Stackable surveys exactly like master writs? no thank you.

valenwood_vegan · July 3

Desiato wrote: »

valenwood_vegan wrote: »

Yeah similar to others, this won't change how I do or store surveys, since I do them by zone instead of survey type.

But maybe it will help some folks with their inventory, idk. Hope we can get a more suitable QoL update for surveys down the road, and perhaps one that helps with actually doing them - running back and forth over and over again to reset a survey location is quite tedious.

(and stackable treasure maps soon too please!).

The problem with the kind of survey qol many players want is that it will just motivate more players to do writs on 20 characters a day, and maybe multiple accounts. With addons, the reward vs effort for crafting writs is INSANELY high.

So what would be the practical impact? Gold upgrade materials lose even more value and harvesting becomes a waste of time. Why even have an upgrade system if legendary becomes the default? Upgradable gear is a feature in games like this, it shouldn't be rendered completely irrelevant. It's bad enough that green and blue don't exist outside the most inexperienced players. That is lost gameplay depth.

Plus it is a bad idea for devs to heavily incentivize activities that are fundamentally boring like doing 7x20 crafting writs a day. I can't imagine it's good for the servers either. If they're going to have an activity that is highly rewarding, it shouldn't be a crafting station grind that only involves accepting a quest and pressing e.

Just because addons make it trivial to obtain surveys doesn't mean it should become trivial to complete them. They don't exist in a bubble. They affect other aspects of the game. If players have more than they can handle, that's on them!

Oh yeah I get that, I wasn't very clear but def don't just want surveys auto-completed or something. I more wish that zos could come up with more engaging gameplay for some of these totally mindless, repetitive tasks. But this doesn't necessarily mean that I'm looking for it to be trivial. Like, I've had a similar complaint about farming for furnishing plans for a long time, which is mostly just entering and exiting the same room hundreds of times to loot and reset all the containers. I don't have the solution, but I just wish some kind of more engaging gameplay could be added to surveys, making them more *interesting* to complete, not necessarily more *trivial*.

EDIT: Like just a total, thought up on the back of a napkin 10 seconds ago example of what I mean - if I had the option of getting a few of my surveys completed each day through doing pledges, or a trial, or by taking on daily quests of some sort from some new quest-giver, I would be all over that. As opposed to running back and forth in the same spot for an hour while watching a movie on the other screen lol.

DenverRalphy · July 3

I'm not opposed to going out to harvest all of the surveys myself. I'm all for chores being part of the immersion. I may grumble about the need for it from time to time. But that grumbling is part of the immersion. It leads to "thank god that's done" moments which is critical to keeping players engaged (despite what they might actually think).

A quality of life change for survey maps would entail reducing needless storage space angst. Side-stepping the act of manually completing surveys wouldn't be a QOL change. That would just be shortcutting past the work yet still reaping the benefits.

Desiato · July 3

msgeek wrote: »

The thing zos seems to forget is that surveys are supposed to be a reward.

They were designed to be a reward for completing them manually. When they were introduced, they were a really nice surprise for new crafters, but completing writs manually was so tedious that once a player became rich enough, they probably didn't bother. They weren't intended to be an activity to make players rich.

If you think they are tedious to complete now, when they were introduced we had to look at a rough map by double clicking on them and figure out where to go.

Crafting writs were introduced for players who wanted to progress as crafters without being adventurers -- because adventurers can just decon all weapon/armor/enchanting/jewelry drops. All of my alts are max crafters without ever crafting. Back then, eso had dedicated crafters!

In short, crafting writs were not designed to be so rewarding for so little effort in the first place. There is no reason to make them even more rewarding by taking away the remaining effort.

gorky1 · July 3

I hope the generic unopened surveys can be sold in guild traders.
There would only be 6 types. It wouldn't add much to the guild stores from a variety standpoint.
Should be easy to implement.

For me personally, letting our followers collect them is the real improvement needed. The first time I did a survey it was boring. Its only worse the 100th time.

tomofhyrule · July 3

I'm definitely one of those people in the camp of "if you don't want to do millions of surveys, then don't." Having Dolgubon's do 20 daily writs per account for you is not the original intention of the game, that's what one of the major issues affecting the PC economy was, and it is not intended that you essentially become Jeff Bezos and have unpaid minions just farm money for you.

That said... if the new surveys ended up being sellable/tradeable, that would be really interesting.

kargen27 · July 3

Aliniel wrote: »

The way I see it (I do daily writs on 20 characters):
- Currently, I move the surveys from my alts into back when their bags are full.
- From the bank, I take them with my "Survey Guy" - he holds all the surveys I have on my account - which is ~180 stacks.
- When I want to do a zone, let's say Glenumbra, I take out all Glenumra surveys into bank and out with my main who does the hard work (yes, I could do it with the "Survey Guy", but he's actually a "Survey Holding Guy" so no).

