Hey ZoS please fix the furnishing problem

DarthCuddlefluff · April 2022

So no doubt the people here of all places have noticed the ever-increasing prices for mundanes, regulus, heartwood and other crafting mats on top of the plans that seem to just have a large recipe price of these for no real reason on top of the seemingly out-of-nowhere cost increase of these items for new recipes ON TOP OF the fact that every update the prices go up like clockwork and I just wanted to pose a simple solution. Sell them for 50 a pop at vendors. Mundanes at the enchanting vendor, Heartwood at the woodworking vendor and so on. Now I know what some of you are thinking. That will crash the market, right? Well, actually, yes. As it should. I don't care about people getting millions for stuff they don't use, I care about housing.

seecodenotgames · April 2022

Furnishing mats like mundane runes will now be available via the new card game. Not sure how many will play this game but hopefully enough will be generated casually that it should make them a little more available.

DarthCuddlefluff · April 2022

seecodenotgames wrote: »

Furnishing mats like mundane runes will now be available via the new card game. Not sure how many will play this game but hopefully enough will be generated casually that it should make them a little more available.

I hope so. Personally I get a stack every 10 or so hours of farming and that is just not even close to enough to sustain my needs. I would even accept like a guaranteed drop rate of the things. At least then I can get an average of at least 1-2 per node.

everseeing_njpreub18_ESO · April 2022

Legit question.

I assume if you need so many you use them to make furniture to sell? Wouldn't making them available so cheap also crash the furniture market as no one will by a chair for 50k if the mats are now only 200g, making it less viable and causing many crafters to move on to other things to make money and thereby making furniture harder to get?

DarthCuddlefluff · April 2022

everseeing_njpreub18_ESO wrote: »

Legit question.

I assume if you need so many you use them to make furniture to sell? Wouldn't making them available so cheap also crash the furniture market as no one will by a chair for 50k if the mats are now only 200g, making it less viable and causing many crafters to move on to other things to make money and thereby making furniture harder to get?

No I don't need furniture to sell. I work on housing because I am passionate for it. In fact the opposite is true because with higher costs to do housing I could probably charge a lot more for doing people's houses. As it stands I charge a minimum negotiated with the person. I have been told that it's too low and been given more in the past. And as it stands furniture being expensive isn't going to deter that market anyway. There were furniture crafters who do it for profit back when mundanes were 50 each and heartwood was less. There are also a ton of people who do it for free, like me. I make anything I can provided the materials. I include it in my guild notes.

kaisernick · April 2022

everseeing_njpreub18_ESO wrote: »

Legit question.

I assume if you need so many you use them to make furniture to sell? Wouldn't making them available so cheap also crash the furniture market as no one will by a chair for 50k if the mats are now only 200g, making it less viable and causing many crafters to move on to other things to make money and thereby making furniture harder to get?

you will find many will make items for their collection of homes
i will only sel item if i have no more need and are desprete for cash

Lugaldu · April 2022

seecodenotgames wrote: »

Furnishing mats like mundane runes will now be available via the new card game.

I'm afraid this will also be a grind, probably you have to play 10 rounds before you win once and then get a single mundane rune (I hope it won't be that way though)....

Inaya · April 2022

Not sure why they don't let us craft things like mundane runes at the enchanting station? Or upgrade wood to heartwood at the WW station? Make a daily limit so it doesn't have a huge effect on the economy. Hell, even make a crafting questine to improve a skill to enable us to craft it.

Mascen · April 2022

everseeing_njpreub18_ESO wrote: »

Legit question.

I assume if you need so many you use them to make furniture to sell? Wouldn't making them available so cheap also crash the furniture market as no one will by a chair for 50k if the mats are now only 200g, making it less viable and causing many crafters to move on to other things to make money and thereby making furniture harder to get?

Not really. IME what drives the price of guild trader sold furnishings is the rarity of the blueprint and what the furnishing is more than the mat cost. Its why nobody cares about Wood Elf furnishings while everyone went bonkers for the Fargrave floating crystals.

DarthCuddlefluff · April 2022

Inaya wrote: »

Not sure why they don't let us craft things like mundane runes at the enchanting station? Or upgrade wood to heartwood at the WW station? Make a daily limit so it doesn't have a huge effect on the economy. Hell, even make a crafting questine to improve a skill to enable us to craft it.

