Here’s the other thing about housing that is killing me, competing with all the other players for leads from enchanting nodes and safeboxes in the new zones. We all want that Daedric enchanting table for our homes. Why does it have to be a foot race to be the first to get there? I was lucky and got one fairly quickly, but had to farm that Havocrel boss for several hours for a second lead there, and I can only find a handful of safeboxes or enchanting nodes per hour in the zones. The chance of getting the lead from a handful of containers is not good.

I’m going to use another Elsweyr comparison here, back then I considered joining another trading guild because the one I had was full, but now I only have 6 items in the trader.

Others in my trading guild have said that sales are down. If I had items to sell I might see this too, but without items in the trader I don’t have sales, and without sales I can’t buy from the traders. Seems like this is all strangling the game economy right now.

Also, how long can a player stand to play without getting a lead or furnishing plan? I used to love doing this but getting nothing is causing me to lose interest in even logging in at this point.

Killing you, eh? You don't say...

All hail the all mighty powers of Synchronicity!

See, a wee bit of time back, I was going through my reference libraries for old projects and came across something from 2009... the truly amazing Global Astroliner bit from Amazing Nuts!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-rexyelXOU&list=RDl-rexyelXOU&index=2

Now I can't help but to hear this thing in my head when ever I think of ESO housing. Just replace every "she" with "ZOS" and I think you too will get the drift...

Yeah, housing is kinda grossed out on the greed front, but what can ya do? Plenty of people who don't seem to have any better use for their paper, so them's the breaks.

katanagirl1 wrote: »

I used to love doing this but getting nothing is causing me to lose interest in even logging in at this point.

When the Deadlands dropped I spent a week doing dailies and avoiding the story. I started the quests on the Monday of second week. I was done with all the story quests halfway through my play time on Wednesday. At that point I had found 2 green plans and 0 (ZERO) motif pages.

I'm very, very thorough when first going through a zone. I check and pick up everything in my path. I explore everything I can in the map. 2 green plans. Not even Murkmire was this bad.

It took me 3 weeks to get the first motif page from the dailies coffer. I ran into every portal I could find, fought WBs, stole from every place I could think of every day since the day the DLC dropped. I got 2 - I think - purple plans and maybe 3 motif pages.

Last week I got a plan drop from one of the mobs in a portal. It was an old daedric plan (which I already had and doesn't sell). This week? I didn't log in.

I think that putting the "best" chance for furnishing plans dropping from the last boss in the portals was a bad idea.

Ravensilver wrote: »

Hymzir wrote: »

Killing you, eh? You don't say...
[snip]
Yeah, housing is kinda grossed out on the greed front, but what can ya do? Plenty of people who don't seem to have any better use for their paper, so them's the breaks.

Umm...

I'm sorry, but I don't get your references. What paper? What do you mean with synchronizity? What does the video have to do with housing?
I thought I'm current with the English language, but I seem to be missing something here... ^^;;

Sometimes I can be somewhat abstruse, especially late in the night when I'm tired. More so when I've been working heavily on a project and my mind has started to wander. And having stated that, I realise I am being so again. But it is late, and my mind has started to wander, so apologies for that in advance...

Synchronicity is the phenomena of random events seeming to have a causal connection when they do not. They are just random events that bear a contextual or structural similarity, but are not actually related to one another.

The event in this case was me noticing a thread on a topic that I care about - i.e. ESO housing - with a provocative and striking topic header, and coming across a blast from the past around the same time, that features a similar line in contextual role quite close to the key thing at the heart of this topic.

The mind, wired for pattern recognition, sees this as a meaningful connection and a linked event, even though on a closer inspection, it is clear that it is just a coincidental occurrence of two unrelated topics featuring the same contextual setting.

However, such synchronistic events can be used to gain better insight into the topic at the heart of the matter. It's kinda like making an analogy. You know they are not directly linked, but find it interesting how well they match, structurally speaking that is. Of course, with all analogies one has to keep in mind, that they are just that. Analogies, and all analogies break if you push them far enough.

Which in this case brings me to the clip I posted... Or more accurately the song featured in the clip, and more specifically the lyrics of the song and the topic they deal with. (The Amazing Nuts version just being my personal favourite video of the song in question.)And even though I do not think that the behavioural patterns discussed in the lyrics are the behavioural patterns that dictate how ZOS operates when it comes to housing, I do still find it eery how close they resemble each other.

