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Request to remove diminishing returns on loot.

  • Turkeysammich
    Turkeysammich
    ✭✭✭
    There are still hundreds of bots, and quite frankly, bots looting containers have nothing to do with a Provisioner, as containers are instanced and only for that person to open.

    So bots are the reason for this? If so, then why not just make ore nodes 80% empty or give lock picks. Instead of nerfing something that has nothing to do with them. Wouldn't that stop the hundreds of underground gatherers? No, it wouldn't, none of these nerfs stopped the bots, they've only changed their tactics.

    So here's my final feedback, as I'm tired of this topic and it's making me sick thinking about how ridiculous this nerf is, there is literally no reason to even have containers anymore. I'll give it a month before I decide to join those not subbing to see if it gets fixed, but less than a month the next time I loot a difficult world boss and get 1 gold only.

    1. Remove Motifs, ores, racial stones, and alchemy ingredients from the container loot table and move them somewhere else. This will allow Provision ingredients and recipes to be more frequent when only 20% of containers actually have anything in them.

    2. If not taking out diminishing returns, then add diminishing returns to gathering nodes. There's no reason the other professions shouldn't get the same respect that provisioning does.

    3. Remove recipes from the loot table, and automatically have them in the list when cooking. The other trades already have the things they can create, without the need to collect recipes. They even get a ton of upgrade stones.

    4. Remove provisioning ingredients and recipes from the loot table and put them in the Chef/Cook NPC merchant inventory. I'm willing to pay than to have a container mock me every time it is opened and contains nothing at all.

    5. Take out diminishing returns all together. There is absolutely no reason normal players should be punished for bots or gold sellers, there are bots and gold sellers in every game, and there always will be.
  • crush83
    crush83
    ✭✭✭✭
    crush83 wrote: »
    crush83 wrote: »
    Reading the first few posts only, it seems that the real problem here is what is affected by diminishing returns.

    What diminishing returns should affect:
    - blue/purple drops
    - From the same container only

    This would prevent bots, for example, from using the login/logout bug to farm the same containers over and over again, but still allow the chance that a blue/purple drop would occur while out exploring the world.

    I also find it strange that they implemented diminishing returns for containers, but didn't apply it to dungeon boss loots...where it was actually needed. (no the 10 minute timer is not diminishing returns)

    Please stop pretending that diminishing returns stop bots - they don't.

    What you guys seem to be missing is that bots are AUTOMATED. They don't care if there's a DR timer of 10 minutes on a given dresser, they can either add more bots, or have it wait and only loot every 10 minutes.

    Meanwhile, it screws players, doubly so because the supply of these items continues to shift into the hands of bots, as they will always always always be looting more than regular players, regardless of DR, due to the way that botters either add more bots or set it up so they loot it in the most efficient way.

    Players, on the other hand, will just loot less items over all because of being discouraged by the timer, and won't ever be hitting that timer exactly 10 minutes every time, like the bots will.

    Further, bots/RMT sites already have huge supplies of these items from before the nerf, so DR just means that the vast majority of supply will remain in their hands.

    Which means demand for their services stays high, as do the gold price of the goods, which they looted when they were cheaper/continue to loot as players stop due to DR.

    DR like this will ONLY HURT PLAYERS, and help RMT sellers.

    I guess you rejected my advice about discussing things civilly.

    Yes, you're right. Diminishing returns will not completely curb the bots. You're wrong if you think it won't slow them down one bit.

    With DR, they'd have to employ 10 times the number of bots in order to make up that 10 minute timer. Now maybe you think that bots have inexhaustible resources - and they might have plenty of stolen credit cards to buy new accounts with - they still need computing power to run all those bot clients.

    Furthermore, if they could run 10 times the number of bots IF DR were to be employed, why wouldn't they go ahead and run 10 times the number of bots without DR employed and get 10x as much gold?

    That said, the only way to get rid of bots is to get rid of the demand for their product. I'd rather Zenimax focus more on tracking real money buyers of gold/items.

    My suggestion was merely a way for the terrible implementation not to affect players as harshly as what they've implemented has done. DR shouldn't be affecting your standard provisioning ingredients. That's absurd.

    Except they dont have to deploy 10 times more bots. Their uptime is literally infinite and that means that, no matter how low the loot is after DR, it still tends towards infinity.

    Players on the other hand don't have unlimited uptime. This is why the bots dont give a *** anout DR but players get wrecked

    I get what you are saying here, and there is some sense to it, but don't forget that these gold farmers have quotas to fill. They need to make x amount of gold per day in order to keep up with demand and justify costs of running their programs.

