Master writs, ZeniMax explains in a dev piece this week, are high-end trade contracts for elite craftables, granted to master crafters completing difficult regular writs, at a rate boosted by the number of recipes the character already knows. The studio has promised to expand new motifs, traits, and crafted sets to the writ system.
But as players have argued, it could take months for even an above-average crafter, never mind a casual, to work through the system and acquire something genuinely useful for housing, making the writs more of a revenue-generating tool than a boon to crafters as many players will just put down a few benjamins in the cash shop to skip the ordeal.
As Massively OP commenter Camren put it, “You can go the long way around, or you can pay to cross the river here. In this case, though, [ZeniMax] made the river and own[s] the ferry.”
Redditors do note that the cost of sealed writs has fallen to a third their spiked value from last week, while prices on materials like heartwood, flour, and runes continue to climb.
The whole dev diary is available on the official site.