So, how do the drop rates for Greymoor furnishings seem?

KMarble · July 2020

Bucky_13 wrote: »

KMarble wrote: »

katanagirl1 wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Tigerseye wrote: »

If you leave it too long to buy them, however, that trend can start to reverse and you can occasionally end up having to pay more for them, if you have missed a specific one, than you would have had to earlier.

I guess I'm thinking primarily as a consumer of furnishings plans, not so much as a farmer and seller.

Selling laundered items, motifs, and furnishing plans is my primary source of income, has been for years. But I also learn the first of every new plan I find on my crafter, so any duplicates are pure profit.

I have noticed that the longer plans have been available from the writ voucher lottery, the more valuable green and blue plans become. Because people invest vouchers primarily in purple quality envelopes, and as people move on to newer hunting grounds the lower quality blueprints go unfarmed and become more scarce. For example, blue quality Summerset plans are selling for around twice as much as purples in guild stores.... if you can find them at all.

Since I gave up farming Murkmire plans, even though I have a Khajiit main character that is perfect for all my farming needs, I have been looking to buy the Dragonfruit plan. I have checked guild traders in capital cities for months and no one has it for sale.

I think it is a green plan but I am not sure.

Other green Murkmire plans are still sometimes going for ridiculous prices.

As far as furnishing plans go, Murkmire is the most bizarre zone in the game. For some reason the drop rate for purple plans there is higher (was that way since the beginning IIRC) than that of green ones.

Adding the Murkmire envelopes to the writ vendor, instead of alleviating a problem, made it worse because there was already enough blues and purples on the market and the green ones were harder to find due to fewer people trying to farm the place*.

*And it is a terrible place to farm since there are no locations with a decent amount of lootable containers. Farming in Murkmire means crossing a map that is hard to navigate, full of enemies that camouflage well with the background, with way too few wayshrines, while doing less damage than normal or having to carry a spare set of gear, weapons and jewelry in your inventory to swap between looting a couple of containers and fighting bugs (mosquitoes and the like).

For Murkmire, I did a bunch of farming for green plans. What worked for me was this: Park a few characters in the crafting area in Lilmoth, check all containers there, then relog. Could reliably pull green recipes there when I spent enough time doing it, most chars were level 3-5. No combat or running, just a matter of how long the loading screens between characters took. This was after the blue/purple ones were made available from the master writ vendor. Managed to get all green ones, looted some and bought others.

Thank you for sharing your strategy.

Bucky_13 wrote: »

We're definitely gonna have another Murkmire situation with Greymoor where the green plans will be far more expensive than the blue/purple ones unless ZOS does something about drop rates. Green is far more rare than blue at traders atm.

Those are bad news. I too, noticed that the drop rate for green plans was worse than blue and purple ones in Greymoor, but I was hoping it was just my experience/lack of luck.

Tigerseye · July 2020

Wolf_Eye wrote: »

Tigerseye wrote: »

Well, if you enjoy it, other than the droprate maybe, then it wouldn't be a chore to do it, would it?

I just meant, if someone doesn't enjoy the process, especially if they aren't getting many drops either, it would probably make more sense to do something else to make gold, rather than making themself miserable.

I agree there aren't many plans in the stores (or weren't when I last looked on PC/EU, anyway) and I'm certainly not trying to say they shouldn't put the droprate up.

I'm just saying don't torture yourself doing something (anything), if you view it as a chore.

Ah.... look....Tiger. Putting aside what Katanagirl is saying for a moment.

What I meant to say is, they made this chapter's furnishing plan gathering a complete chore compared to Elsweyr. With Elsweyr, it was much MUCH easier to get at least a few plans just by hunting dragons.

But not Greymoor. With Greymoor, it USED to be easy to get furnishing plans just by going through the Public Dungeon. After the patch? No longer.

My original comment was merely bemoaning the lack of ways you can get new furnishings in a relatively easy way like Elsweyr furnishings.

