Is the cost of furnishings too much of a barrier?

Zypheran · June 2019

So I love housing in this game. I think they really got the balance right between how easy the system is to use and the level of creativity that is possible. I would love to see more functionality (NPC's, costume display, rested bonuses etc) but even as it is at the moment I think it is one of the best housing systems I've seen.
BUT... I don't get to use it that much! I design and build many, many houses but almost always on the PTS. I simply couldn't afford the pricing to do it on live. Furnishing recipes are rare and thus very expensive to buy in game. The amount of raw materials required to craft everything for a 700 item house would be astounding. So if I were to buy and furnish a house in game, it would cost me millions of gold and take months to farm all of the raw materials.
To be honest, I like the idea of using the crown store but oh my dear blessed deity... the cost is just astronomical!! Lets say you furnish a 700 item house from the CS. The average item price is around 150 crowns (very conservatively). For 700 items that would easily cost you over 100,000 crowns. I've decorated many houses and I've done a quick sum of the cost if I had done it on live and the cost is always around 100K to 150k crowns. And this is just for ONE house!!
Based on the current crown/euro conversion rate (1000 crowns = €6), using the crown store to furnish a 700 item house would cost anywhere from 500 to 1000 euro! This is IN ADDITION to the 60-80 euro it would have cost you to buy the house in the first place.
Now, I'm not opposed to putting money into this game. I spend a good amount of money on crowns, DLC and ESO+ every year but come on, this surely has to be objectively, ridiculously overpriced by any standard or perspective!?
I really think that a fully furnished house should be possible on the crown store for the same price as the house. ZOS really should consider a MASSIVE cut to furnishing prices on the crown store. I see the recent furniture sale prices but taking 20% off a random category isn't really going to address the issue when the current pricing so unrealistic.
My worry isn't really about me and my enjoyment, to be honest I'm happy to stick to building and designing on the PTS but I think that the price is so high that it acts as a barrier to a huge percentage of the player base from wanting to engage with housing. And this concerns me because if a section of the game is under used it will probably not be given much resources. In truth, it could be argued that that situation exists already with housing.
It believe it would encourage a far higher proportion of the player base to engage with housing if the financial barriers were dramatically reduced. Some options would be;
- Huge reduction in CS furniture costs
- Increased drop rates for furniture plans and the associated furniture materials
- Reduction in the amount of mats required to craft items
- Keep the existing CS prices but allow the item purchased to used over and over again in any of your houses
- Introduce a flat CS fee for decorating your home e.g. decorate your home with any 700 items for X,000 crowns. (just not 100K!)
I really would love to see housing become more accessible and I actually believe it would result in more money for ZOS in the end as more people spending reasonable crown amounts would surely be better than a very small few spending large amounts.
What are your thoughts?

Imryll · June 2019

For me part of the fun is decorating with items i can make--or have filched from a house I bought furnished. My EU character and my NA main have found different patterns so their homes will necessarily look different. For me decorating is a really slow process, but I like it that way. I've yet to buy a pattern or piece of furniture from a guild store, so player pricing is irrelevant. I also prefer simpler decor so that helps.

NotaDaedraWorshipper · June 2019

Something that bothers me quite a bit, is how expensive the achievment furniture is!
Furniture that is purely decorative, in my decorative house, which I have unlocked from an achievment. Yet they often cost thousands of gold. Some at such ridiculous prices as 100,000 gold!

dodgehopper_ESO · June 2019

I do agree that the pricing for housing items strikes me as particularly greedy. There is no other way to put it. It is even worse because it effects nothing in the game and if it did that would be seen as pay to win and drive a lot of people out and completely sour the community (It would become an Asian grindfest style game). I take my time building the interiors on homes. Most of them are just partially done and I just slowly plop items in. It will take years at the rate I'm going and I do not care. I'd rather have good gear and weapons and potions and food than have a nice redguard bed and fancy curtains.

Tigerseye · June 2019

Crown Store furnishings are way too expensive.

I think they are priced like that with the idea that new players will buy a couple, before figuring out what they can get ingame, or a player might impulse buy something, if they either can't find it at all, or can't find it at a reasonable price

Then, of course, there are a few Crown store only things, like some paintings, rugs and plants, which you might buy a couple of, from time to time.

I don't think they really price them with the idea that many people will decorate an entire house that way.

However, I agree that they should be cheaper.

I think more people would buy more stuff (especially the Crown store-only stuff), if they were.

What I do myself, is to not even try to seriously decorate a large house (on live) more than about once every 5 months.

I can still run out of furnishing mats, even then.