    Before the timer, let's say a bot was farming a boss every minute.
    After the timer, let's say a bot is farming a boss every 10 minutes.

    That means they are making 10x less gold per day...which means in order to recover that decrease, they have to deploy 10x as many bots.

    Of course, the reality is that the bots aren't sitting idly by for that 10 minutes. Now they are farming all the trash mobs during that 10 minutes and still getting gold income. I agree 100% that the 10 minute timer is awful. Properly implemented diminishing returns would work much better, but they apparently don't know how to do that.
    Edited by crush83 on May 9, 2014 7:45PM
  • Tomster
    Tomster
    ✭✭
    I found perhaps 8 racial motifs in the starter town at about level 10 (first few days) but Now Im level a few experience points from level 50 and have not found ANY racial motifs since then until today I found a Wood elf one in coldharbour. Also I seem to find the same ones over and over even among the common ones, Im still missing briton, redguard, Kahjiit, nord (+ perhaps dunmer) and all the rare ones.

    Boss drops was indeed nerfed badly with diminishing returns, I havent gotten many blues from bosses since then, I'd usually stick around out of curiosity to get the rare drop and leave. After defeating a strong opponent you feel a feeling of accomplishment and expect a reward, but get an anticlimax.. also on first completion of bosses on the map (the skull ones). Interestingly though, the common zombie in a dungeon can drop blue and even purple items no problem, wtf? Unexpected.

    I agree with provisioning being kiilled at every turn. Easy leveling,ingredients take up loads of precious inventory, nonexistent oats & tomatoes in the game WTF (except for hirelings) and now dimininshing loot.

    My playstile is that I gotta do every quest (solo) and I ended up being more than 5 levels above the questgivers => no ultimate recharge and no drops whatsoever. So you can't do all the quests to get the whole story? Why? Even the skull bosses on the map are affected even when defeating them the first time and get an acchievement, WHY?

    And bots still thrive in elder bots online. Bad decisions everywhere.
  • Tomster
    Tomster
    ✭✭
    crush83 wrote: »
    crush83 wrote: »
    crush83 wrote: »
    Reading the first few posts only, it seems that the real problem here is what is affected by diminishing returns.

    What diminishing returns should affect:
    - blue/purple drops
    - From the same container only

    This would prevent bots, for example, from using the login/logout bug to farm the same containers over and over again, but still allow the chance that a blue/purple drop would occur while out exploring the world.

    I also find it strange that they implemented diminishing returns for containers, but didn't apply it to dungeon boss loots...where it was actually needed. (no the 10 minute timer is not diminishing returns)

    Please stop pretending that diminishing returns stop bots - they don't.

    What you guys seem to be missing is that bots are AUTOMATED. They don't care if there's a DR timer of 10 minutes on a given dresser, they can either add more bots, or have it wait and only loot every 10 minutes.

    Meanwhile, it screws players, doubly so because the supply of these items continues to shift into the hands of bots, as they will always always always be looting more than regular players, regardless of DR, due to the way that botters either add more bots or set it up so they loot it in the most efficient way.

    Players, on the other hand, will just loot less items over all because of being discouraged by the timer, and won't ever be hitting that timer exactly 10 minutes every time, like the bots will.

    Further, bots/RMT sites already have huge supplies of these items from before the nerf, so DR just means that the vast majority of supply will remain in their hands.

    Which means demand for their services stays high, as do the gold price of the goods, which they looted when they were cheaper/continue to loot as players stop due to DR.

    DR like this will ONLY HURT PLAYERS, and help RMT sellers.

    I guess you rejected my advice about discussing things civilly.

    Yes, you're right. Diminishing returns will not completely curb the bots. You're wrong if you think it won't slow them down one bit.

    With DR, they'd have to employ 10 times the number of bots in order to make up that 10 minute timer. Now maybe you think that bots have inexhaustible resources - and they might have plenty of stolen credit cards to buy new accounts with - they still need computing power to run all those bot clients.

    Furthermore, if they could run 10 times the number of bots IF DR were to be employed, why wouldn't they go ahead and run 10 times the number of bots without DR employed and get 10x as much gold?

    That said, the only way to get rid of bots is to get rid of the demand for their product. I'd rather Zenimax focus more on tracking real money buyers of gold/items.

    My suggestion was merely a way for the terrible implementation not to affect players as harshly as what they've implemented has done. DR shouldn't be affecting your standard provisioning ingredients. That's absurd.

