Partial improvements to jewelry crafting mats requirements. Is it enough?

Iselin

After several weeks of silence ESO has finally decided to partially address jewelry crafting mats grind a bit. This is what they had to say (and my response):

ZOS_MSchroeder wrote: »

We’ve heard your concerns about Jewelry Crafting, and we’ve been working on a few changes to help address them. The change to the value of Master Writs was a big part of those changes, but it isn’t the only part – or even the biggest! We’d like to inform you of some of the changes we’re currently working on for Jewelry Crafting.

• First, we’ve noticed that some players will leave Blacksmithing resources alone in their search for more Jewelry Crafting materials – which can result, in the long run, in a zone having too few Jewelry Crafting Seams for players to find. To help alleviate this, in an upcoming PTS patch, we’ll be adding a small amount of Jewelry Crafting raw material to some (but not all) Blacksmithing ore nodes. Not only will this encourage players to harvest both Blacksmithing and Jewelry Crafting resources, it will also result in more Jewelry Crafting Dust being mined overall (as we are not affecting the yield of existing Jewelry Crafting Seams at all).
• Second – and this is the big one – in an upcoming PTS patch, we’ll be significantly reducing the number of Platings it takes to upgrade a piece of Jewelry. At maximum rank in Platings Expertise, it will take you only a single Terne Plating to upgrade a ring from White to Green, and it will take only 4 Chromium Platings to upgrade a ring from Purple to Gold – both of which are half of what it takes currently on Live.

With these changes, we aim to make the experience of obtaining Jewelry Crafting materials, upgrading Rings and Necklaces, and completing Jewelry Crafting Master Writs more enjoyable and economically beneficial. They should arrive on PTS sometime soon – and be included in the final Live release of the Wolfhunter DLC pack.

Thanks for the info about rolling back a bit on the extra grind for jewelry upgrade mats. But I'm still having a hard time understanding why jewelry upgrades, especially to green, blue and purple, need to have this extra requirement relative to the other 9 gear slots.

• Green, blue and purple jewelry drops in the world are no more rare than similar quality for the other slots. Making crafting those upgrades have still 5X the resource requirement leaves crafted jewelry at a distinct disadvantage relative to improving any of the other 9 slots.
• It's not like jewelry is inherently so powerful compared to the other 9 slots that extra effort should be imposed on upgrading it. If any one type of item should be that way due to the impact it has on your overall power, I'd think that would be weapons not jewelry.

IMO, anything other than treating jewelry crafting gear improvements just like the other 9 slots is still contextually wrong.

What do you guys think?

MadFrenchie

It seems to be a step in the right direction, but I would certainly like to hear they're justification for requiring more mats, as you say, for equipment that doesn't seem to warrant it in any objective manner.  It seems like less than fun design for the sake of less than fun design.

How do the changes relate to the cash shop?  I'm not familiar enough with it currently to comment on that relation.

Iselin

MadFrenchie said:

It seems to be a step in the right direction, but I would certainly like to hear they're justification for requiring more mats, as you say, for equipment that doesn't seem to warrant it in any objective manner.  It seems like less than fun design for the sake of less than fun design.

How do the changes relate to the cash shop?  I'm not familiar enough with it currently to comment on that relation.

This is not really one of those in game grind vs. cash shop issues. The only cash shop relief for jewelry crafting has to do with the trait research real world timers and in that sense JC is no different than any of the other crafts with research timers that have had this cash shop relief option for a long time.

It's just a bad design issue with forced rarity because it's new or just because.

Iselin

Torval said:

The TL;DR of his post: We hear you and acknowledge JC isn't fun. We don't want to make it fun, so we'll try to make it less unfun.

Everything they do supports one of their revenue models. Insane grind helps support the subscription and consistent logins that also secondarily support using the cash shop. The longer it takes, the longer the sub lasts. The longer the subscription period and daily grind activity the more likely players will spend money on other aspects of the game.

When the grind gets too high they can just lessen it a tiny bit, players call it a victory. The overall impact to loss of revenue is minimal.

ZoS is so revenue focused I look at everything they do with regards to how it contributes to revenue growth.

The changes don't spark a greater interest in JC for me, despite the reduced requirements.

This is true but I was trying to be polite and constructive with my response to see if they actually have an answer to the inconsistency they created relative to the other gear crafts.

JC wasn't created in a vacuum: they already had established a baseline grind associated with crafting back in the days when it was a sub-only game - a time where presumably grind for the sake of extending subs made more sense since that was the only business model at the time.

Carving out JC and making the upgrade requirement 10 times grindier (now 5 times) doesn't even make sense as a sub incentive since they made it so obnoxious the bulk of the player base is not even trying to do it.

