Why are Motifs so painful to obtain?

Maulclaw · November 2018

I've been trying to get my hands on some of the skins that are tied to some of the dungeons, DLCs included. And naturally, I began to queue and finished a couple of those in normal mode. The thing is, some of those were really, really tough... especially with a group of pugs who aren't fully aware of the mechanics (myself included). Unfortunately, none of us got anything besides a weapon. No unlocks or motifs. This has made me believe that these Motifs can only be unlocked via Veteran mode?

This also made me think: why is ZOS making motifs such a big deal? I mean, 4,000 Crowns for one set? End-game fashion is something most players love, especially when the game allows it. It's a huge deal in Guild Wars 2, TERA, Star Wars: The Old Republic and many other MMOs out there... but I don't feel like they are as greedy as ESO in this regard (especially since Crown purchases aren't even shared across regions). Costumes are fine, but they're more "casual" when compared to most sets out there. I don't think it's fair to lock these lore-friendly and awesome sets behind paywalls or behind extreme grinding.

SirAndy · November 2018

- In-game gold sink
- Real world money grab in crown store

Acrolas · November 2018

Maulclaw wrote: »

This also made me think: why is ZOS making motifs such a big deal? I mean, 4,000 Crowns for one set?

The crown and crown gem cost is to reflect that the in-game motifs show up as requirements in Master Writs and also count in the 50 motif requirement for Grand Master Crafter. The store exclusive seasonal motifs don't factor into Master Writs which is why they're closer to 2000 crowns.

yodased · November 2018

I am actually all for the hardest dungeons giving people something to farm in them.

It takes a lot of effort to get those places down to farming level and the people that spend the time in there in my opinion, deserve the recognition and reward.

LordSkyKnight · November 2018

You said it yourself. One of the biggest aspects of MMOs that people love is to customize the look of their character. Anything involving the appearance of your character is going to draw a huge amount of possible revenue for these companies. That's why most of the best looking stuff in this game is found in the cash shop.

Look how the motifs started out. The race books were highly traded when the game went live and it only took one book to look all of the gear pieces. They got dirty and started breaking them up into pages and made them harder to acquire.

Oh and don't you dare giving swtor a pass. Those dirty rats put all the best looking gear right into the gambling boxes.

Everyone loves dressing up their Barbies.

zaria · November 2018

SirAndy wrote: »

- In-game gold sink
- Real world money grab in crown store

Add time sink, and yes many motifs are nice and they are used for master writs.

myskyrim26 · November 2018

Collected all pre-Summerset motifs. At first, I tried to obtain them myself, but quickly founded it to be long and very boring way. Than I turned to guid stores: I discovered that a major part of motifs is not expensive at all. So, I started to sell mats and buy motifs. April event is also a very easy way to obtain missing pages.

As for a gold sink... Well, what is gold for, really? I spend the gold only on repairing my weapons and gear. I don't need it for anything else. So, motifs rarity cotributes to ESO economy. So, they must be rare.

drkfrontiers · November 2018

Guild traders. Everything you need.

Tan9oSuccka · November 2018

The drop rates are simply terrible now.

I believe I ran the Murkmire dailies 14 times in one day. I think I got one motif page.

Yawn.

yodased · November 2018

Tan9oSuccka wrote: »

The drop rates are simply terrible now.

I believe I ran the Murkmire dailies 14 times in one day. I think I got one motif page.

Yawn.

Don't do them too close to each other.

rumple9 · November 2018

They locked out dungeon motifs solely to ESO plus subscribers that are elite players.

Kiralyn2000 · November 2018

Why?

In The Beginning, there was the MMO. And the MMO required a monthly subscription (and there was only so fast they could make new content) so they filled it with Time Sinks. So that you would have to spend a lot of time to get what you wanted, leading to More Money.

And then the required subscription passed away and was replaced with Free To Play and the Cash Shop. And they saw that Time Sinks could still produce More Money, and they put ways to skip the Time Sink in the Cash Shop.

