My problem with it.

Lore: companions as set in the game act like friends that help you out from time to time. They are willing to let you dress them up in cosplay (minus Helms and hats) ride whatever mount you give them, and fight how you want things fought. However, they wont be your servant or pack mule.

You can't store anything on them and they wont do quests for you. So lore speaking this action breaks them.

Solutions: simply make them tradeable, that solves storage and creates a market for them, and is probably the easiest solution to program.

Next, I would be fine with an assistant that does this, provided that one of several conditions exist.
One, there is a cooldown or payment penalty for the process. Nothing unreasonable, but a hard cap like 5 or 6 per type per day.

Or

Two, cp perks like Plentiful harvest shouldn't trigger and neither should other rng based drops or increases (nirncrux) and any normal variances should be rounded down.

Normally doing surveys yields same results as today.

There should be a way to get flat amounts of mats, but doing so should yield a penalty because your paying someone to do it for you, meanwhile those that invest the time to collect themselves get just a bit more benefit for their efforts.

Now this one said before that Ember could do enchanting surveys, but this might result in her selling most of the Kuta for brandy and moonsugar.

Could possibly add another skill point to each of the crafting sections that partially automated the surveys, maybe costing a nominal fee per survey or adding a timer to them.
Similar to how you get daily mail with materials, have some unseen npc fulfil the surveys and send the collected materials on to the character.
Going further with a similar idea you could add such a skill to the legerdemain tree for treasure maps, again with a fee.
The fee needn't be huge, but something that means people will still go out themselves if they'd rather not pay the gold.

Dimorphos wrote: »

I must say I really have nothing in common with 99% of the people in this forum. No matter what I write or suggest all I ever get is negative or opposing responses. In-game I usually get at least 50-50 responses some are against but others agree.

Maybe this forum attracts a certain kind of people and I really do not belong among them.

Well, there is a subset of about 5-10 very regular commenting users that typically want nothing to change ever and if the company listened to them, we’d have the same game we had in 2014-2015 frankly. Change is necessary and even if you have 5-10 people being negative on your post, they usually don’t represent the entire playerbase. The forums is typically a group of people that are very opinionated, which is fine, but that don’t necessarily give a good pulse on things you post. You’ll also see a vast majority of things on the forums are complaints and negativity. I’d recommend asking your questions and proposals in other spaces as well - in your in game guilds, Reddit, Facebook groups if you’re a part of any, etc.

I think your idea sounds great and I’d love to add some more utility to companions since they provide very little combat utility (up for discussion depending on the type of player, player interests and skill level). I don’t think adding this addition detracts from the RP people have with them of being friends and I also don’t view your idea as what people are saying here. I typically use my companions to get their respective achievements and then put them in storage. I’d use them all the time with your idea. I view them as a part of a team. If you want to RP here - I go pick these survey materials up, so why can’t they pull the weight in the team too?

Some people don’t like change for the sake of not liking change. It’s an aspect that wouldn’t harm the way other people play the game. It’d still likely be much faster to go do your surveys yourself if they limit how many surveys they can do each day. And just like anything - don’t use it if you don’t want to.

Cheers

TLDR: don’t be afraid to post ideas because 5-6 people are overly negative on every post on the forums

Erickson9610 wrote: »

Dimorphos wrote: »

But yes, I would be up for any change that would take this time sink away from us but still give us the benefits. But I think benefits should always come against some slight inconvenience/effort made.

We could get Survey Assistant who trades Surveys for raw materials at a similar rate to the Fencing Assistant? Maybe it would also work for Treasure Maps as well to make it worthwhile.

I really don’t like the idea of adding ANOTHER $50 assistant to the game for surveys. I’d prefer we as a community come up with less ideas founded in monetization, considering how (in my opinion) over the top it is currently.

I’d prefer ideas founded in largely ignored, currently in game assets. Let’s expand upon companions instead of just adding 2 more each year! Let’s add depth here, not more means for ZOS to charge us $$.

thorwyn wrote: »

This has been discussed a couple of times already.
My position is this: if they introduce such a feature, there has to be some form of limit or draw back. Because if you could just log off and let your companion do all the surveys for the next 10 hours while you are asleep or at work, the entire survey system would be redundant. It would be as good as giving you the materials instantly.

