Problem: Bots were industrialising provision material farming, automating large scale looting and reloading. Mats were then used to create food/drink and sold to vendors. This provided an infinitely scalable, largely unattended, stream of clean gold for selling

Simple solution: Food & drink sell to vendors for nothing. Impacts practically no one except the farmers

Chosen solution: Nerf drops significantly for everyone, including those playing the game as originally intended


Of course the irony is, by restricting supply, they've made prices for certain items shoot through the roof overnight, massively increasing the value of both the 'stock' already farmed and the gold all the bots/farmers got before the nerf. So even when they lose, they sorta win. We can't farm for ourselves any more, so if we want something, we have to have over our money

Personally I think that this is all a placeholder mechanic anyway - currently there are issues with bots and goldsellers, and there isn't really a magic bullet for them. But there are certainly things that can be done to limit how many exist in-game. ZOS are naturally (hopefully) putting concrete systems in place to combat the bots etc, but in the meantime they have popped in a diminishing returns to limit damage done by the baddies. I expect they will remove the DR once they have come to a suitable solution - even though it won't be a magic bullet.

Of course, this DR mechanic might not be working at all, and instead punishing players, but we'll see.

Or it might be here to stay and all part of the playstyle intended! Who knows.

I for one would be a happy paying player with this change...
Motifs are the new Gold Farmers making money scheme. It doesn't make that much sense to make them so uber Rare?
When you can make alt that craft that style anyway to me this seems like a way to just upset your player base.

As for crates and chest and everything else that says its loot able and you click on it to find no loot at all I mean really why is that even an option? just make it empty to me that seems like a bug in the game not a fix.

One thing I read is when they said we are adding more loot able things in the game I was happy. I love that part of the game. now it seems they went back on what they said in the first place! Bad and shame on you!

Give motifs out as a end reward of a quest chain (obviously soloable quest chain, also on veteran levels) and thus remove them from containers for good. Make it "bind on pickup" so that they cannot be sold. Quest can start in the beginning area and is given by a smith, once completing it a random racial motif is given as a reward (obviously not the same motif as player race is and no same motif would be given again as a reward). One quest per zone so to get the next motif, player would have to level up and move on to new area. Final motif could be given somewhere in, say, mid-veteran levels. Remove diminishing returns from containers and add more crafting materials back to them, for all skills. Give max green recipes out from containers and add some option, like an NPC who would "upgrade" the recipe to blue quality and to purple after that with either some (reasonable!!!) cash payment or why not a quest, say NPC asks to make some amount of that food to prove that the player has the skills to be called a "cook" and then upgrades the recipe to higher tier as a reward, heck make it possible to upgrade a recipe per day if you're so paranoid about "quick advancement" but at least the option would be there, and would not help the "loot farmers" in any way as each recipe would also be bind on pickup.

And as for solo dungeon bosses.. I understand that they did make the change to stop the bots but the result is that now me, who doesn't camp the bosses for hours can't get any loot either. I usually went into the solo dungeon with my char, fought the boss and if I got the blue item - which I know drops from them - I moved out right away. If I didn't get it, I waited a bit more and usually after a kill or two more the blue item dropped and I left. Now? Forget it. Blue item drops rarely, in most cases just white junk, I can't wait there for blue items either because spawn times are longer and the diminishing returns will make sure that the next time boss spawns, I get nothing at all (well, come sad amount of coins only). And guess what? Check pretty much every solo dungeon in low level areas like Glenumbra, Stonefalls, etc. Bosses are camped by bots 24/7 and normal players don't get anything from them at all, now. Heck it's a luck if normal player gets even a single hit in before 10+ or 20+ bots mow it down in less then a second. So no, that fix didn't do anything other then punish normal players, bots are still camping everything.

Agree with the OP. All this is doing is hurting legitimate players

Yes, finding provisioning materials and recipes has become increasingly difficult. I have to change zones entirely which doesn't work well when I'm trying to get materials/recipes for my current questing level.

If the motif books are the main cause for this, then perhaps remove them entirely from being looted and have them as rewards for a few crafting quests. Once your character has them all you can no longer receive them as crafting rewards. (Not my preferred option, as I like to give them to crafting alts too, but if they crafting quests are token it could work. Maybe.)

Either that or have different rarities of materials have different rates of diminishing returns. Not going to be a long-term fix for provisioning recipes, but at least I could find some materials.

skyggles wrote: »

TL;DR
Issue: Cooking/Brewing was to easy to level up.
Fix: Remove mats from game.

Did I get it right ?

I don't know if it was intended or a consequence of trying to fix the farming of other items with diminishing returns. Along with bots farming the bosses in public dungeons, players were logging in and out for hours on end to farm the motifs.

Weirdly the diminishing returns has made the motif books more valuable rather than less as it's harder to find them. I don't know if this was intended or not.

