Crafting Surveys: They are not fun and feel like a chore. Suggestions

Araneae6537 · September 2021

Some days I’m in the mood to collect surveys — no difficult fights nor need to think — it can be relaxing. Sometimes I combine it with collecting antiquities or doing some other things in zone and maybe I will join in a dolmen or boss fight. You don’t have to do but don’t take them away from everyone else! They reward more precisely because they do take more time on your part. If there was a way they could be done for you, they would not reward as much material I’m sure.

SilverBride · September 2021

Surveys count toward endeavors that ask players to harvest resources. Just another reason I enjoy them.

LadySinflower · October 2021

Best suggestions here to ease the pain a bit:

1. Make the entire stack of one survey harvestable at once.
2. Like the new thing they are doing with skyshards, if you have a survey in your inventory put an icon on the map/compass when you are close to the location.
3. Allow them to be traded so people who just do not want to do them can put them in the guild trader.

I happen to enjoy doing surveys and don't get many because I'm only doing writs on one character. But maybe improvements like these would help people who hate them to hate them less (or even like them).

joerginger · October 2021

LadySinflower wrote: »

Best suggestions here to ease the pain a bit:

1. Make the entire stack of one survey harvestable at once.

This. I also suggested this before. It's the one QoL improvement I'm really hoping for.
The riding to and fro or reloading the node by either porting to an unowned house or logging out and then logging in again just take up way too much time.

I wouldn't really mind the surveys, but now I have more than two years' worth of surveys with some stacks going into the 90s, so it's very unlikely I can possibly live long enough to get all the surveys.

Taggund · October 2021

Anything to make the process less of a chore would be nice. I was initially doing them weekly, then i stopped doing the alchemy and enchanting ones to save time as I did not really need them (and enchanting was really poor return for time spent).

Now as I've cut back time in game, I've stopped all. It really came down to not wanting to take several hours of a day just to do surveys. It helps that my gold needs are also cut back, so I can bypass doing them and just rely on the material received doing the writs.

ANewHand · October 2021

It's so frustrating to lose time doing surveys that I could've spend doing a more enjoying things, like decorating my empty houses.

The worst part is running around for the survey to respawn though, especially because it's not the same for every survey. Some of them you can run behind a rock next to it and it's back up, others you might ride your mount for a while in a straight line and it still hasn't respawned.

Why not make all surveys in a stack harvestable at once? We've already done the work of traveling to the survey location, everything else is really just pointless drudgery.

ZOS has been delivering fantastic QoL improvements lately, let's pray we get one for surveys 🙏

NoizeTrauma · November 2021

SilverBride wrote: »

Surveys count toward endeavors that ask players to harvest resources. Just another reason I enjoy them.

This has never occurred to me. Whatever the daily endeavor asks you to harvest, find the survey stack that you have the most of for that mat and do that one as many times as you have in your stack.

Great idea. I don't have as many as some, but I easy have over 100 surveys from various areas and this is a good way to get through them without having to dedicate a huge amount of time to it.

Thanks.

LadyDestiny · December 2021

I just wait till I have a nice large stack of them and then have a survey day. It's nice coming back to decon and getting all those golds.

ewo5 · December 2021

A lot of great ideas on this thread. Mostly to bring the addon advantages to console. I would love a icon on the map for surveys that have been located. Just a colored dot on the map would be enough as long as they were different colors for each type. Getting all of them for that one location in one pass would be amazing or a countdown of how many are left as long as you did not have to go far to reset it.

Jaimeh · December 2021

I think they are supposed to be a chore, another part of a grind in a MMO, and tbf you only need to do them if you do a lot of writs and need to supplement your own mats, which then of course creates more surveys. If you do it to sell mats for profit then there should be an effort, though I agree the process could be a little more fun. They could make it easier by adding a crafting skill line in companions that offered gathering of x amount of surveys in your stead every week, for example.

Necrotech_Master · January 2022

i dont mind surveys, to me they are a lot better than normal treasure maps (i only do treasure maps in areas im trying to complete antiquity codex entries)

i absolutely dislike the normal crafting writs though, feels like a huge waste of mats and time, i would rather just go mat harvesting myself or solo a dungeon than do normal writs (i dont mind master writs though because they do have something i value which is writ vouchers)

the only time i even bother with normal writs now is to complete endeavors (craft X item for a particular crafting skill line)