You tell me I should go and do something else, and I appreciate that you were trying to give me helpful advice, but that wasn't ultimately the point I was making. The point I was making is that they made it hard to get the new furnishing plans and it's disappointing that they did that. The price is only going to go up for them, at least until they release plans in the writ voucher shop, and that's disappointing.

It's OK, I get what you mean.

However, once you have registered your disappointment, here, all you can really do is go and do something else, or carry on doing this regardless if you prefer and then hope they will change it, sooner, or later.

This game constantly disappoints me, one way and another, it has done for years and it normally takes forever for them to change anything, if they ever do.

It's not like a game where they are highly reactive to the community, when it comes to these things and switch direction quickly, when asked, or tweak things all the time.

Not sure why this is the case, but it is.

If green plans are dropping far less frequently and they also did the same in Murkmire, that can't be a mistake, can it?

That has to be a design choice, for some reason.

I have no idea why it would be(?), but it must be.

Either way, getting married to the idea of any aspect, of any one activity, being instantly fixed, or buffed on a dime, is normally a mistake, here.

So, unless it is an activity you enjoy so much you would do it for no profit, at all, if you find you are having really poor results, you have no other choice but to stop, at least temporarily.

If enough people do that, they then might buff it a bit.

Or maybe not, if (for example) they are trying to control where the gold in the economy goes and to whom.

For example, if they are placing plans on the trader themselves, to hoover up excess gold and/or if they are favouring those who tend to buy and/or learn the plans first, in terms of droprate.

As opposed to allowing/enabling certain players - some of whom are not even interested in learning the plans themselves, first - to become super-rich on the backs of the buyers of plans, who do.

Not saying they are doing any of that, necessarily, but they could be - there would be valid reasons (from their perspective) for doing some, or all, of that.

Especially now you can buy Crowns for gold.

Sorry to sound so negative, from your perspective.

Don't shoot the messenger.

Tigerseye · July 2020

Just to give an example of what I am eluding to, above:

Player A is keen furnisher, ESO+ subscriber (for the housing slots, not just the craft bag!) and is an occasional buyer of Crowns, via real money, for furnishing packs and/or the occasional house. They learn every furnishing plan they find, unless it is a duplicate, as they love to craft their own furniture. They have no Radiant Apex mounts, despite having spent plenty of money on the game.

Player B, on the other hand, has zero interest in housing, or furnishing, they do not sub to ESO+ and never buy Crowns via real money. They never learn the furnishing plans they find, or only when they are next to worthless to sell. They own Radiant Apex mounts, because they convert the gold paid to them for furnishing plans, by Player A (and similar players) to Crowns and then buy crates with them.

What financial motivation is there for ZOS to enable Player B, at the expense of Player A?

Especially if Player B then ends up riding around on Radiant Apex Mounts (while Player A does not), due to all the gold they have accrued, even though they have contributed only the original purchase price to the game.

It would make more sense for them to curtail Player B's activities, at least to an extent, by reducing the droprate of plans; either in general, or to players who do not learn and/or buy plans, themselves.

...and then, make up for any shortfall of plans, on traders, by sticking any missing (or overpriced) plans on there, themselves.

Again, not saying they are doing this, but you get my point.

katanagirl1 · July 2020

You know what a chore would be for me? Mindlessly doing 28 toons worth of daily crafting writs. Also, reloggimg multiple toons at one location ad nauseum.

It might work, but that is beyond my limits on loading screens for both. Surely that is not a reasonable method that would be designed into the game to get adequate furnishings plans.

I don’t understand why the drop rates between zones have to vary so dramatically. Why can’t there be some uniformity?

I also realize that I cannot find all the plans in the wild by myself. I find as many as I can, sell duplicates, and buy others I need. Until now.

Perhaps if you don’t farm furnishing plans and instead just buy them for gold, then you have no idea of how plentiful or scarce plans are in various zones, and how difficult they are to find in each. This is a legitimate discussion here.

