless of how flush they are or not (actually the richest people I've known have tended to be the least inclined to part with their money... which is probably why they're rich). I mean the banker is almost the cost of a AAA game. The fact that a handful of characters can share them means nothing coming from the SP world where I can have as many characters as I want and still use the same DLC. And have as much storage as I want, and costumes, and ability to mod my own, and... etc. It's come as a bit of a culture shock to find I have to pay a monthly sub on top of a typical AAA price to get fairly basic functionality and then everything else costs extra.

Almost thinking wistfully to the days when Oblivion's Horse Armour was absolutely lambasted for being a terrible example of price gouging. It seems positively benign from ESO's viewpoint.

Well do you think this game would exist if they didn't make money I'm tired of this crying about spending money. This generation of gamers have no concept of what a hard game is and what it means to support a product!! If you don't like it move on and find an enjoyable game that fits your needs.

BNOC · August 2018

Danny_UK wrote: »

Do not buy the merchant, why do people make this mistake? I saved up my crowns from ESO+ and bought the banker for 5000, this is the most useful as it gives you extra space, access to items on demand and place things in there. I'm mainly using mine for stuff I get from the writs, call the banker and everything is stored.

There is no reason to buy the merchant, there are lots of merchants along the way, far to many to count which means you'd only be wasting your crowns. I mean it is up to the individual, if you feel a merchant is more useful to you then go ahead but I certainly wouldn't buy the merchant.

The merchant literally isn't worth it, you're right.

Any town has merchants aplenty - The only reason this would ever be good is if you could repair using it.

If you've maxed your bags, you don't collect a full inventory of loot faster than your items are damaged and you need to repair - This makes the merchant redundant as you have to go to another one anyway.

Not worth the price - The banker is convenient, however.

vometia · August 2018

warldcharacterb14_ESO wrote: »

Well do you think this game would exist if they didn't make money I'm tired of this crying about spending money. This generation of gamers have no concept of what a hard game is and what it means to support a product!! If you don't like it move on and find an enjoyable game that fits your needs.

I'm not sure who's "this generation": I mean speaking personally, I've been gaming on and off since Pong was a thing in the 1970s. Gaming was enormously popular when I was at school in the early '80s: pretty much everyone had a console or computer at home and it was pretty much they heyday of the arcade machine. And we certainly weren't the first generation: my grandfather used to drag me around the arcades when I was a pre-teen so I could watch him playing the latest video games, whether it was a platformer, shoot-'em-up or racing. It was also the natural progression for the previous generation who'd grown up with pinball machines.

Difficulty: nah. It's always been much of a muchness, enough to be challenging-but-accessible for the most part with various exceptions for what are now termed the "casuals" or self-styled "hardcore" types. Nothing has really changed. Except you no longer need to use cassette tape to do savegames, which was always the serious difficulty element: getting those recording levels just right and not having the tape eaten and going all crinkly.

Costs: now there's a thorny issue. IIRC, in my youth (the 8-bit heyday I was on about) it was around £8 for a cassette and around £20 if you wanted the same title on a cartridge. Apparently according to inflation, those figures are around £25 and £65 respectively... so in other words, the mid point is still around what I'd expect to pay for a AAA game. Maybe not that thorny, then.

Except today there's MMOs. Now these have ongoing costs and someone needs to pay for it somehow. For much of the time I've worked in IT (I started my first proper job in 1989) "software as a service" has been the Holy Grail. And a lot of people don't want to buy because they simply want to know what they're paying rather than having ongoing costs; and the suspicion has always been SaaS is going to end up costing way more. Which is why publishers keep pushing it.

But it's either/or: you either buy the software up-front or pay a licence to use is. When it comes to MMOs, though, you're expected to do both: pay the up-front costs and the monthly licensing. And then find that really all the monthly licensing does is replace some of the stuff stripped out of the base game if you're comparing it to the SP stuff. And only some: because so much of it is also a chargeable extra, and sometimes a huge charge: what would've been a negligible thing in the SP game, be it an NPC or armour you could wear suddenly costs even more money, and sometimes the sort of money that could buy another AAA game. Just for a suit of armour or a guy that will help you manage your inventory.