God I would love that. Don't even do the daily limit.

SilverBride · April 2022

seecodenotgames wrote: »

Furnishing mats like mundane runes will now be available via the new card game.

Well that leaves me out.

chrisfeng · April 2022

It's part of the game economy. There is no reason of anything to be at the price they are at beside supply and demand.

If its too expensive for you, just farm them, with some craft tree CP, it isn't really hard.

DarthCuddlefluff · April 2022

chrisfeng wrote: »

It's part of the game economy. There is no reason of anything to be at the price they are at beside supply and demand.

If its too expensive for you, just farm them, with some craft tree CP, it isn't really hard.

"Just farm them" doesn't work for people who do housing as their primary content or people for whom housing is a way to make money. You can end up using 6k of each type of furnishing crafting mat especially with new houses. And that's like 20 mil on the cheap if you have contacts. If you already spent $100.00 irl on the house there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to meaningfully furnish it.

kind_hero · April 2022

chrisfeng wrote: »

It's part of the game economy. There is no reason of anything to be at the price they are at beside supply and demand.

If its too expensive for you, just farm them, with some craft tree CP, it isn't really hard.

If this is your "get good" comment, let me remind you there is no skill or real challenge involved in gathering mats. It's just a time sink that is not fun at all, compared to other time sinks in the game that are enjoyable to a degree. Farming mundane runes or heartwood is not one of them. It takes many hours to get just a fraction of the mats required for a housing project. For a temple I built, where I used a lot of structural furnishings (praxis), I used about 1k mundane runes. Culanda laquer was in the hundreds as well.

The crafting economy wasn't designed to handle so many recipes. Right now there are hundreds more than years ago, and from my experience, runes or other such mats are hard to get as they were in Summerset. I have many unfinished houses because I prefer to do something else with my time, rather than spend hours to get a few mats. I am just not playing ESO as much anymore, and this is one of the reasons.

Things got worse with the Blackwood chapter, including Fargrave. Style materials cost a lot of gold, those mimic style stones can't be used for furnishings, and thus traders abuse the market using these items. An ivory brigade clasp is around 5k. Stones for the Fargrave furnishings are 2k or more, but for those you need like 16 or more for a piece. This is a big issue. To get those stones one needs to do Craglorn content. Well, how much Craglorn do I need to farm to get 16 stones for one item? All this is super imbalanced towards the housing crafter, because we want to focus on crafting, not on grinding. Of course, I do not mind a bit of grinding, dailies, and so on. But this is totally ridiculous, and the way it is designed looks like a big neon sign to the crowns shop.

Solutions:
- increase the drop rate,
- make the furnishing mats drop from surveys, and make surveys tradeable
- have runes, heartwood, regulus, etc, drop from deconstructing gear
- allow deconstructing of furnishings (this way I can buy cheap furnishings and salvage them for mats, or I can do this with stuff that I don't need)
- getting such mats through refining at the crafting station, or creating them from other mats (very good idea @Inaya )
- have furnishing mats drop from bonus crates we get from dailies, like let me chose between a bag of gear or a bag of mats (a crafter would pick mats not weapons)
- put runes and such in heavy sacks and treasure chests. Getting 20 mundane runes from a treasure chest would be a find!
- allow using mimic stones for crafting furnishings. Right now, with so many outfits and costumes, the mimic stones are almost of no use
- add a furnishings mats survey, like salvaging a broken cart in the world, or a ruin, etc
- simply decrease the amount of these special mats required to build a furnishing, including style materials!

chrisfeng · April 2022

I don't think people who routinely need 6k mundane rune or heartwood are representative of the majority game population. Most people don't own loads of manors and fill each to 700/700.