New system:
- Instead of having 30+ surveys on the alts, I will only have 7 stacks of Unknown Surveys.
- My "Survey Guy" will still collect all the Unknown Surveys and when I want to do them, he will have to open them ALL so I can do all 50/100/whatever for that one zone.
- Thus my "Survey Guy" stays a "Survey Guy".

So, what changes? I will move surveys onto my "Survey Guy" less frequently. It helps a bit, but doesn't save my "Survey Guy" from being a "Survey Guy".

#savesurveyguy

If you want to do Glenumbra you will need to open them all to be sure you have the Glenumbra surveys.

scrappy1342 · July 4

TomCat wrote: »

Dear ZOS team, you're just not listening.
Nobody asked for stackable surveys – it was always the desire for stackable treasure maps.
Stackable surveys by profession are completely useless to me. I don't do surveys by profession, I do them by ZONE.

i've never understood why they don't stack and why you can't carry more than one. other than when they put a new lead in, they really aren't that valuable. and they work the same way as a survey map. if you have extras of the same treasure map stored in mail or your bank and take it out right after digging up the first chest, you have to run away and come back for the second one to spawn. just like a survey map.

i would say i guess i will just keep doing it like always. open them up and store them in their stacks. when i do them, i also do them by zone. but the last 2 years or so, they just aren't worth what they used to be. but i'm not really playing the game anymore. with all the changes they have made since april, i have dropped my sub and i'm not even doing dailies anymore. i log in for daily bonus and i'll do any easy endeavors and grab event tickets. some days it's just the daily bonus. and honestly sometimes i completely forget to even do that

bmnoble · July 4

Unless these unopened unknown surveys can be sold on guild traders it is just an inconvenience.

I will pass my surveys via my bank to my survey holding character and need to open them all, the point of stacking them is to be able to go to the survey site with all the same copies and do them in one hit, rather than going to multiple zones and doing one here another there.

Would rather they either allow us to collect all the stacks at once when harvesting surveys on site or add a new 5000 crown survey assistant to the crown store that auto collects them at this point.

READLER · July 4

Now I'm sure that later the developers will do the same with treasure maps. For example: a bag with the name "Galen's treasure map envelope" will drop out, and when opened, one of the local treasure maps will randomly drop out.

spartaxoxo · July 4

Aylish wrote: »

I don‘t get why we need to stack them anyways. Same surveys already stack, which is absolutely ok for me.

It was good for master writs since they don‘t stack even if they‘re identical. But for surveys?

I have tons of surveys taking up bank space. I know I'm not the only one. They've talked about it being a big space killer for a lot of people. This is one of things where the forum reception seems completely disconnected from what I've seen tons of people complain about for years.

Being able to gather multiple at once is another but people have asked for surveys, writs, and treasure maps to be stackable for ages.

SeaGtGruff · July 4

Rittings wrote: »

Why can't we just have FLAT SURVEYS??? So... "Clothing Survey Report" - and we can complete it where we want?

You mean, so everybody can complete all of their survey reports in Craglorn? Somehow, I doubt that idea would ever fly.

MasterSpatula · July 4

Drastically reducing the number of zones surveys can drop for would be a much larger QOL improvement. I'm not sure why they even bothered adding surveys for Solstice, and I'm really perplexed why the Solstice ones are so dang spread out. Better to just stop adding new zones. Even better, take all the DLC/Chapter zones off the loot table entirely. Restricting future surveys to base game zones only would be a huge improvement.

Elvenheart · July 4

I've been afraid to open any of my unknown writ envelopes because I've been understanding that clicking on them would spill out every writ in the envelope into my inventory, but today I tried an experiment. I filled up all the slots in my inventory but one by unstacking some potions, then clicked on a writ envelope and it spit out just one writ into my inventory, and left the envelope intact. I didn't get to look into the envelope and select a writ, but at least the envelope still exists, then I hit the button to stack the potions I filled up my inventory with into a single stack. So I ended up getting only one writ out of the envelope that way but didn't get to choose it.

I really wish envelopes worked the same way some boxes do, that we could just open them, look at the contents, select what we want, and leave the rest inside.

Desiato · July 4

For me this will be the benefit of the new system.

First, I will grind through my existing collection of surveys. It's not bad because I make a point of not letting it get bad, but it still takes up a lot of inventory space.

Then I'll collect the new containers, taking up drastically reduced space.