And as someone who's been gaming for 40+ years I'm kinda thinking that's a bit much. Prices have waxed and waned over the years but have generally been much of a muchness. But now so much stuff is being pared away and charged separately and as an older gamer I'm thinking, seriously?

And I keep seeing the justifications. A company exists to make a profit. Well, yeah, if you distil it down to its most basic element, yes. But it usually balances that with providing a good overall "customer experience". Ripping people off is not that; "what the market will bear" is a rather cynical and short-term strategy normally pursued by someone on the management carousel just looking for their next bonus. I would like to think (and my experience backs it up) that most businesses are not there to simply extract as much money from their customers-I-mean-consumers by any means possible and even if they do want to take the most cynical attitude, being too hard-nosed tends to put people off. "There's one born every minute" was never a great PR strategy, after all.

I know a few people take the attitude "if you can't afford it then maybe you shouldn't be playing", but there are other well-worn adages one could say in response to that.

In summary, there was never a golden age of serious gamers who played serious games that were implausibly hard; there was never a golden age when people blindly supported a publisher regardless of how they were treated, and when customer loyalty tended to be more of a thing, it was usually earned; and if there was a golden age of paying through the nose for every last thing, that time is now.

Not94me · August 2018

I hold what sounds like the minority view, here. I'm a console player, and subscribe to eso+. That being said, I own the banker and the merchant, paid full price by buying the total cost in crowns, and don't regret the purchase. They come in handy after 2 or more trials, on top of the other stuff I carry.

I also spent real money to buy crowns so that I could buy Pariah's Pinnacle, and to furnish it to my own ideal layout - including real money for mundus stones and crafting stations.

In saying all of that, I can understand where everyone is coming from by saying that the merchant and vendor cost too much, for limited services. I too wish they had been cheaper, and that they did more.

I just wanted to speak up as someone who does not mind spending a little extra on a game that I enjoy. I look at it as contributing to the ongoing development of what i consider to be a great game. Like i said, I know I'm in the minority, but there you go.

DorianDragonRaze · August 2018

It's a question of saving time or saving money. Like you can buy a good new car and use time, or you can save on the car and ride bicycle, or you buy a cheap old car and spend you time fixing it every other day.
A banker saves tons of time, so totally worth all the money.

Bc_bmx · August 2018

I'd still like a stable master, and writ boards/drop off locations for my home.

MasterSpatula · August 2018

Haven't read thread cause six pages of this argument sounds awful.

I'll just state this: 5K for me is far, far, far more than they're worth. I'm not upset about this. I don't need them. But if they did charge a less ludicrous price for them, I would actually buy the things.

But that's true of a lot of things. Somehow, ZOS has determined that the "milk a few" business model will make them more money than the "Wal-Mart effect." So be it.

stitchesofdooom · August 2018

MasterSpatula wrote: »

Haven't read thread cause six pages of this argument sounds awful.

I'll just state this: 5K for me is far, far, far more than they're worth. I'm not upset about this. I don't need them. But if they did charge a less ludicrous price for them, I would actually buy the things.

But that's true of a lot of things. Somehow, ZOS has determined that the "milk a few" business model will make them more money than the "Wal-Mart effect." So be it.

the 6 pages are a few people like you who agree with me and a buncha other people who mostly think I'm entitled and should be a permanent ESO Plus subscriber. Then I explain that I only want them for my Guildhall and a cheaper Guildhall only version would be nice, I've already spent over £100 on the game which is more than enough, and then Zenimax is just being greedy.

At this point they mostly see the logic of my point of view and either apologise and agree with me, or agree to disagree as we all play differently... NAH, just kidding. They mostly decide I'm an abhorrent individual who's "lack of willingness to support the game" disgusts them. This is the interwebs after all.

There are the last 6 pages summed up for you.

stitchesofdooom · August 2018

vometia wrote: »

warldcharacterb14_ESO wrote: »

Well do you think this game would exist if they didn't make money I'm tired of this crying about spending money. This generation of gamers have no concept of what a hard game is and what it means to support a product!! If you don't like it move on and find an enjoyable game that fits your needs.