YashaX

Its good news, but it doesn't go far enough. 

I would like to see JC follow the same rules as other crafting professions- possibly making upgrading to gold harder than other professions if they are concerned about the market for gold jewelry.

I don't understand how they allowed such a terrible system to go live in the first place, it seems to detract from many of the things that makes crafting so attractive in ESO.

Iselin

YashaX said:

Its good news, but it doesn't go far enough. 

I would like to see JC follow the same rules as other crafting professions- possibly making upgrading to gold harder than other professions if they are concerned about the market for gold jewelry.

I don't understand how they allowed such a terrible system to go live in the first place, it seems to detract from many of the things that makes crafting so attractive in ESO.

I'm not willing to even concede that upgrading jewelry to gold needs to be different than upgrading any other gear item to gold. Gold drops of any item type are very rare top of PVP campaign or vet trial rewards. But we're able to upgrade lower tier items to gold at a gold cost of course since gold upgrade mats are pricey.

The only reason that gold jewelry drops have traditionally been more highly prized was because the game didn't have jewelry crafting so you couldn't improve blues or purple to gold (for whatever that's worth since jewelry improvement to gold is just a tiny incremental increase in stats over purple unlike doing the same with weapons where you do get very nice boosts) like you always could with any other item. Now that JC does exist, trying to maintain that rarity of gold jewelry is a silly artificial thing - just a legacy leftover from the times when you could not upgrade it. It's shallow development thinking. 

Octagon7711

I noticed the Devs have always had the idea that the game should have epic difficulty.  When ESO first came out every boss at the end of a quest line had a very hard boss fight, often forcing players to level up more and/or find a more efficient build. The devs said they thought the game should have a high difficulty level in order to make it more fun.  A lot of players complained and now it's a cake walk. 

The same epic difficulty philosophy has popped up whenever something new has been introduced or if it was easy, was later nerfed to make it a grind.  Same with jewelry.  Over time they will probably make it easier when they start to concentrate on the next epic difficulty content.

Iselin

Octagon7711 said:

I noticed the Devs have always had the idea that the game should have epic difficulty.  When ESO first came out every boss at the end of a quest line had a very hard boss fight, often forcing players to level up more and/or find a more efficient build. The devs said they thought the game should have a high difficulty level in order to make it more fun.  A lot of players complained and now it's a cake walk. 

The same epic difficulty philosophy has popped up whenever something new has been introduced or if it was easy, was later nerfed to make it a grind.  Same with jewelry.  Over time they will probably make it easier when they start to concentrate on the next epic difficulty content.

I hear what you're saying and if they had invented some new powerful thing, different from existing systems, and made that something very difficult to get, I could see the sense of it.

The problem I have with doing this to JC is that it's just another craft for one of the item slots we have been using and equipping since day one and there is not a thing super powerful or unique about those item slots other than the fact that we couldn't craft them or upgrade them before and now we can.

It just doesn't fit in with the well established gear crafting and upgrade system that it's part of. It's an inconsistent forced difficulty.

I'm not against adding legitimate difficult new system but doing it to JC is just plain silly.

YashaX

Iselin said:

YashaX said:

Its good news, but it doesn't go far enough. 

I would like to see JC follow the same rules as other crafting professions- possibly making upgrading to gold harder than other professions if they are concerned about the market for gold jewelry.

I don't understand how they allowed such a terrible system to go live in the first place, it seems to detract from many of the things that makes crafting so attractive in ESO.

I'm not willing to even concede that upgrading jewelry to gold needs to be different than upgrading any other gear item to gold. Gold drops of any item type are very rare top of PVP campaign or vet trial rewards. But we're able to upgrade lower tier items to gold at a gold cost of course since gold upgrade mats are pricey.

The only reason that gold jewelry drops have traditionally been more highly prized was because the game didn't have jewelry crafting so you couldn't improve blues or purple to gold (for whatever that's worth since jewelry improvement to gold is just a tiny incremental increase in stats over purple unlike doing the same with weapons where you do get very nice boosts) like you always could with any other item. Now that JC does exist, trying to maintain that rarity of gold jewelry is a silly artificial thing - just a legacy leftover from the times when you could not upgrade it. It's shallow development thinking. 

That certainly would be the best way to go, the crafting system for non-JC professions is fantastic- it takes a long time and dedication to become a master but lets players make great gear at all stages of the journey. It feels so much more satisfying than crafting in any other mmo I've played- probably because it was derived from a single-player rpg system which focused on interesting gameplay mechanics rather than grind.

Its disgraceful how they could take such a great core system and totally fuck it up for JC.