Biro123 wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

Biro123 wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

I've been doing writs for about 2 years on my main account. 15 characters a day. I have been using the master writs to purchase the attunable crafting stations, as I'm trying to outfit my personal home with all of the possible stations. I have spent 42,000 vouchers so far on those stations (I also have all of the recipes, storage crates, ebony motif, etc..) I have another 5,000 to go before I have all the stations.

I have also made millions in gold (it'd be a LOT more, had I sold the vouchers or attunables, I estimate the value of all the stations at about 32,000,000 gold (at PC/NA prices)) Writs are extremely valuable.

Here's the math I've come up with.

I spent about 1 million gold to buy raw materials every 2 months of so (since lvl 50 writs do net you a loss). I buy raw silk, leather, and wood, refined rubedite ingots (since they are so cheap). refine those, and sell the gold improvement mats I get from the refining at a cost of 300-400k total (depends on RNG). Then, I do writs on those 15 toons over the next two months, netting 4.6k gold/writ x 15 writs/day x 60 days = 4.14 million gold over those two months. The surveys I get will be collected and refined, the gold/purple mats I get from those, allow me to do the master writs that I get from doing those surveys. Thus I net a profit of approximately 3.5 million gold every 2 months from doing writs.

Jewelry is a little different. Even though all my characters are max level in JC, I only have 8 of them do JC writs at max level, where the other 7 do them at level 1. The lower level ones still drop surveys, that I collect on a character that is max level, so I only get platinum. The level 1 JC writs are virtually self-sufficient (as they return 5 Pewter, and require either 5 or 6 Pewter).

All 15 of my toons are full 8-trait crafters, and know all the base game motifs, the base game purple motifs, and the very cheap purple motifs (such as hollowjack). They do not know the rarer styles (other than my main account, which knows all, except for Dead-Water, but those aren't in the "table" yet for increasing drop chance)

In other words, I think they are more than worth it. I choose to do writs to earn gold/materials, so I can buy some other things in the game without having to grind for them (such as monster helm/shoulder style pages, soul shriven skin, etc)

I'd honestly rather be at work than doing that, to be fair. Each to their own, I guess..
I mean, sure its worth it in terms of in-game currency earned compared to other ways of earning - but that's, say 10 mins per character (including login/out time, managing inventory/buying/selling) x15 = 150 minutes per day = 2.5 hours per day. = 17.5 hours per week. That's like part-time job hours..!
Is it really worth it in terms of time? But I guess it goes on to the wider point of what do you really need all that money for, and do you really enjoy the rewards you get at the sacrifice of that kind of gameplay?

Me? I have absolutely no craving for titles, ahievements or cosmetics (house included ) - which seems to be where most of the money goes.. I just want every single thing I do in game to be enjoyable - enjoy the journey, not the destination and all that. I guess I'm the oddball here, because I really don't get it.

I appreciate that everybody has their own value of "time" in the game. Rather than spend 12 hours running a dungeon to try and get a drop of a monster helm style page, I do writs and I buy it from somebody who does it.

I've also gotten my writs to be effective (I am on PC/NA, so thanks Dolgubon's Lazy Writ Crafter) I have potions and food pre-made in my bank, so I don't have to craft those each day. The Alinor stations make a quick loop. It takes me about 3 minutes a character to do the writs, with another 2 minutes or so for load-out/load-in, depending on server load. I actually use the log-in/log-out time to catch up on news/discord/e-mail/etc on my other monitor. So it doesn't take me a ton of time to do them daily. I can get them done in about an hour each day, sometimes a little more.

A page on writs is going to bring in the people who enjoy doing writs, so I don't think you're seeing a valid cross-sample of everybody. I believe that each MMO out there is going to require a "grind" of some sort, just choose the one you enjoy doing. I feel the time/reward curve for writs is one of the best ones I've found. Others will disagree, and that's okay.

Yeah, I know. I'm sure I'm the minority here, though, otherwise I'd probably be more argumentative
My perspective comes largely from doing a few courses on Games development, and creating a few of my own games - and one of the main design concepts that the courses kept going back to over and over again was 'Is it fun?' and 'can it be more fun?'. It heavily encouraged asking yourself this with every single feature you added to the game, or change you make to it, and I've since translated that over to asking myself the same question when playing a game. Is this fun? If the answer is 'no' - then I either do something different in the game - or find a different game.
I find MMO's are terrible for adding 'unfun' and repeating content to keep people playing - and one of the reasons I've played ESO for so long is that this stuff is mostly optional.