With that being said, I got no problem with more sources and better drop rates.

zetavivern · April 2022

This is a real issue. Just a year ago heartwood used to sell for 400g, now it's over 1000g. In one year. Did the players start making 2.5 times more gold to accomodate the inflation? I don't think so. The player-driven economics used to work fine when the Housing just launched, but we got dozens of houses and hundreds of recipes since then, the Housing has become an endgame content for many players, yet the rate at which those resources are generated hasn't grown much. Player-driven economics in general is a very hard thing to manage, and inflation is almost inevitable, but it can be mitigated or compensated for.
There are many good suggestions in this thread on how to solve the issue. Personally I think that at the very least the drop rate of furnishing mats should be doubled, they should be dropped from surveys, and maybe they should be available for purchase from NPCs for gold (not for alliance points or any other currency, because that will just create more problems with those currencies). I also doubt that the mats' drop rate from the card game is going to be anywhere near sufficient with all the other possible rewards in the pool.

DarthCuddlefluff · May 2022

zetavivern wrote: »

This is a real issue. Just a year ago heartwood used to sell for 400g, now it's over 1000g. In one year. Did the players start making 2.5 times more gold to accomodate the inflation? I don't think so. The player-driven economics used to work fine when the Housing just launched, but we got dozens of houses and hundreds of recipes since then, the Housing has become an endgame content for many players, yet the rate at which those resources are generated hasn't grown much. Player-driven economics in general is a very hard thing to manage, and inflation is almost inevitable, but it can be mitigated or compensated for.
There are many good suggestions in this thread on how to solve the issue. Personally I think that at the very least the drop rate of furnishing mats should be doubled, they should be dropped from surveys, and maybe they should be available for purchase from NPCs for gold (not for alliance points or any other currency, because that will just create more problems with those currencies). I also doubt that the mats' drop rate from the card game is going to be anywhere near sufficient with all the other possible rewards in the pool.

I am glad to see that people actually agree with me. I was really kinda preparing for the worst when I posted this. Let's just say that people end up calling me a lot of things I am not to keep politics out of it. It's sickening.

redspecter23 · May 2022

[snip] They set the drop rate on materials and also set the amounts needed. They are the supply and the demand to a certain extent. Do furnishings really need to have a 15 Mundane Rune requirement? Remember that a real, actual person decided on that number and there is a reason for it. If we knew the reason, we probably wouldn't be too happy. These recipes could require 1 or 2 Mundane runes each and a conscious decision is being made to have them require a very certain amount. They aren't using dart board math here. They are doing this intentionally.

It would be nice if these mats were sold at a vendor for 50g each. Really at that point, they could just remove the need for them altogether and it would be about the same. However, either of these situations are in direct conflict with my previous point. [snip] That is the core issue and the problem that needs to be solved first. Figure out why ZOS wants it to be so difficult to craft furnishings in large quantities. Why do they want a bottleneck due to certain materials like Mundane Runes? Go directly to the "fun police" and look for your answers. It would be great to have some transparency on why they feel the need to make this system overly expensive and/or time consuming.

[edited for conspiracy theories/misinformation]

DarthCuddlefluff · May 2022

redspecter23 wrote: »

[snip] They set the drop rate on materials and also set the amounts needed. They are the supply and the demand to a certain extent. Do furnishings really need to have a 15 Mundane Rune requirement? Remember that a real, actual person decided on that number and there is a reason for it. If we knew the reason, we probably wouldn't be too happy. These recipes could require 1 or 2 Mundane runes each and a conscious decision is being made to have them require a very certain amount. They aren't using dart board math here. They are doing this intentionally.

It would be nice if these mats were sold at a vendor for 50g each. Really at that point, they could just remove the need for them altogether and it would be about the same. However, either of these situations are in direct conflict with my previous point. [snip] That is the core issue and the problem that needs to be solved first. Figure out why ZOS wants it to be so difficult to craft furnishings in large quantities. Why do they want a bottleneck due to certain materials like Mundane Runes? Go directly to the "fun police" and look for your answers. It would be great to have some transparency on why they feel the need to make this system overly expensive and/or time consuming.

I am aware that there is no way ZoS is completely blind to the problem but here on the forums it's the wild west. I didn't want to call ZoS out for fear of being banned. I have heard many horror stories. I would love it if a ZoS employee came out with a REAL answer here and not just some non-answer or a shut down. I guess they have been called out now. Alright ZoS why are you screwing over the people who make you a ton of money by dropping $100.00 or more each month on a new house?

[edited to remove quote]