    Except they dont have to deploy 10 times more bots. Their uptime is literally infinite and that means that, no matter how low the loot is after DR, it still tends towards infinity.

    Players on the other hand don't have unlimited uptime. This is why the bots dont give a *** anout DR but players get wrecked

    I get what you are saying here, and there is some sense to it, but don't forget that these gold farmers have quotas to fill. They need to make x amount of gold per day in order to keep up with demand and justify costs of running their programs.

    Before the timer, let's say a bot was farming a boss every minute.
    After the timer, let's say a bot is farming a boss every 10 minutes.

    That means they are making 10x less gold per day...which means in order to recover that decrease, they have to deploy 10x as many bots.

    Of course, the reality is that the bots aren't sitting idly by for that 10 minutes. Now they are farming all the trash mobs during that 10 minutes and still getting gold income. I agree 100% that the 10 minute timer is awful. Properly implemented diminishing returns would work much better, but they apparently don't know how to do that.

    Bots are simply doing other things instead to make up for it, jute farming for instance. Or quest reward exploiting. After entering coldharbour you get a reward of about 250 gold, there are currently dozens of bots at once running from the wayshrine to the questgiver (you can skip the tour and get the money right away withdoing nothing), after accepting the reward the character is likely deleted and a new random lvl3 character is created and loggs on and repeats.

    The average time a bot reaches the quest giver is about 6 seconds. I calculate that the rewards would be about (60/6)*60*24*250= 3 600 000 G / 24 h if my math is correct. This is no small amount. I reported this two nights ago, and yesterday but still no change. Tomorrow I might make a video and make a topic about it, now I am too tired.

    Solving this particular problem would be easy, a level cap on coldharbour or a prerequisite / dependancy on another completed quest in the main storyline would solve this.. but only thing I've seen Zenimax do is a few GM's out every now and again who ban characters and not accounts from what I've read (which are created directly again).. And of course these ridiculous nerfs that affect players a lot more than bots since they don't take into consideration basic economics like supply and demand at all and some other pretty common sense variables.

    Also skipping coldharbour in the beginning is a luxury that players could do without, bots will have more of a problem. Just make it mandatory and make human interaction needed somewhere, a random puzzle or even a captcha code in-game lol would eliminate the problem of automatic newly created ones, what on earth are they doing..
    Edited by Tomster on May 10, 2014 3:44AM
  • Xithian
    Xithian
    ✭✭✭
    Tomster wrote: »
    And of course these ridiculous nerfs that affect players a lot more than bots
    Tomster wrote: »
    Also skipping coldharbour in the beginning is a luxury that players could do without, bots will have more of a problem. Just make it mandatory

    ...
  • Daethz
    Daethz
    ✭✭✭
    Thanks to these diminishing returns, running world bosses, dungeons and so on is now almost entirely useless. Congrats. I was in a worldboss/dolmen party earlier today, we cleared two zones, i believe i got 3 greens, 1 blue, most of the bosses dropped either nothing or just ~8 gold.

    8 Gold is NOTHING. Being slapped by a mudcrab one time costs more gold in repairs than killing 10 bosses that drop 8 gold each.
    Waiting, and watching, for the return of Melee Weapons.
    -Subsidiary of The Fighters Guild
  • Daethz
    Daethz
    ✭✭✭
    I have a fix, instead of making loot impossible to get.
    Remove trading gear and materials to other players entirely.
    Waiting, and watching, for the return of Melee Weapons.
    -Subsidiary of The Fighters Guild
  • Turkeysammich
    Turkeysammich
    ✭✭✭
    I wasn't going to post again lol, but I just logged into the game, the first time today, and the first 15 containers were all empty.....15 in a row....who's idea was this?
  • sarnox
    sarnox
    wrlifeboil wrote: »
    Move on to another site or city for provisioning materials.
    • Veteran content contains lower level ingredients
    • You have to go back to Coldharbour to loot Tier 5 ingredients
    • In Coldharbour, Tier 4 Provisioning ingredients share loot tables with Tier 5
    • Now the majority of low containers contain no loot