(tl;dr - MMOs have always had long time sink projects, and the option to skip those long sinks cost a lot of crowns.)

LordSkyKnight wrote: »

Oh and don't you dare giving swtor a pass. Those dirty rats put all the best looking gear right into the gambling boxes.

On the other hand, they're all (at least when I played) tradable in the auction house, and can be unlocked account-wide in the Collection (that's less of a bonus as compared to ESO, but compared to other games, where lockbox items aren't automatically account-wide - like STO or Secret World - that's actually quite a nice feature.
(not to say that SWTOR didn't have plenty of crappy f2p features to balance it out.)

Everyone loves dressing up their Barbies.

Reminds me of a common forum comment over in Star Trek Online - "Space Barbie is endgame"

Rungar · November 2018

you get thors hammer after you collect 50 of them

Danikat · November 2018

I suspect the crown store motifs are so expensive so there's still an incentive to farm them, because as much as ZOS wants people to buy stuff from the store they also need people playing the game - otherwise there's no one to play with and people get bored and quit and then no one's buying anything.

This way they're a rare and valuable drop for dungeon runners and everyone else can buy them from guild traders, and if you don't want to deal with that or don't know it's an option you turn to the crown store to get them that way instead.

Other than the 9 basic racial motifs they were never that common or easy to find, even before the crown store existed. And back then they only unlocked the ability to use them for crafted armour (and only on 1 character) because the outfit system didn't exist.

MartiniDaniels · November 2018

What do you mean hard to gain? You either run difficult content and/or receive/exchange motifs for free and/or grind gold and buy it from guild stores. Or you want everything to be easy and free, etc? and I'll agree it's not easy to gather all motifs/recipes, but it's really easy to acquire some particular motifs you need, week of playing for top ones (i mean 7-8 pages you need for new "look"), with exception of Welkynar maybe.

Cpt_Teemo · November 2018

rumple9 wrote: »

They locked out dungeon motifs solely to ESO plus subscribers that are elite players.

You can buy Dlcs separately with gold if you wanted and trusted someone else to gift you the Dlcs as gifts

Chaquinho89 · November 2018

I have all the currently available motifs learned on my crafter, except for the 'Frostcaster', which I'll buy when they bring it back to the crown store. In my case, I hardly buy everything at once unless I'm missing like 2~3 pages to complete, then I spend gold buying the remaining ones.

I know that some of them are extremely painful to get (e.g. Buoyant Armiger, Welkynar, Dremora, Worm Cult), but my advice is to just have fun while doing the content, don't push yourself onto getting it right away because you'll get frustrated that way...

Take your time and make friends along the way, try trading pages with people who have what you don't, find people who are willing to give you their dropped pages if they don't want it, or if you have the gold you can buy the cheaper from guild traders while you aim for the harder ones...

Also, there's an anniversary event ZOS does where quest dailies drop containers that have rare motifs, you can look forward to that as well, usually happens around april~may with the Jubilee Cake 100% XP.

ezio45 · November 2018

likely a combination of:

- zos rewards are incredibly lame for the most annoying activities

- crown store motifs

- zos's backwards ass idea that making players grind *** endlessly keeps players engaged and gives a reason to do old content when really it would be fine if you just let players play what they wanted, say pvp or trials that are fun, instead of having them grind endlessly in boring dailies that just really burns them out from doing boring repetitive ***

therift · November 2018

Excepting the players who pursue Master Crafting Writs by choice, motifs are purely cosmetic and completely unnecessary to PvP, running Trials, or enjoying any of the content in the game.

If you're burned out from running content to gain motif pages, you did that to yourself all on your own.

MartiniDaniels · November 2018

Honestly saying it's not that much you can get for your gold other then motifs and recipes.. I now run kinda lottery for self amusement - i buy all welkynar pages i see at reasonable price and obtain "random" motif from 10 of them, kinda fun, i can afford 1 motif in 3-4 days of my play (playing 2-3 hours daily).

So if you will make motifs and recipes all cheap and easy, for those who doesn't / can't aim for scores in leaderboard (95% of player base) game will became pointless after several month of playing which is inappropriate for MMORPG.