I'm not sure who's "this generation": I mean speaking personally, I've been gaming on and off since Pong was a thing in the 1970s. Gaming was enormously popular when I was at school in the early '80s: pretty much everyone had a console or computer at home and it was pretty much they heyday of the arcade machine. And we certainly weren't the first generation: my grandfather used to drag me around the arcades when I was a pre-teen so I could watch him playing the latest video games, whether it was a platformer, shoot-'em-up or racing. It was also the natural progression for the previous generation who'd grown up with pinball machines.

Difficulty: nah. It's always been much of a muchness, enough to be challenging-but-accessible for the most part with various exceptions for what are now termed the "casuals" or self-styled "hardcore" types. Nothing has really changed. Except you no longer need to use cassette tape to do savegames, which was always the serious difficulty element: getting those recording levels just right and not having the tape eaten and going all crinkly.

Costs: now there's a thorny issue. IIRC, in my youth (the 8-bit heyday I was on about) it was around £8 for a cassette and around £20 if you wanted the same title on a cartridge. Apparently according to inflation, those figures are around £25 and £65 respectively... so in other words, the mid point is still around what I'd expect to pay for a AAA game. Maybe not that thorny, then.

Except today there's MMOs. Now these have ongoing costs and someone needs to pay for it somehow. For much of the time I've worked in IT (I started my first proper job in 1989) "software as a service" has been the Holy Grail. And a lot of people don't want to buy because they simply want to know what they're paying rather than having ongoing costs; and the suspicion has always been SaaS is going to end up costing way more. Which is why publishers keep pushing it.

But it's either/or: you either buy the software up-front or pay a licence to use is. When it comes to MMOs, though, you're expected to do both: pay the up-front costs and the monthly licensing. And then find that really all the monthly licensing does is replace some of the stuff stripped out of the base game if you're comparing it to the SP stuff. And only some: because so much of it is also a chargeable extra, and sometimes a huge charge: what would've been a negligible thing in the SP game, be it an NPC or armour you could wear suddenly costs even more money, and sometimes the sort of money that could buy another AAA game. Just for a suit of armour or a guy that will help you manage your inventory.

And as someone who's been gaming for 40+ years I'm kinda thinking that's a bit much. Prices have waxed and waned over the years but have generally been much of a muchness. But now so much stuff is being pared away and charged separately and as an older gamer I'm thinking, seriously?

And I keep seeing the justifications. A company exists to make a profit. Well, yeah, if you distil it down to its most basic element, yes. But it usually balances that with providing a good overall "customer experience". Ripping people off is not that; "what the market will bear" is a rather cynical and short-term strategy normally pursued by someone on the management carousel just looking for their next bonus. I would like to think (and my experience backs it up) that most businesses are not there to simply extract as much money from their customers-I-mean-consumers by any means possible and even if they do want to take the most cynical attitude, being too hard-nosed tends to put people off. "There's one born every minute" was never a great PR strategy, after all.

I know a few people take the attitude "if you can't afford it then maybe you shouldn't be playing", but there are other well-worn adages one could say in response to that.

In summary, there was never a golden age of serious gamers who played serious games that were implausibly hard; there was never a golden age when people blindly supported a publisher regardless of how they were treated, and when customer loyalty tended to be more of a thing, it was usually earned; and if there was a golden age of paying through the nose for every last thing, that time is now.

I was born in the 80's I remember when you bought a whole game, you got a whole game with the money you spent, and it worked on day 1. This "games as a service" brahmin manure needs to die.

stitchesofdooom · August 2018

I have been gifted the banker. I still think the price is a joke

StamWhipCultist · August 2018

I have both banker and merchant.
They are great when you need to swap gear or sell junk while grinding area for xp/stuff.
Hope zenimax give us way to upgrade them to regular banker/merchant utility lvl, so we can acess guild store and fix gear easy.

stitchesofdooom · September 2018

StamWhipCultist wrote: »

I have both banker and merchant.
They are great when you need to swap gear or sell junk while grinding area for xp/stuff.
Hope zenimax give us way to upgrade them to regular banker/merchant utility lvl, so we can acess guild store and fix gear easy.