KMarble · July 2020

Tigerseye wrote: »

Just to give an example of what I am eluding to, above:

Player A is keen furnisher, ESO+ subscriber (for the housing slots, not just the craft bag!) and is an occasional buyer of Crowns, via real money, for furnishing packs and/or the occasional house. They learn every furnishing plan they find, unless it is a duplicate, as they love to craft their own furniture. They have no Radiant Apex mounts, despite having spent plenty of money on the game.

Player B, on the other hand, has zero interest in housing, or furnishing, they do not sub to ESO+ and never buy Crowns via real money. They never learn the furnishing plans they find, or only when they are next to worthless to sell. They own Radiant Apex mounts, because they convert the gold paid to them for furnishing plans, by Player A (and similar players) to Crowns and then buy crates with them.

What financial motivation is there for ZOS to enable Player B, at the expense of Player A?

Especially if Player B then ends up riding around on Radiant Apex Mounts (while Player A does not), due to all the gold they have accrued, even though they have contributed only the original purchase price to the game.

It would make more sense for them to curtail Player B's activities, at least to an extent, by reducing the droprate of plans; either in general, or to players who do not learn and/or buy plans, themselves.

...and then, make up for any shortfall of plans, on traders, by sticking any missing (or overpriced) plans on there, themselves.

Again, not saying they are doing this, but you get my point.

Player B doesn't bother ZOS. They might not spend real currency to acquire what they have other than chapters, but the moment they trade in-game gold for "crowns" they initiated a monetary transaction because there is on other way to acquire crowns than to exchange real currency for them (yes, even if the seller is using crowns they got from ESO+, since the subscription is paid with real life currency).

The reason ZOS allows crown exchanges to happen is that it does generate profit for them. It's a win-win: crown buyers will spend more time in the game farming whatever they do to make in-game gold, sellers will spend real currency to buy crowns, and subscribers have yet another incentive to pay for ESO+.

* I put crowns between quotes because Player B isn't really buying crowns, they're buying virtual objects that can be acquired with crowns - pets, mounts, crown crates etc..

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I think the reason drop rates are so inconsistent between different zones is due to lack of attention to the problem and or lack of time to deal with the problem. For some reason they don't seem to know how to balance it from zone to zone*.

It's possible that the code they use for drop rates became too simplistic as they added more styles, and they have yet to adjust it - as an (theoretic) example: all green plans have the same chance of dropping, but since there are more base game green plans than the expansion, the chance of getting one of the new green plans is lower than getting a base game one. In short, the pool is getting diluted with each new batch of plans.

*Maybe they haven't found a good solution yet. Maybe they think that having the envelopes IS the solution (hint: it is not).

katanagirl1 · July 2020

The envelopes are welcome when the alternative is doing nothing to the drop rate of course.

It’s just a band-aid over the problem, though. If the only furnishing plans in guild traders come almost exclusively from that source, then I see that as a problem - hint: purple Vvardenfell plans I’m still acquiring, and possibly Greymoor plans.

The drop rate *should* be adjusted when the number of available plans drops to zero or some other very low threshold.

At some point, continued farming for the item is pointless and a waste of time. You don’t get XP for opening drawers.

bluebird · July 2020

KMarble wrote: »

I think the reason drop rates are so inconsistent between different zones is due to lack of attention to the problem and or lack of time to deal with the problem.

What really bothers me is that they care enough to nerf things weeks after launch, like they did with Summerset and now Greymoor too. Like, what the heck, ZOS, why? They take drop rates that happened to be 'halfway decent' (let's not pretend that being able to get 1 Purple schematic in 1 hour was some game-breakingly high bugged ratio, loot cooldowns already prevent people from getting purples in a row) and nerf them to 'almost non-existent'.

It's stuff like this that really shows that ZOS don't play their own game. Because not only are the drop rates abysmal, the containers you can get them from are also terribly scarce.