I still won't let too many accumulate. Maybe once every couple of months, I'll open them, using either bank space or housing storage -- which is getting freed up via the new system -- to help organize them, and then complete them.

If I were ZOS, I would bite the bullet and completely redesign the crafting writ system. It's cursed at every level and something that makes players ultimately unhappy. It's the classic scenario in an mmo when the reward is too good to ignore, even if the task is total garbage to do.

Plus it has strayed too far from its original purpose and can't be good for server and database performance. So many transactions for no good reason.

Then they should learn from it and not allow addons to provide automation to this degree ever again.

DenverRalphy · July 4

Elvenheart wrote: »

I've been afraid to open any of my unknown writ envelopes because I've been understanding that clicking on them would spill out every writ in the envelope into my inventory, but today I tried an experiment. I filled up all the slots in my inventory but one by unstacking some potions, then clicked on a writ envelope and it spit out just one writ into my inventory, and left the envelope intact. I didn't get to look into the envelope and select a writ, but at least the envelope still exists, then I hit the button to stack the potions I filled up my inventory with into a single stack. So I ended up getting only one writ out of the envelope that way but didn't get to choose it.

I really wish envelopes worked the same way some boxes do, that we could just open them, look at the contents, select what we want, and leave the rest inside.

Huh? Are you under the impression that if you have say, a stack of 12 unknown blacksmith writs, that if you click it with more than 12 empty slots open in your inventory that it'll extract all of them? Cuz that's not how it works.

It will always extract one writ at a time.

mdjessup4906 · July 4

davidtk wrote: »

And wouldn't it be better instead of making a mess with addons when surveys are packed into the unknown surveys stack to keep the survey maps the same, but adjust the nodes according to how many maps there are? For example, if I have 5x Jewelery II from Malabar Tor, so that the node contains 5x more resources and do it as only ONE node? I understand that the server would have to calculate the probabilities for double loot using CP and possible double loot events, but I think that would be better than giving another layer to go through.

This would be a FAR better change.

I wouldn't even mind there being a waiting tmer to pull all the nodes at once. A few minutes being frozen in place beats running away and back 20 times by lightyears.

Stacking by profession kinda may help me a little since I tend to only do surveys when they're for an endeavor now. "Pick 5 alchemy plants" etc. I pull all the alchemy surveys from the bank and use Beammeup addon to find the closest one to a wayshrine. And delete all the ones that arent close to a wayshrine. How engaging.

tsaescishoeshiner · July 4

Stacking surveys will save me a lot of inventory space.

It won't take much time to open a character's current writs unless you've hoarded up 500 unopened ones.

And even then, that's way better than what you'd have to sacrifice to set aside 500 inventory/bank slots.

SeaGtGruff · July 4

Elvenheart wrote: »

I've been afraid to open any of my unknown writ envelopes because I've been understanding that clicking on them would spill out every writ in the envelope into my inventory, but today I tried an experiment. I filled up all the slots in my inventory but one by unstacking some potions, then clicked on a writ envelope and it spit out just one writ into my inventory, and left the envelope intact. I didn't get to look into the envelope and select a writ, but at least the envelope still exists, then I hit the button to stack the potions I filled up my inventory with into a single stack. So I ended up getting only one writ out of the envelope that way but didn't get to choose it.

I really wish envelopes worked the same way some boxes do, that we could just open them, look at the contents, select what we want, and leave the rest inside.

As already mentioned, "using" a stack will open only one at a time, like 'using" any other stack of items-- say, a stack of food or drink consumables.

However, if you're like me and want to be extra careful because you aren't sure how it's going to work, you can always "split" a stack of N unknown master writs and change the split to 1 and N-1, then "use" the 1 unknown master writ.

Rittings · July 4

I think a few people here have missed the point. Opening the boxes to get them all out to find stacks of surveys for zones is going to be a massive time dump... You save space in the short term, but you'll need that space to open them all up anyway, so the space will always remain "reserved" for the unopening of the boxes... again, this is counter intuitive to what we desire...

For goodness sake Zos, stop with the constant different surveys in each zone - it just exacerbates the terrible issue.

MAKE ONE SURVEY OF EACH TYPE! Boom... every problem is solved.

Rittings · July 4

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

Rittings wrote: »

Why can't we just have FLAT SURVEYS??? So... "Clothing Survey Report" - and we can complete it where we want?

You mean, so everybody can complete all of their survey reports in Craglorn? Somehow, I doubt that idea would ever fly.

I'm good with them removing nirncrux from survey nodes... it's not like most of us ever need more than a few of them in our lives... plus, bots are all over Craglorn dilluting their price anyway, so I don't think it really matters... heck, remove the survey report sites from Craglorn altogether for me if you want... I just want an easier life that doesn't compromise inventory space, nor does it offer a used bandaid for the issue.