In a way, it's a good thing, as I spend a lot of time decorating a large house and it's good to have a break in between, to do other things and maybe just do an inn room, or something, until I'm ready for a big project, again.

rsantijw13 · June 2019

Daily crafting quests on 10+ characters would be around and hour total and a few mil each month. Try that and never worry about gold again

HanzeeBokeem · June 2019

Greetings @Zypheran ... It's an expensive hobby for sure but doing the daily crafting writs is a great way to make gold as has been pointed out.

I would also like to see the luxury furniture vendor bring a furnishing plan with him once a week.

TheImperfect · June 2019

I spend most of my time making gold to buy furniture.

cyberjanet · June 2019

For me the housing was completely ruined by the prohibitive costs. Furniture is made of staple materials in the real world, not the most rare and costly. The drop rate for furnishing patterns/blueprints whatever they are called, is pathetic. I moaned about it at great length when they launched it, nothing was changed, so other than the guild hall, I haven't done much with furnishing.

ghastley · June 2019

I don't spend on anything but a few plans that don't want to drop (and buy those only when I want to make several of something). I treat the slow rate of accumulation of the special furnishing mats (Heartwood, Bast, Regulus tec.) as a regulator on my activities, so I don't fill all my houses in ten minutes and get bored. I currently have at least three that are completely empty, and most are awaiting some specific item I can't make yet.

My only criticisms of the sub-game are how slowly you can get started. I'd like to see a full entry set of furnishings (bed, chair, table, rug, ...) that you could make as soon as you can buy/rent a room. Then have the upgrades later. And another is the choice to make some items crown-only. That makes them a real expense, rather than just a gold sink for the in-game currency which represents time spent playing. Having ESO+ means that a few crowns aren't begrudged, but the furnishings do compete with costumes, mounts etc.

kaisernick · June 2019

NotaDaedraWorshipper wrote: »

Something that bothers me quite a bit, is how expensive the achievment furniture is!
Furniture that is purely decorative, in my decorative house, which I have unlocked from an achievment. Yet they often cost thousands of gold. Some at such ridiculous prices as 100,000 gold!

YES THANK YOU
i despise how some simple furniture is so expensive i mean some takes ages to unlock anyway yet i then have to spend more time grinding the dame gold.

bluebird · June 2019

Yes, agree with others! Furnishing costs can really ramp up to insane proportions.

It's not particularly hard to furnish a house, but it's hard to furnish it well and to furnish it the way you'd like to. Sure there are cheap pieces and relatively easy to get schematics and easy to craft styles, but when somebody gets into the nitty-gritty details (and doesn't want to fill their castle with Rough Stools and other ratched items), housing has a huge wealth treshhold to truly enjoy completely.

For starters housing practically requires you to be an ESO+ sub. For no reason than to inflict restictions than ensure that the only way to get the most bang for your buck is to pay even more. Purchased a 15k crown house? Enjoy 350 slots or pay us an extra 15 dollars per month just to have the option to place furniture, nevermind actually purchasing the furniture! And the 1650c stipend you get for a month of sub will get you 3/4s of one Redguard Fountain (2200c). Lol.
Aaand that's the next issue. Crown-exclusive furniture. I'd have no problem with crown furniture prices if they existed to incentivise gameplay by making crafting a more worthwile activity. But it seems the other way to me. They make crafting furniture and getting schematics harder (especially those rare blueprints that have like one copy listed across all traders for an insane price) so that purchasing crown furniture is more appealing. And then they hit us with the insane prices on the furniture. 1800 crowns for one padded Breton chair that's slightly larger than the other padded Breton chairs? What? (It's the Breton Throne obviously and at least it's craftable, but it's nuts! You can buy an entire house Humblemud for 2.2k!)
And then there are the crown-exclusive furniture. Which is just mean. Really. At least in Summerset we could craft two of the three statues (Orator&Kinlord) with one (Kinlady) being an achievement furnishing. In Elsweyr though, we get one achi statue (Tojay-Raht) and 4 crown exclusives (Tojay, Ohmes-Raht, Cathay-Raht, Suthey) all from crown-exclusive furniture packs!!! This is made worse by the schematic drops - getting purple CWC recipes is already harder since we can't get them with writ envelopes like Morrowind ones - but even then some of the best items are Crowns only. The Clockwork Chandelier is one of the few warm-gold-light lamps that has a good range of illumination, and the Brotherhood Brazer also burns more brightly than most craftable braziers, and they are all crown-exclusive. Whyyy!!!
This ties into the pattern of crown furniture existing to 'fix' problems that don't need to exist in the first place. I can get crown exclusive lamps to light up my giant dark room, but why are rooms designed as giant and dark in the first place, and why don't normal furniture have a decent range of illumination?
Limited time crown exclusive homes are a deterrent too. Allowing people to purchase items whenever they want (preferably at a reduced price instead of the insane 18,800c that Grand Topal goes for) would not only dispel a lot of player frustration with LTOs but also help ZOS since players could act on their impulse purchases - if you offer a house once a year for three days, chances are most people's whim to buy it has already passed. (I have to give some credit here, Hall of the Lunar Champion was a move in the right direction. Hope we see more gold-purchasable and gameplay-aquirable houses.)
And just for the sake of being fair, I also have to mention the furniture discounts they started doing, which is another step in the right direction. While the default prices are already too high (and in some cases absolutely insane and extortionate) seeing them discount some categories for a couple of weeks (it was all Courtyard items by 30% a while ago iirc, and now I think it's all Gallery items by 25%) is nice, and I hope this will be regular now so people can actually entertain purchasing some items (I wouldn't ever spend that many crowns on several furniture, but might if they were half price).
And yes, I agree that achievement furniture (and some luxury furniture) are ridiculously expensive. Especially in many cases where there are almost exact copies of them at the regular zone furniture vendor for a fraction of the price.

