Style Mats - Needed or Unneeded Memory Sink

Lnin0 · May 26

With memory always being a concern for the game is there a reason we need 200 style mats? Didn’t the introduction of the Outfit station make these irrelevant?

Why not replace all gear style mats with mimic stones. When you break gear down you get mimic stone fragments that can be combined into a stone. You have three style mats for all gear: mimic fragments, mimic stones and crown mimic stones.

Keep jewelry and furnish styles as-is but if the style mat has no other use than to craft gear get rid of it. That’s a reduction of 150+ to about 20.

Mimic stones would be more abundant so if worried about the common “exploit” (using medic stones to craft gear in key styles only to break down and sell style mat) ZOS could remove it so you never get style mats from crafted gear pieces or make it so it only works with dropped grear or gear crafted with crown memic stones - not gathered ones.

If they felt need to set some gear apart for say master writes (those that have harder to gather styles) then just up the number of mimic stones required to craft a piece in those styles. So instead of one stone it takes three or five.

All in all this change would

- Reduces data strainneeded to track all these mats
- Simplify gear crafting and doing writs as there is one less selection needed.
- Make it easier for players to know when they extract a sellable style since only the usable styes would be left
- make it easier to manage bag and bank space
-

tincanman · May 26

Anything that reduces the 'necessity' of the craft-bag and therefore subscription is, I imagine, probably at the bottom of zos hit-list for thing to remove from the game.

The more fiddly things that block inventory that can be 'conveniently' stored in the craft-bag the better for zos revenue and, given the craft-bag is the most often cited reason given by players for subscribing, I'd expect zos to continue the trend of adding more of these style mats, not reduce or remove them. Unless or until they can replace them with something equally as inventory-clogging.

tincanman · May 26

I'm not sold on the idea of crown-only mimic stones anyway as a replacement. Although the idea of a single mat, perhaps used in multiples depending on the relative scarcity of the style/motif, might - possibly - generally appeal.

I'd currently much prefer to see an improved interface for selecting trait/style items rather than removing them completely from the game.

Gray_howling_parrot · May 26

I agree on the fact that we have way to many style ingredients.

I think having 2 style ingredients would free up a lot of space and lessen the load FOR SURE. Simply learning a style and using a mimic stone (new currency/style ingredient) would be great. You can also maintain the crown mimic stones as an option purchasable with real money.

To get them you could get them the exact same way that you currently do - deconstructing gear, doing daily quests, etc. and have the vendors (blacksmiths, clothiers, etc.) that sell the basic racial ones not sell the styles anymore, but rather some cool new furnishing options or maybe white training gear instead?

bmnoble · May 26

If they want to make a real difference to the memory the game has to work with, they should start considering an end date for support for the older consoles.

Gray_howling_parrot · May 26

bmnoble wrote: »

If they want to make a real difference to the memory the game has to work with, they should start considering an end date for support for the older consoles.

Well, yes, but in regard to the specifics of this post, I think lessening the sheer amount of style materials, which is expanding every year, would be a smart move.

Dagoth_Rac · May 26

bmnoble wrote: »

If they want to make a real difference to the memory the game has to work with, they should start considering an end date for support for the older consoles.

Until players actually start moving off those older consoles, ZOS is not going to throw away millions of players so they can add an extra scribing line. The loss of revenue from losing all the players not on new consoles would dwarf the revenue gained from an extra skill line or more furnishing storage in house or whatever. I mean, Sony recently announced that 59 million subscribers to PSN are still on PS4. I am guessing that XBox numbers are similar. This is not a handful of stragglers stubbornly clinging to an old gen console. It is a massive player base. An older game like ESO might have more old gen console players than new gen console players.

Gray_howling_parrot · May 26

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

bmnoble wrote: »

If they want to make a real difference to the memory the game has to work with, they should start considering an end date for support for the older consoles.

Until players actually start moving off those older consoles, ZOS is not going to throw away millions of players so they can add an extra scribing line. The loss of revenue from losing all the players not on new consoles would dwarf the revenue gained from an extra skill line or more furnishing storage in house or whatever. I mean, Sony recently announced that 59 million subscribers to PSN are still on PS4. I am guessing that XBox numbers are similar. This is not a handful of stragglers stubbornly clinging to an old gen console. It is a massive player base. An older game like ESO might have more old gen console players than new gen console players.

Yea, unfortunately we don't really have any idea how many people are still on last-generation consoles - only ZOS has that information. I ASSUME because they have not dropped support yet that there is still a sizeable number of people on those consoles to where ZOS would be alienating a large portion of their player base and lose more money than it may be worth to them.