MJallday · July 4

personally id have much rather they sorted out the 900000 transmute boxes i have

Elvenheart · July 4

DenverRalphy wrote: »

Elvenheart wrote: »

I've been afraid to open any of my unknown writ envelopes because I've been understanding that clicking on them would spill out every writ in the envelope into my inventory, but today I tried an experiment. I filled up all the slots in my inventory but one by unstacking some potions, then clicked on a writ envelope and it spit out just one writ into my inventory, and left the envelope intact. I didn't get to look into the envelope and select a writ, but at least the envelope still exists, then I hit the button to stack the potions I filled up my inventory with into a single stack. So I ended up getting only one writ out of the envelope that way but didn't get to choose it.

I really wish envelopes worked the same way some boxes do, that we could just open them, look at the contents, select what we want, and leave the rest inside.

Huh? Are you under the impression that if you have say, a stack of 12 unknown blacksmith writs, that if you click it with more than 12 empty slots open in your inventory that it'll extract all of them? Cuz that's not how it works.

It will always extract one writ at a time.

Oh, thanks for that insight. I really did think if you clicked on the envelope it would just disappear and dump anything inside it into all the available inventory slots if you had more slots that the content of the envelope.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · July 4

Just let me send my companion out to do the surveys in my inventory and return with the mats whilst I do other stuff...

method__01 · July 4

i have a lot -prolly close to 3000 PC EU and 2000+ NA server,try to do as much as possible but no time
also going back and forth resetting the node ,might work for 10-20 times but for 100?
asking for assistant i dont know now how many years, nothing
at least give me the change to harvest more with one -like 5 or 10 so cut the time in half

jetplane_18 · July 4

Rittings wrote: »

I think a few people here have missed the point. Opening the boxes to get them all out to find stacks of surveys for zones is going to be a massive time dump... You save space in the short term, but you'll need that space to open them all up anyway, so the space will always remain "reserved" for the unopening of the boxes... again, this is counter intuitive to what we desire...

For goodness sake Zos, stop with the constant different surveys in each zone - it just exacerbates the terrible issue.

MAKE ONE SURVEY OF EACH TYPE! Boom... every problem is solved.

Yup this is the problem. Nothing really changes compared to the current system because you're still getting random surveys from it. It's just an extra step.

lillybit · July 4

Totally agree it's a completely pointless "fix" that probably means we'll never get a real solution

Most people either do them straight away so don't need them to stack, or wait til they have a decent pile so would need to open every one because there's no way of knowing otherwise.

I really wanted them to just store in the craft bag so they were always available to collect as I was in the neighbourhood - or at least easy to access if I have a bit of spare time.

As it is I store my mine over 3 characters (so I still have space for crafting) so that's a lot of loadscreens just because I'm in the area!

On the subject of surveys, would love if the alchemy ones could start giving a proper selection rather than just the same 6 flowers - I have so many of those now and still struggle for mushrooms

Cooperharley · July 4

I'd rather them just give us the materials as a surprise jackpot from our daily writs or give us a survey assistant. I've never once gotten a survey and thought, "oh boy, I can't wait to run all over the place gathering crafting materials!" I just delete them now. I don't mind a few chores here and there, but i have enough chores in real life and don't log into a video game for more.

Edit: misspell

katanagirl1 · July 5

The master writ change made doing daily master writs more complicated for me. The same thing will happen to surveys.

SeaGtGruff · July 5

I don't mind having surveys for nearly every zone. (I know there are none for Summerset, but I'm not sure if there are any other zones which have no surveys.) But I don't think we ever needed three different surveys of each type for certain zones. And I'd love it if they added the ability to occasionally get certain zone-specific style mats from harvesting nodes, as they did for a few zones before apparently dropping that approach and having them be occasional daily quest rewards instead.

As for the specific idea of having a single stackable unknown survey report of each type, I'd personally be okay with that, but I can see why some players wouldn't be. It wouldn't do anything to reduce my existing plethora of survey reports, but it would be helpful going forward. What they ought to do is have some sort of event which incentivizes players like me to work through their huge backlog of surveys, such as giving us a reward coffer each time we complete a survey. I'd be okay with the reward coffers not having anything "special" such as event style pages, because I don't need something else to clutter my inventory.

Jofish · July 5

I am doing all my surveys once a week. I have plenty of room in my bank for them. I don't see a problem nor a need for the mysterious"unknown". Even the master writ unknowns simply add another step to a simple procedure. I do all my master writs each day. And i have plenty of time to play cards...