    Nothing else to be added to the discussion. The provisioning system needs to be reworked.
  • colonel_schmeevin
    The current loot chances and drop rate from mobs for anything and everything sucks. Only nodes are working as normal. Not sure if it was mentioned in here or not has anyone else noticed a huge drop in soul gems as well? Prior to the nerf I had 10-15 easy at all times. Now as a VR3 I've been weeks without more than 1 or 2. Sucks for when weapons lose charge or u get trained. I'm not going to so any 4 man dungeons without then either. Guess I'll have to shell out 1000g x5 or however much grand soul gems go for
  • Turkeysammich
    Turkeysammich
    ✭✭✭
    I just happened upon 6 people all taking turns farming an instantly respawning ore node, and I'm still getting 5-10 empty containers in a row, explain to me how that's fair? Then I've got people telling me how they have no problem getting provisioning ingredients, and no official help at all letting me know if I'm bugged or not.
  • Mephistu
    Mephistu
    Soul Shriven
    I find the Diminishing Returns 'fix' has had a soul-destroying effect on my enjoyment of the game and has dramatically changed my playing behaviour - in ways that I believe are against the Elder Scrolls ethos. I'm one of those who enjoys the journey and didn't race for the end-game. I stopped and looted everything leaving no stone unturned. I also never log-farmed and looted places as I went through them. I did loot the Daggerfall and Auridon banks whenever I logged into an alt to inventory shuffle but the majority of motifs and recipes were gained on my main through normal play.

    With a shortage of bag-space and skill points while leveling, I decided to spread crafting across my stable of alts (read "player retention"). The Diminishing Returns nerf has had the following effects on my play:

    1. I now only loot containers that have a chance of dropping motifs (e.g. trunks, nightstands, etc). The main thing I want is the Barbaric motif and I'm damned if I'm going to farm gold to pay 50k or up for one. So now I don't loot the crates, barrels or even bookshelves as they diminish my chances. At VR3 with hundreds or thousands of VR containers looted and nada.

    2. I no longer loot any containers at all with alts. Instead of enjoying the journey with them, I chew through the content instead. Or rather I would but I have been playing them less due to the next point.

    3. I respecced my main away from Provisioning since I don't loot the containers. I am now doing all trade skills on my main (it's amazing how many spare points there are after respeccing away experiments). Since the rare motifs are now so rare, I will be extremely lucky to get even one, it doesn't make sense to have three toons do the three main tradeskills. Therefore, content is chewed through up to three times faster.

    The Diminishing Returns nerf has perversely made me feel like farming is the only way to get motifs due to the ridiculously low drop-rate. Low drop rates always work in favour of botters/farmers and against normal players. Sure, the drop rate is lower for them too but that just drives up the price. The only other recourse is farming for gold to buy the motif. /sigh

    I truly hope this is a short-term solution and that they are working on personal loot across instances or an alternate solution such as acquiring the Daedric motif by completing the set of Daedric lore books, a veteran quest chain, or similar as looting so many empty chests is severely dampening my enjoyment of the game.
  • Magdalina
    Magdalina
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    ✭✭✭
    ...is this problem still actual? Well, obviously boss loot timer is(it's awesome to spend your time preparing to a boss fight, work out a strategy for a more complicated one, maybe gather ppl, heroically win the fight after a few attempt...and get a soul gem and 8 gold), but far as provisioning containers go, was playing Coldharbour earlier today, almost none of the containers seemed empty. Found quite a few mudcrab meat, honeycomb and all that without even farming specifically, just looting all tomb urns and stuff in every cave and all. I'm not sure on recipes and motifs, haven't found any of these lately but I'm not sure how many actually drop in Coldhabor and then might just be bad luck.
  • Turkeysammich
    Turkeysammich
    ✭✭✭
    ...is this problem still actual? Well, obviously boss loot timer is(it's awesome to spend your time preparing to a boss fight, work out a strategy for a more complicated one, maybe gather ppl, heroically win the fight after a few attempt...and get a soul gem and 8 gold), but far as provisioning containers go, was playing Coldharbour earlier today, almost none of the containers seemed empty. Found quite a few mudcrab meat, honeycomb and all that without even farming specifically, just looting all tomb urns and stuff in every cave and all. I'm not sure on recipes and motifs, haven't found any of these lately but I'm not sure how many actually drop in Coldhabor and then might just be bad luck.

    Sometimes it seems random when diminish returns kicks in, sometimes I'll log in for the first time of the day, and it's already set in, 15 empty containers in a row. Other times, it'll be fine, until I change zones, or log out to eat, and even if I haven't looted any containers at all before logging out, if I log back in, then it kicks in.

    And the official response, to tell me if I have a bug or not, is "Sheogorath has take a liking to you!" Thank you for the "help," ESO Support Troll was successful *click cancel sub*
    Edited by Turkeysammich on May 14, 2014 7:20PM
  • robdotcom2002pub19_ESO
    Im about to nerf my credit card with DR.
  • Evergnar
    Evergnar
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    I have a good deal going on lock picks right now. 1 gold for a billion of them. /sarcasm
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