Anyway, long way of saying that I agree with you all, and I wish I could upvote comments several times

Tigerseye · June 2019

bluebird wrote: »

Yes, agree with others! Furnishing costs can really ramp up to insane proportions.

It's not particularly hard to furnish a house, but it's hard to furnish it well and to furnish it the way you'd like to. Sure there are cheap pieces and relatively easy to get schematics and easy to craft styles, but when somebody gets into the nitty-gritty details (and doesn't want to fill their castle with Rough Stools and other ratched items), housing has a huge wealth treshhold to truly enjoy completely.
For starters housing practically requires you to be an ESO+ sub. For no reason than to inflict restictions than ensure that the only way to get the most bang for your buck is to pay even more. Purchased a 15k crown house? Enjoy 350 slots or pay us an extra 15 dollars per month just to have the option to place furniture, nevermind actually purchasing the furniture! And the 1650c stipend you get for a month of sub will get you 3/4s of one Redguard Fountain (2200c). Lol.

Aaand that's the next issue. Crown-exclusive furniture. I'd have no problem with crown furniture prices if they existed to incentivise gameplay by making crafting a more worthwile activity. But it seems the other way to me. They make crafting furniture and getting schematics harder (especially those rare blueprints that have like one copy listed across all traders for an insane price) so that purchasing crown furniture is more appealing. And then they hit us with the insane prices on the furniture. 1800 crowns for one padded Breton chair that's slightly larger than the other padded Breton chairs? What? (It's the Breton Throne obviously and at least it's craftable, but it's nuts! You can buy an entire house Humblemud for 2.2k!)

And then there are the crown-exclusive furniture. Which is just mean. Really. At least in Summerset we could craft two of the three statues (Orator&Kinlord) with one (Kinlady) being an achievement furnishing. In Elsweyr though, we get one achi statue (Tojay-Raht) and 4 crown exclusives (Tojay, Ohmes-Raht, Cathay-Raht, Suthey) all from crown-exclusive furniture packs!!! This is made worse by the schematic drops - getting purple CWC recipes is already harder since we can't get them with writ envelopes like Morrowind ones - but even then some of the best items are Crowns only. The Clockwork Chandelier is one of the few warm-gold-light lamps that has a good range of illumination, and the Brotherhood Brazer also burns more brightly than most craftable braziers, and they are all crown-exclusive. Whyyy!!!

This ties into the pattern of crown furniture existing to 'fix' problems that don't need to exist in the first place. I can get crown exclusive lamps to light up my giant dark room, but why are rooms designed as giant and dark in the first place, and why don't normal furniture have a decent range of illumination?

Limited time crown exclusive homes are a deterrent too. Allowing people to purchase items whenever they want (preferably at a reduced price instead of the insane 18,800c that Grand Topal goes for) would not only dispel a lot of player frustration with LTOs but also help ZOS since players could act on their impulse purchases - if you offer a house once a year for three days, chances are most people's whim to buy it has already passed. (I have to give some credit here, Hall of the Lunar Champion was a move in the right direction. Hope we see more gold-purchasable and gameplay-aquirable houses.)

And just for the sake of being fair, I also have to mention the furniture discounts they started doing, which is another step in the right direction. While the default prices are already too high (and in some cases absolutely insane and extortionate) seeing them discount some categories for a couple of weeks (it was all Courtyard items by 30% a while ago iirc, and now I think it's all Gallery items by 25%) is nice, and I hope this will be regular now so people can actually entertain purchasing some items (I wouldn't ever spend that many crowns on several furniture, but might if they were half price).

And yes, I agree that achievement furniture (and some luxury furniture) are ridiculously expensive. Especially in many cases where there are almost exact copies of them at the regular zone furniture vendor for a fraction of the price.

Anyway, long way of saying that I agree with you all, and I wish I could upvote comments several times

On the whole I totally agree with you.

To be fair, Topal was available for less than that, recently and there was also a Crown sale on, at the same time, so it worked out to be quite a reasonable discount.

