With the Skyrim celebration event wrapping up, I'd like to take some time to go over my experience finishing up the Ancestral Reach Antiquities Codex entries. It was a lovely event to start trying to get this cleared up, as treasure maps were going for as low as 1k gold each, with an average somewhere around the 4-5k mark. Incredible, considering they had typically gone for upper-10's to low-100's on guild traders. I thought I'd buy up a few, go dig up some leads, complete the codex for cheap, and be on my merry way. Unfortunately, things did not go as planned!!
Now this isn't my first rodeo, so I did the same thing all experienced adventurers do when faced with a "farming" style challenge: I immediate bulk-bought dozens of treasure maps and began the joyless task of speed digging them straight from my mail in order to save time. This worked incredibly well for the first dozen leads. I think I only spent about 100 maps getting 12 distinct leads. I of course decided that I would try to juke the system by NOT immediately scrying for and digging up the antiquity as soon as I got the lead for it, imagining that there was a specific chance to drop A lead for the motif, rather than some other setup like each individual lead having its own chance to drop at a very low rate. I was very fearful that I'd get duplicates if I dug them up immediately and waste a bunch of time and maps digging up stuff that I'd only end up selling, instead of leaving them for other people to finish their codex. This is where things began to go horribly wrong.
I spent another 50 or so maps before finally scoring my 13th lead, for Chests. Awesome, I thought! A rare one that sells for a bunch of gold! Not that I was going to sell it, these were for personal use, but it still felt great to find. A bit much to get another lead, but hey, that's RNG for ya, right? And so I kept digging for the last, blessed, final lead. And digging. And digging.
And digging.
At around map #300, I realized that there was probably something wrong, but I didn't know what. The final lead (for Shoulders) wasn't dropping. Did I have too many antiquity leads? I ran to the local Reach tavern and picked up the lead for Ancient Map of the Reach. Nope, that's not it, I was able to pick up that lead without any issue. Maybe only motif leads were capped at 13? No way to test, so can't confirm. Well, maybe I'll just dig up one of the really expensive ones, Chests, in particular, and see if the next lead I get is a duplicate or not. But not yet. I'm sure I'll get the lead I'm looking for in no time, after all, it's just and artifact of RNG, right?
At map #400, I decided to dig up the Chests motif. Awesome, another motif for the collection, time to go look for the next lead and hope there's no duplicates until you finish the codex!
The next lead was for a duplicate of Chests. Okay, so there's duplicates, that's unfortunate, but at least I can juke it to drop just between shoulders I dug it up again. I did the same cycle again, for Chests, again. Rinse and repeat a couple of times. Okay, well, not having a lot of luck there, but it's surely just got to be RNG at this point, right? So I should just go back to the old method, and surely my lead will come.
At a bit past map #500, I decided that no, in fact, there was indeed something deeply wrong with the method I was using. I let go. I dug up all my leads. I started digging up antiquities as soon as I got the leads. Many duplicates later, three days after initially starting my endeavor, a little past map # 600, I finally found the missing lead for Shoulders. I had already committed to a life without joy, but I wasn't expecting the process to be not only mirthless, but bordering on a little miserable.
Where did it go wrong? Why did it take over 600 maps? Could that have been avoided? Is there a secret cap to leads, are they unjukeable, or are they totally random and this is just the expected data point on the total distribution? If there was something wrong with my method, shouldn't that be more explicitly stated somewhere? Or better yet, shouldn't that just... not be the wrong way to do it? Are players really supposed to be using up 600 maps (or more, or infinite) each to finish out a given Ancestral Motif codex page? Well, at least I got mine. It feels sick to say it. Like something you'd expect out of a sociopath. But I finished. Hope nobody else who was looking to do this got screwed over because I was hogging all the cheap PC NA lead maps for three days in a row.
Men'Do PC NA AD Khajiit
Grand High Illustrious Mid-Tier PvP/PvE Bussmunster