Well to play the devils advocate.
This makes sense and it should have been this way from the start of the game.
I never saw a good reason to buy items on the guild store due to how easy it was to get whatever you wanted by camping the "loot pinjata".
Now as we go forward rare items will be slighly more rare and player crafted items like food and drinks could be valuable enugh to sell on the guildstore.

i feel the need to chime in here as well - as i'm someone who does only tend to loot containers once and then move on.

i have very definitely noticed the changes to containers as well as boss mob loot in public dungeons.

i've not been trying to game the system at all, when i enter a house for a quest i'll do the quest, loot containers, exit and continue onwards. i wont be sat there relogging over and over again (unless i'm trying to get into cyrodiil which usually takes at least 3 attempts)

i'll kill a boss in a public dungeon until i get loot from it and then leave the dungeon.

so far, since this change i have picked up only 1 or 2 blue boss drops and i have not found a single motif book on my main templar (VR2) or my alt sorcerer (level 10).

most if not all containers i come across are either empty, contain a crafting style element (moonstone, corundum etc) or lockpicks - very few provisioning materials.

so even without trying to game the system, it would appear i am still suffering from the diminishing returns somehow...

i'm honestly starting to wonder where on tamriel i'll be able to find enough upgrade materials for gear crafting - i have loads of hemming, loads of honing stones, but very few embroidery+ or dwarven oil+ materials - other than the ones i get from hireling mails, as blues are seemingly very few and far between nowadays. (there is the option of buying blues from npc's in rawl'kha and deconstructing them - but thats expensive, or buy pvp gear and deconstruct that, but that also seems a waste of AP)

So the changes to get rid of bots in dungeons AND ESPECIALLY these deminishing returns... I'd have to say is a FAIL, I just spend the last hour on screenshots and reports of at least 30 bots rotating through Coldharbor... A level 40+ area so the reason people aren't seeing them around so much is because they've moved to other areas, it seems the main stream of real players have not reached that area to be generating all the complaints.
+ But Coldharbor? I'm running into bots that are up to T5, Went to The Grotto of Depravity - swarming with bots... but the boss in there was completely left alone... so great job on getting the bots off the bosses - but it's a fail on getting rid of them, and it's barely a discouragement. The gold-sellers are just taking it to the next level to be less obvious, more complex pathing, actual names instead of 'jffjjesj', more complex fighting styles and patterns. I'd rather keep the bots dumb and easily recognizable than to create more restrictions to get rid of a symptom.

The bots/gold sellers have no real effect on the economy without the ability to "spread the wealth", and it's spreading through the buyers. Bots can farm all they want but without buyers it's only a matter of time before they fill their warehouse.

I see a lot of WTB messages for crafting mats, some offering 1k gold per stack (not even full stacks), as enticing as that looks, it seems to me like someone just bought themselves a load of gold, not saying they did but why else would someone be making that kind of offer? Why not hold the buyers accountable and ban them? Why not discourage the buyers? Why not put up bigger warnings and further disclaimers about getting banned for that kind of activity? Are gold buyers getting banned? Are the diminishing returns specifically meant to discourage bots or was it actually targeted at legitimate players?

Eris wrote: »

Turkeysammich wrote: »

In order to give feedback, we'd need an official reason for the nerf, and as the nerf was done in secret, without any notification, it just makes it that much more difficult.

I'd be willing to bet that it was done because people were logging on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and always picking stuff up with each relog.

1. The nerf was not done in secret, they've talked about diminishing returns for a while now and it even went live on PTS servers a week before public servers.

2. Re-logging has been a technique used by bots, I suspect that's how they are glitching the harvest nodes.

Jim_McMasterub17_ESO wrote: »

Farmers blow my mind.

Exploiting game design so you can continuously loot the same areas comes in many forms, & is inherently against the very essence these games are created with.

Loot something, & move ON.

Diminishing returns remove part of the incentive to sit in one area & continuously kill the same creatures, or loot the same chests after logging & relogging...

over & over & over... That's not playing a game, that's gaming the system.

I for one am for the changes made in a continuing effort to stop the gold farmers & motif farmers from eroding the financial basis of the game.

Sorry it's hurting the way you play. As for me, it's not affecting me in the least.

If every container was full of loot to begin with, i'd agree with you. But when you walk into a building with 10 potential dressers/wardrobes and you get 2 lockpicks you'd rethink that

Racial Motifs should not drop from containers. Period. They should be a very rare drop from any "boss" mob. They exist purely for cosmetic reasons, and ZoS has shown that they want them to remain rare.

Having motifs drop from containers means that anyone who has no plans to do provisioning is forced to gather provisioning mats for hours upon hours. It also means that things like this affect the entire provisioning profession for the sake of something that has nothing to do with provisioning in the first place. They already halved the sell price of food, so that can't be the problem.

Even before this it was hard to get the right combination of mats in the vet levels to actually make things. Now it's pretty much a joke, and yes, I am considering speccing out of provisioning.

Add me to the list of not liking the new setup. I never farmed anything. I would fight a boss on occasion 2-10 times in a row if I really need the blue item (only felt the need to do this once). All this change does is hurt legitimate players. Making the change effect the entire account really stings.

I play the game solo since that seems to be how they want you to play (quest phasing pretty much destroyed any hope I had to play with my friends). I do not see why I suddenly have to make friends with half the game and waste gold to get items I could have gotten before just by playing each of my alts. I usually keep my alts close to the same level and have each one gather so I am normally over flowing with material for each level range. With the change now I get hardly anything. I now regret not leveling provisioning from the start of the game.