a cheaper, fully functional guildhall only version would be EPIC

StamWhipCultist · September 2018

stitchesofdooom wrote: »

StamWhipCultist wrote: »

I have both banker and merchant.
They are great when you need to swap gear or sell junk while grinding area for xp/stuff.
Hope zenimax give us way to upgrade them to regular banker/merchant utility lvl, so we can acess guild store and fix gear easy.

a cheaper, fully functional guildhall only version would be EPIC

I absolutely agree. I would gladly pay for housing only full guild access banker and vendor that is able to to repair items.

cynaes · September 2018

They're well worth the money for me - especially the banker. The real life time I've saved because I had a banker ready when I was out questing/doing group dungeons far outweighs the amount of money I spent on them.

TBH, I would gladly pay the same amount for the banker again, to get one that looks a little more ... pleasing?

stitchesofdooom · September 2018

cynaes wrote: »

They're well worth the money for me - especially the banker. The real life time I've saved because I had a banker ready when I was out questing/doing group dungeons far outweighs the amount of money I spent on them.

TBH, I would gladly pay the same amount for the banker again, to get one that looks a little more ... pleasing?

you ever watch iZombie?

"you know why he charges so much?"
"because he can"

JKorr · September 2018

stitchesofdooom wrote: »

vometia wrote: »

warldcharacterb14_ESO wrote: »

Well do you think this game would exist if they didn't make money I'm tired of this crying about spending money. This generation of gamers have no concept of what a hard game is and what it means to support a product!! If you don't like it move on and find an enjoyable game that fits your needs.

I'm not sure who's "this generation": I mean speaking personally, I've been gaming on and off since Pong was a thing in the 1970s. Gaming was enormously popular when I was at school in the early '80s: pretty much everyone had a console or computer at home and it was pretty much they heyday of the arcade machine. And we certainly weren't the first generation: my grandfather used to drag me around the arcades when I was a pre-teen so I could watch him playing the latest video games, whether it was a platformer, shoot-'em-up or racing. It was also the natural progression for the previous generation who'd grown up with pinball machines.

Difficulty: nah. It's always been much of a muchness, enough to be challenging-but-accessible for the most part with various exceptions for what are now termed the "casuals" or self-styled "hardcore" types. Nothing has really changed. Except you no longer need to use cassette tape to do savegames, which was always the serious difficulty element: getting those recording levels just right and not having the tape eaten and going all crinkly.

Costs: now there's a thorny issue. IIRC, in my youth (the 8-bit heyday I was on about) it was around £8 for a cassette and around £20 if you wanted the same title on a cartridge. Apparently according to inflation, those figures are around £25 and £65 respectively... so in other words, the mid point is still around what I'd expect to pay for a AAA game. Maybe not that thorny, then.

Except today there's MMOs. Now these have ongoing costs and someone needs to pay for it somehow. For much of the time I've worked in IT (I started my first proper job in 1989) "software as a service" has been the Holy Grail. And a lot of people don't want to buy because they simply want to know what they're paying rather than having ongoing costs; and the suspicion has always been SaaS is going to end up costing way more. Which is why publishers keep pushing it.

But it's either/or: you either buy the software up-front or pay a licence to use is. When it comes to MMOs, though, you're expected to do both: pay the up-front costs and the monthly licensing. And then find that really all the monthly licensing does is replace some of the stuff stripped out of the base game if you're comparing it to the SP stuff. And only some: because so much of it is also a chargeable extra, and sometimes a huge charge: what would've been a negligible thing in the SP game, be it an NPC or armour you could wear suddenly costs even more money, and sometimes the sort of money that could buy another AAA game. Just for a suit of armour or a guy that will help you manage your inventory.

And as someone who's been gaming for 40+ years I'm kinda thinking that's a bit much. Prices have waxed and waned over the years but have generally been much of a muchness. But now so much stuff is being pared away and charged separately and as an older gamer I'm thinking, seriously?