Hence my point about substituting every "she" in the lyrics with a "ZOS." Thus also the joke about synchronistic events and their powers on our imagination at the start. See, I'm not saying that housing in ESO is based on an instinctual desire to bleed everyone who comes in contact with it for every single penny they got and bring them to their knees in desperation, but... It's a kinda funny how close that mindset seems to describe the way housing works in ESO.

I know, I know. It is a much more complex topic, with market forces, societal behaviour patterns, and consumer culture values all mixed up in a broth that creates this reality. It's not intentional, but the end result is still the same, and ESO housing ends up heavily on the greedy side of things, made purposefully as aggravating as possible to sell convenience.

And there are enough people, who are willing to engage with the system as it is, to keep it trucking as is. Hence my note about people and their paper. Which is slang for money. And another one of those synchronistic things - I don't think it is used all that much any more. But it used to be a much more prevalent word back in the day, and features quite heavily in the dialogue of GTA San Andreas. Which, as you may know, has featured quite heavily in the recent discussions about gaming and the greed of the companies involved in the business.

That's what that was all about. A synchronsitic event, and now I can't stop thinking about ZOS wanting the cream, ZOS needing the cream, and ZOS getting the cream. And how they are killing us, and how I know we will just go along with it, 'cause you know, we will. And that was the point of it all. It sucks, but it is what it is for reasons we can't really do all that much about. It wont change. For all intents and purposes, it is working just as intended and doing fine. And there are lot of people who are willing to participate in it, even though most of us full well know how down right bad the whole deal is. All you can do is accept it as is, or choose not to participate in it. You can also make noise about all the wrongs in the system, and maybe with time get enough people to realise that the "accepted" prices for micro-transactions are ludicrous in the gaming industry as a whole. And that selling convince is just as bad as paying to win. And maybe then thing will change. Maybe.

And in case you were wondering, cream, in this context, is an euphemism for money. Well, wealth really, or ill gotten gains. An all encompassing desire to own all and everything there is. And that is the problem in our system. Corporations do not want to make a profit, they do not want to make money, they want to make all the money. And even then it wont be enough.

But this is getting long enough and is starting to lose it's focus. The initial post was a much more light-hearted take on things. Like a call to laugh at the absurdity of it all. ZOS is not really in the wrong here. Nor are the people willing to engage with the system as it is. All we can do is to take stock of what the system asks and reconsider if we are willing to pay the prise in time, money and effort. And who knows, maybe the future will bring about better systems for this sort of stuff, though am not particularly optimistic on that front. Not with all the craze over NFT's and more and more publishers getting on board the crypto train.

And with that, I think I'll call it a night. Hope it cleared up the references, and if not... Well, no biggie, different people think in different ways. Just chalk it down to a difference in our personalties or something.

This isn't only Blackwood and Deadlands. I've seen dramatic reduction in plan drops in other zones as well, this is reflected by market prices of various DLC blue plans. I used to sell Alinor blues for around 8-10k just a few months ago. Now I can push them for 15-30k. Even some of the base game blues are going up in price, mostly Redguard and Khajiit stuff, textiles. I used to pull at least one blue DLC plan on every routine sweep, now I see almost exclusively base game stuff. It looks like ZOS wants us to buy more master writs and spend more vouchers.

I also have a problem with the system in which every player gets to learn only a few plans and then we're supposed to rely on trading. It's deeply flawed because:

• Guild traders are expensive to fund and offer only 30 slots. There are thousands of possible furnishings, so we have to both anticipate the hot sellers and avoid selling things that are oversupplied by other players. Market research is time consuming.
• Nobody wants to have to travel to every little odd trader or outlaw refuge to pick up only single elements of a larger build they have in mind.
• It's difficult to find crafters who can make specific furnishings. Zone chat makes it very unlikely to find such crafters because there are too many zones, each with multiple instances.
• The guild finder is awful when it comes to finding guilds devoted to niche activities like fishing or housing. Many guilds abuse the tag system by slapping on all possible tags.
• The chatbox itself isn't suited for up to 500 people posting crafting requests. Neither is any 3rd party chat service.

There really needs to be a player-made crafting writ system. Community boards where we can post crafting orders at a small fee (gold sink right here) and either pay for the materials or deliver them upfront. It can be secured against scammers who would take the mats/gold and then abandon the tasks. Payment would simply remain in deposit until crafter delivers the products or until the writ expires. As an incentive, player-made writs could award a single voucher each (like charity writs), up to some daily or weekly limit to prevent abuse.