Rain_Greyraven · November 2018

I have no issues getting the motifs I want.

Maulclaw · November 2018

LordSkyKnight wrote: »

You said it yourself. One of the biggest aspects of MMOs that people love is to customize the look of their character. Anything involving the appearance of your character is going to draw a huge amount of possible revenue for these companies. That's why most of the best looking stuff in this game is found in the cash shop.

Look how the motifs started out. The race books were highly traded when the game went live and it only took one book to look all of the gear pieces. They got dirty and started breaking them up into pages and made them harder to acquire.

Oh and don't you dare giving swtor a pass. Those dirty rats put all the best looking gear right into the gambling boxes.

Everyone loves dressing up their Barbies.

"Gambling Boxes" have been nerfed a while ago. While it's true that some sets are still rather expensive, BW Austin has been doing a lot of direct sales this year, which has decreased the price in credits of many items as a result. I personally don't mind this the way it is, but for 40 euros I could get so much from the store in terms of looks when compared to ESO. I guess I just have to get used to how things work in this game.

I also have no idea if these Motifs can even be sold? For the exception of racial and Halloween ones. And how much do they cost usually?

Rain_Greyraven wrote: »

I have no issues getting the motifs I want.

You could have elaborated more on that, though. Not everyone can sink the same amount of time as other players, or have the same means of income, etc, etc... it's quite internal... but from what I've seen so far, it really seems like ESO really wants players to dedicate an awful amount of time just for one set amongst hundreds of skins.

Maulclaw · November 2018

Eh, seems like people are really taking my thread out of the way and twisting it around. I did not mention about it making the whole collecting motfis incredibly easier; I did not mention anything about a burn our as I'm still relatively new to the game as a whole.

Ugh, just let the thread die then if the topic is so controversial.

therift · November 2018

OP, motif pages are great rewards for running content, which I'm sure you already know.

That content becomes easier as you gain game experience... easier to the point that running vet dungeons is less of a challenge and more just fun.

Some are tied to luck in reward drops, but overall collecting motifs will become easier for you.

In the end, motifs are mostly cosmetic, except for completing crafting writs, and only Master Crafting Writs require a complete collection.

I don't know about other games. From your post it sounds like other games don't incorporate character appearance into game content to the same degree as ESO... but the ESO method works. Motif pages are tradeable, so if you decide to pursue expertise in completing vet dungeons, thos motif pages can be a good source of income.

LiberatorSam · November 2018

Pretty sure it’s a 100% drop rate for hm for those DLC dungeons.

Ohtimbar · November 2018

As others have said, it's a massive soul-crushing time sink designed to stretch a mere ounce of content out over many many months until players succeed or give up and run to the crown store for relief. Such is the exploitative way of eso circa f2p.

Ramber · November 2018

Farming motifs in dngns??? IT TAKES FOREVER that way... its such a huge waste of time. You can do other things to earn gold to buy the motifs a lot faster given the RNG, the time it takes to run the same fricken dngn over and over and over........ and over... and still not get the ones u need.

Itzmichi · November 2018

What's the point of a reward if it's obtained easily? If we go all vanilla in this game eso will be dead at some point boring beyond any reasonable point. Just try to either earn the gold or getting better and earning the pages for real.

Vildebill · November 2018

Agree 100%. Huge time/gold sink that eventually leads to crown store purchases. I don't even bother with dungeon motifs on my crafter, just sell the pages when they drop if I happen to run the dungeon. Far more fun things to do than run the same dungeon for 30 hours :P

Juhasow · November 2018

If You want just motifs then farming gold to buy motifs is faster then farming motifs with pugs.

flguy147ub17_ESO · November 2018

Time sink, ZOS thinks time sinks are Content. Hmmmmm, we arent going to let you search for items on guild stores with a simple search feature so what should take you 2 minutes in Deshaan to search for an item now takes you 30 and if its not in Deshaan go to the next city and spend another 30 minutes going through all the garbage on guild stores you arent looking for.