About 30% of doors in Solitude are locked.
The houses that aren't locked are extremely small, with only a few lootable containers (plenty of tables, chairs, trestles, shelves, open baskets, but not many wardrobes, desks, backpacks, nightstands)
You can't even loot the few containers that are there, because some in the instance will always be assigned 'Empty' as per the game's container rules
Additionally, Greymoor has a number of lootable furniture that are not interactable (like, it's clearly a Cabinet on the wall, or clearly a desk, but it's not interactable)
On top of that, all of those in the cities are 'Stealing' containers (worse loot chance than not-owned containers)
And the few not-owned furniture that exist are in Greymoor Keep which turns inaccessible after you complete the quest.
And the one decent instance with decent Urns was nerfed as soon as ZOS discovered it...

If Harrowstorms are supposed to be an alternative way of getting schematics (like Eslweyr), it was a huge miss. The random nature of HS combined with a lack of notification (as opposed to North/South Dragon cycle with Dragon location/engagement/health markers on the map) makes them a terrible system. And even if you do them, the drop rates of Greymoor plans from HS seem lower than Elsweyr plans from Dragons. Plus, you can't just do HS whenever you feel like it, you need a group for it. And the zone is already dead half the time, with basically no chance to find a HS group at non-peak times (all those alive Dragons in Northern Elsweyr, does it sound familiar)?

I strongly doubt ZOS care about micromanaging the plan economy by paying attention to Player A and Player B types and what not. It just seems like they want to make life for players as inconvenient as possible to increase playtime metrics and drive up sales in the ridiculously overpriced Crown Store by nerfing ingame alternatives.

KMarble · July 2020

bluebird wrote: »

Additionally, Greymoor has a number of lootable furniture that are not interactable (like, it's clearly a Cabinet on the wall, or clearly a desk, but it's not interactable)

I agree with you, but wanted to highlight this one point you made.

IIRC, Elsweyr introduced us to non-interactable objects that should be interactable, but at least there it was consistent. If a type of container couldn't be looted, it was that way throughout the zone. But with Greymoor that isn't the case.

When doing Gwendis' quest we can enter the left side of the castle (we can still go in after the quest is done btw) and we find several types of containers. Until you reach the kennels none of the wooden boxes or barrels, for example, can be looted, but you can loot some once you reach the rooms above the kennels.

The living quarters have the same issue. There is a hallway/room with several beds, a few vampires and a vampire lord. Only one of the chests in there can be looted even though there are 2 or 3 that look exactly the same, and one of the wardrobes (on the right side if memory serves) that you cannot interact with.

Don't get me wrong, I love to loot, and entering an area with no lootable containers is sad, but if they're going to make certain types of containers not lootable, at least be consistent.

bluebird · July 2020

KMarble wrote: »

bluebird wrote: »

Additionally, Greymoor has a number of lootable furniture that are not interactable (like, it's clearly a Cabinet on the wall, or clearly a desk, but it's not interactable)

The living quarters have the same issue. There is a hallway/room with several beds, a few vampires and a vampire lord. Only one of the chests in there can be looted even though there are 2 or 3 that look exactly the same, and one of the wardrobes (on the right side if memory serves) that you cannot interact with.

Yep, that's exactly what I noticed too. Especially in Graymoor Keep, but there are a few in Solitude too. I've been desperate enough for Greymoor schematics to rush an alt through Western Skyrim story just so they can access the main Graymoor Keep, and I left Gwendis's side quest unfinished too, so I can go back inside the building. And exactly as you say, it's really infuriating. Desk with some stuff on top of it, lootable. Identical Desk next to it, unlootable. Argh!

I also noticed that strangely, there are some spawned Treasure Chests inside Gwendis' side area inside Graymoor Keep... normally that area is unaccessible to players so it's a weird decision to put Treasure Chests there.

Erissime · August 2020

katanagirl1 wrote: »

bluebird wrote: »

katanagirl1 wrote: »

bluebird wrote: »

katanagirl1 wrote: »

bluebird wrote: »

ApostateHobo wrote: »

katanagirl1 wrote: »

I have opened an urn in a location and not taken it, then abruptly changed my mind, and with no other visible players in the are, the urn suddenly was empty before I could pick it up again.

I don’t believe the ”personal instance” theory anymore.

I have a video on my YouTube channel that shows this at Dreloth Tomb.