And I keep seeing the justifications. A company exists to make a profit. Well, yeah, if you distil it down to its most basic element, yes. But it usually balances that with providing a good overall "customer experience". Ripping people off is not that; "what the market will bear" is a rather cynical and short-term strategy normally pursued by someone on the management carousel just looking for their next bonus. I would like to think (and my experience backs it up) that most businesses are not there to simply extract as much money from their customers-I-mean-consumers by any means possible and even if they do want to take the most cynical attitude, being too hard-nosed tends to put people off. "There's one born every minute" was never a great PR strategy, after all.

I know a few people take the attitude "if you can't afford it then maybe you shouldn't be playing", but there are other well-worn adages one could say in response to that.

In summary, there was never a golden age of serious gamers who played serious games that were implausibly hard; there was never a golden age when people blindly supported a publisher regardless of how they were treated, and when customer loyalty tended to be more of a thing, it was usually earned; and if there was a golden age of paying through the nose for every last thing, that time is now.

I was born in the 80's I remember when you bought a whole game, you got a whole game with the money you spent, and it worked on day 1. This "games as a service" brahmin manure needs to die.

Yes. You got a whole game. Even with multiple floppy discs, or multiple cds, there was a limit to how much content could be included. When you finished the whole game, you were finished. No new content, not a lot of replay value, until you bought another new game. That new game had the same limitations. If you had to depend on the company for new content, you waited until the new game came out. If the company doesn't allow for player modding, the "whole game" lasts what, 30, 40 hours, maybe?

I have two accounts, one with a full 15 slots, one halfway. I've been playing since early access, so 4+ years now? I play on pc, so any new game I buy is at least $50.00. I don't want to think about how much I'd have spent on "whole games" to get the same amount of game time that I've used with a sub to ESO. Of course, your mileage may vary, but the nice thing is, once you buy the base game [that they have expanded every year] you don't have to spend more if you don't want to. If you would rather buy "the whole game", the options are still out there.

Congrats on the "born in the 80's" thing. I was born in the 60's. Computer cassettes. 5 1/4 in. floppies. PONG on a black and white tv. There are players and posters on the forum who remember the "buy the whole game" times. And without the rose colored glasses, they had their faults too.

Vahrokh · September 2018

I would have bought them if they had been fully featured, like the "real" NPCs.
Especially the banker, without guild stores (which I use a lot for trading) it's useless to me.

MerlinPendragon · September 2018

They're still very useful without ability to repair or access guild bank.

The price is right on the mark. I would gladly pay this again now that I have had them for a year.

DanteYoda · September 2018

They'd be worth 5k if we could customize them like our characters..

jaschacasadiob16_ESO · September 2018

Now please go to a Gucci boutique and tell them you ain't gonna pay that skirt 700€ but you would gladly get them 29.99€ for it.

Runs · September 2018

I know we all have a different version of out own personal time value. For me personally these are cheaper than the value of my time that they have saved. It's not even close to a contest. 30 seconds to a minute here and there does not seem like a lot, but it does add up. So for me the cost was fine.

I do wish they also had the full features, or that there was a way we could pay to add features to our assistants. And that we could customize them, at least let them use our outfits or polymorphs.

GallantGuardian · September 2018

I bought them when I saved up my 1500 free crowns from my sub... I rarely buy anything in the crown store and saving the crowns for them was totally worth it ...

stitchesofdooom · September 2018

GallantGuardian wrote: »

I bought them when I saved up my 1500 free crowns from my sub... I rarely buy anything in the crown store and saving the crowns for them was totally worth it ...

and you sub for a craft bag that is essential for crafters because the caps opn space are too low making it more of a necessity. So basically ESO Plus is a scam

idk · September 2018

Zos counters OP’s offer of 1k crowns with an offer of 5k crowns.

OP, buy the crowns on sale and you’ll save on purchasing the assistants. Being the assistants pride ya shield steady for a couple years now it seems very unlikely Zos will cut the price 80%.

stitchesofdooom · September 2018

idk wrote: »

Zos counters OP’s offer of 1k crowns with an offer of 5k crowns.

OP, buy the crowns on sale and you’ll save on purchasing the assistants. Being the assistants pride ya shield steady for a couple years now it seems very unlikely Zos will cut the price 80%.

still. a. rip. off.

redlink1979 · September 2018

The only issue here is that you don't have the coin/crowns and you want, as many in the game, instant gratification...