We already have hirelings for off-line gathering (with the daily limit) so I think it would be fair that were such behaviour to be implemented either for our existing summoned companion or an extra assistant, that it could only occur while we were actively signed in on the corresponding character.

And yes, the impact of automated survey pick up on the economy would be significant. I am notoriously lazy when it comes to surveys, so I created one character that does nothing but carry all my crafting surveys, so they won't pollute my chests. This char has hundreds and hundreds of surveys in his pockets, which I will probably never pick up because I don't need to. I'm sure I'm not the only one with such a mass of surveys stored away somewhere.

I seem to be acquiring a bit of a stash myself. The biggest piles are the alchemy and enchanting ones - what do people mostly do with those? (In comparison, I'm often short on cloth/metal/wood surveys).

Cooperharley wrote: »

Erickson9610 wrote: »

Dimorphos wrote: »

But yes, I would be up for any change that would take this time sink away from us but still give us the benefits. But I think benefits should always come against some slight inconvenience/effort made.

We could get Survey Assistant who trades Surveys for raw materials at a similar rate to the Fencing Assistant? Maybe it would also work for Treasure Maps as well to make it worthwhile.

I really don’t like the idea of adding ANOTHER $50 assistant to the game for surveys. I’d prefer we as a community come up with less ideas founded in monetization, considering how (in my opinion) over the top it is currently.

I’d prefer ideas founded in largely ignored, currently in game assets. Let’s expand upon companions instead of just adding 2 more each year! Let’s add depth here, not more means for ZOS to charge us $$.

I have several notes regarding this:

1. Companions were never meant to have this extra functionality. They have enough depth as it is.
2. Another Assistant would be a logical choice considering ZOS can monetize it. It's what keeps this game running.
3. We still haven't seen Companions of a few races or curses (such as Bosmer, Nord, Orc, Vampire, Werewolf, etcetera) so we should continue to get more Companions, rather than spend years revisiting old Companions. We should also get multiple variations of some existing Classes/Races, such as another High Elf or another Nightblade. Maybe future Companions will have Subclassed skill lines like Tanlorin does, so there will be more skill variety only seen in new Companions.
4. Finally, there are several more ways to add depth to Companions than tacking on features unrelated to them. Maybe ZOS will finally add in that romance system they mentioned, giving them a reason to revisit the old Companions with new dialogue. That's the extent that I expect ZOS will revisit old Companions — their stories are done.

We already have hirelings for off-line gathering (with the daily limit) so I think it would be fair that were such behaviour to be implemented either for our existing summoned companion or an extra assistant, that it could only occur while we were actively signed in on the corresponding character.

These are not "hirelings" though. That's just the story they made up to explain a feature that gives you a fixed number of materials per day via mail.
Having your companions pick up surveys while you are online would be a good suggestion. However, it would also invite players to go afk in their houses or some remote place in the world while running some form of activity script to avoid auto-log out.

I seem to be acquiring a bit of a stash myself. The biggest piles are the alchemy and enchanting ones - what do people mostly do with those? (In comparison, I'm often short on cloth/metal/wood surveys).

Alchemy surveys are quite lucrative because of the prices for columbine and formerly corn flowers. You know you can reset the nodes until they yield the ingredient you want, right?

I just don't agree with turning our Companions, that have personalities and back stories, into chore workers.

Idk sharp likes to fish, so let him fish for me while im out getting my butt kicked in vlc. Not for achieves of course, just for the fish. With the stock delivered to us, his reliable business partner, at a fraction of the rate a player doing it themselves would get over a specific time frame, say half an hour?

Same with ember, bastion, etc. I mean they always have positive comments when I drag them with me to collect mats, so im not sold on the idea that they'd hate this particular division of labor.

Add to them a menu that let's us hand them our surveys. Maybe let it take a certain amount of time to get the stuff, with a limit of like 10 at a time or so.

Or just add a hireling npc to the Undaunted or crafting areas that does the same thing. Either way.