Nah containers just kind of empty themselves a little while after you search them. No idea why, but it's been that way as long as I've played the game.

Yeah. I'm also pretty sure that this is normal and was always like this, especially if you open several containers in the same area. It's probably to reduce server load, rather than keeping personal loot data for every player from hundreds of checked containers.

There might also be a timer on them that determines when the container will reset to an Empty state from the moment of opening it (regardless of whether or not you open any new ones in the instance), but it is definitely affected by opening other containers.

When I was powerleveling Legerdemain at the Daggerfall ships, you could literally see this happening live. Look inside Crates or Dressers without looting the item, then keep moving on to some other containers and as you look inside your (around 5th) new containers, the old ones across the room will magically pop their lid/drawers and change into their 'Empty' container state. I liked to pretend that a friendly thieving poltergeist was accompanying me on my heists, and they were happily taking the stuff I left behind, lol.

A simpler explanation is that other players that are not in your instance are farming them.

Other instances can't interact with yours. So simpler? Maybe. But wrong. Try it, really, if you don't believe me

Take 2 friends with you, or even just one into an instance with you. Have them take a look and point out which containers are marked 'Empty' for them from the start. They will be different. You can have a person see all Empty containers while others are looting them afterwards. Then have all 3 of you look inside a same on-empty container and tell each other what's inside. The contents of the container will be different for each of you.

You might each see different things, but I bet as soon as one of you takes what’s in there, the others will see the container as empty. They may be instanced, but they could also be shared. Like nodes, a player with rank 1 in ore will see iron but my character with rank 10 sees rubedite. When someone else farms a node, it vanishes for me.

I don’t really have any people left on my friends list that play at the same time as I do try it out.
I do see other players in my instance interact with containers and I see them as empty afterward as well.

You don't have to bet. I'm telling you. It's a fact. There's no point in guess-work when everything is well-documented, not sure how else to tell you. Containers like Urns, Dressers, Backpacks, Wardrobes, etc. are not shared. They are permanent fixtures in the world that are always there, and their Empty/non-Empty status and their loot are allocated randomly for each player on an individual basis.

Crafting nodes, Treasure Chests, Thieves Troves, Safeboxes and Heavy Sacks in the world are shared, they can be looted by any player, they are competitive. Unlike containers, they aren't permanent fixtures in the world but spawn randomly and may not always be there. They are a completely different type of loot system.

Which server do you play on? Cause you really should have taken all our word for it when we're telling you how it works, but I volunteer to make a char on your server and try it out if you still don't believe it.

Where is this info documented?

I have trouble believing things found on forums when my observations indicate otherwise.

Erissime · August 2020

Once upon a time when I was a noob at this game I was playing with a friend and we were ... sharing loot. That is to say when a bunch of containers would meet us in a delve we would not loot every other one there so to leave it to the other. Some 2 days after we laughed our hearts out upon the realisation of the fact that every such containers are instanced for each player. Not all had same status for both ( empty/full)- and in looting the same container (provided it was not empty for both) we would actually both get a loot - so not shared. And never the same loot. What more documenting this needs ?

MornaBaine · August 2020

For the first chapter I have been truly excited for I've been very disappointed in all things relating to housing and furnishing for it.

LadySinflower · August 2020

I think it really depends on your luck with RNG. Mine is generally terrible, and that has been reflected in my drop rate for solitude and vampiric furnishing plans. IIRC, I have gotten two (new) green, one blue, and one purple plan from all sources combined.

One of my guilds does an event every few months where people get together to offer up furnishing plans and recipes in trade with other guild members. There's one guy who consistently has brand new blue and purple plans in abundance. A large variety of them. He won't share his farming location or his "secret," but nobody can compete with him. That tells me that most people probably have the same bad luck as me, while a select few have phenomenal luck. Just once I'd like to be the person lucky enough to find a single plan I can stick in the trader for 1M gold, but I'm sure it's not meant to be. I want these furnishing plans like I need air and water, but all my farming has produced very little. It's the luck of the draw.