Extremely disappointed with the growing number of heritage items

I was very disturbed and disappointed to see the growing number of heritage items in the shop. Items that I likely would have purchased in the past for decoration (candles, holiday lights, etc). Great job on killing sales and diminishing income.

 

It seems to me that, although they understand the importance of decorating for their cash flow and attracting players, they don't really have anyone with a decorator mindset on the team. And so they don't seem to have a grasp on the types of items that would be great to have as Heritage (unique items that are going to anchor the space you're decorating and so you're unlikely to buy them unless you know you want them in a particular space, in which case you'll design the space around the Heritage item) versus "foundational" items that you want to have as tools in your decorating chest but that you need to have affordable versatility with -- you need to be able to buy a bunch of them, test them out, see which works best in which space, then either trade on the ones that don't work best or store them until the next project -- neither of which you can do with Heritage items. So things like the melted candles -- they would be great decorating items, but no decorator's going to buy them unless they can afford to just support Port -- or unless they're making a space where the candles are intended as the anchor instead of as accents. And that's a very small minority of people. :-(

I wish I could believe they were properly analyzing item sales and comparing sales of similar Heritage and non-Heritage items. But given the size of the team and the way Chris talks about how quick and easy it is for them to add new Crown shop items, and the way I've seen some treated on stream, it feels much more like the Crown shop items are created by whim and then forgotten about, rather than with any strategy to maximize sales.

 

The general problem I have is that they're bound, period. My wife and I have 5 accounts, something like 14 properties, and we have a single "storage" house specifically so any of our avatars (who are all CO-OWNERS FOR A REASON) can decorate ANY of the properties. They've utterly undermined their player base with this (as you said, clearly not having decorators on staff).

 

With the new deco palette, you can place no trade items on lots you have permission. I just did this on qa with my second account.

 

That does zero for the issue I just described. I cannot log in whatever account I want, log into my avatar, go to the central storage house, pull the item out of the chest, and take it to the lot being worked on. It's STUCK ONLY to the account that bought the accursed thing. I cannot buy something and store it at the house for later use for my wife. Etc etc etc. We have 10's of thousands of items well organized in specific chests so that we know exactly where to go to find the types of items we're looking for for a given property that's in the process of being decorated at any given time. The pallette system does nothing as far as solving this, and makes things even significantly worse by removing the ability to properly sort and store items.