That is when I bought it.

Nebthet78 · June 2019

bluebird wrote: »

Yes, agree with others! Furnishing costs can really ramp up to insane proportions.

It's not particularly hard to furnish a house, but it's hard to furnish it well and to furnish it the way you'd like to. Sure there are cheap pieces and relatively easy to get schematics and easy to craft styles, but when somebody gets into the nitty-gritty details (and doesn't want to fill their castle with Rough Stools and other ratched items), housing has a huge wealth treshhold to truly enjoy completely.
For starters housing practically requires you to be an ESO+ sub. For no reason than to inflict restictions than ensure that the only way to get the most bang for your buck is to pay even more. Purchased a 15k crown house? Enjoy 350 slots or pay us an extra 15 dollars per month just to have the option to place furniture, nevermind actually purchasing the furniture! And the 1650c stipend you get for a month of sub will get you 3/4s of one Redguard Fountain (2200c). Lol.

Aaand that's the next issue. Crown-exclusive furniture. I'd have no problem with crown furniture prices if they existed to incentivise gameplay by making crafting a more worthwile activity. But it seems the other way to me. They make crafting furniture and getting schematics harder (especially those rare blueprints that have like one copy listed across all traders for an insane price) so that purchasing crown furniture is more appealing. And then they hit us with the insane prices on the furniture. 1800 crowns for one padded Breton chair that's slightly larger than the other padded Breton chairs? What? (It's the Breton Throne obviously and at least it's craftable, but it's nuts! You can buy an entire house Humblemud for 2.2k!)

And then there are the crown-exclusive furniture. Which is just mean. Really. At least in Summerset we could craft two of the three statues (Orator&Kinlord) with one (Kinlady) being an achievement furnishing. In Elsweyr though, we get one achi statue (Tojay-Raht) and 4 crown exclusives (Tojay, Ohmes-Raht, Cathay-Raht, Suthey) all from crown-exclusive furniture packs!!! This is made worse by the schematic drops - getting purple CWC recipes is already harder since we can't get them with writ envelopes like Morrowind ones - but even then some of the best items are Crowns only. The Clockwork Chandelier is one of the few warm-gold-light lamps that has a good range of illumination, and the Brotherhood Brazer also burns more brightly than most craftable braziers, and they are all crown-exclusive. Whyyy!!!

This ties into the pattern of crown furniture existing to 'fix' problems that don't need to exist in the first place. I can get crown exclusive lamps to light up my giant dark room, but why are rooms designed as giant and dark in the first place, and why don't normal furniture have a decent range of illumination?

Limited time crown exclusive homes are a deterrent too. Allowing people to purchase items whenever they want (preferably at a reduced price instead of the insane 18,800c that Grand Topal goes for) would not only dispel a lot of player frustration with LTOs but also help ZOS since players could act on their impulse purchases - if you offer a house once a year for three days, chances are most people's whim to buy it has already passed. (I have to give some credit here, Hall of the Lunar Champion was a move in the right direction. Hope we see more gold-purchasable and gameplay-aquirable houses.)

And just for the sake of being fair, I also have to mention the furniture discounts they started doing, which is another step in the right direction. While the default prices are already too high (and in some cases absolutely insane and extortionate) seeing them discount some categories for a couple of weeks (it was all Courtyard items by 30% a while ago iirc, and now I think it's all Gallery items by 25%) is nice, and I hope this will be regular now so people can actually entertain purchasing some items (I wouldn't ever spend that many crowns on several furniture, but might if they were half price).

And yes, I agree that achievement furniture (and some luxury furniture) are ridiculously expensive. Especially in many cases where there are almost exact copies of them at the regular zone furniture vendor for a fraction of the price.

Anyway, long way of saying that I agree with you all, and I wish I could upvote comments several times

I completely agree with you bluebird. They need to permanently reduce the prices on all Housing items in the Crown Store by 50%. Then they also need to up the drop rate on Blue and Purple recipes in the overland, and change it so the DLC zones ONLY drop the housing recipes for THAT DLC!

During the Early Access for Elsweyr, the drop rates of Purple recipes was really good. I would get one a day.. But they ninja nerfed that when it went to live so now I only get 1 purple recipe per week and it is a chance of a purple from all zones. This isn't right at all.

They really need to overhaul this system.. Make it easier for us to get what we want without paying through the nose for it.

A luxury furniture vendor who is there permanently with past offerings at discounted rates should be added, while the regular guy can come in on a weekly basis with exciting new offerings, including purple recipes.

Then the Master Crafting vendor needs to also be updated with more offerings of furniture recipes from Summerset, Morrowind, and Murkmire. In addition to bringing gold items from Elsweyr. Hopefully they update them in the second half of the year with Southern Elsweyr's release.