What would be the downside to doubling the ore in Serpent Spine?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Scoffer, Apr 5, 2017.

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  1. Morgoth redbeard

    Morgoth redbeard Avatar

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    just feal that a place cald a mine shood be there for mining not a bunch of hunting we got dungeons for that
     
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  2. Asclepius

    Asclepius Avatar

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    I have to agree here - I only spent limited time in Serpent Spine mine, but I have the same impression. A lot of running around and fighting mobs (which fortunately are not a problem for me, more of a distraction) but very little ore in sight.

    I know the devs are always willing to revisit situations - I ask that they do the metrics on this "mine" and see how much ore/person/hour is currently being farmed compared with previously. Balance that against economic constraints and increase the node availability if possible..
     
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  3. Maltese

    Maltese Avatar

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    Don't like the change. It's a mine not a dungeon.
     
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  4. Sentinel2

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    I'm a GM miner in all four skills. There are only two mines which are able to keep up with me. Etceter and Spectral Mines. Once I've cleared an area of creatures, there is plenty of ore to mine. I'm not sitting around waiting for ore. And waiting. And waiting. . . .

    My concern (as echoed by others) is what happens to the other mines as they become uncloned? Will we see even less ore? It's already a grind to mine. And it's slow going, unless I'm in one of these two mines.

    I realize we are still in development. Balancing is ongoing. And the devs bravely read these threads and try to work through the issues. It's a LOT of work to develop something. I've been there :)

    As I said, I have concerns. I'm hoping we can hit upon the right balance. Fighting the enemies hasn't been the problem many are bringing up here. Finding sufficient ore for crafting in a reasonable amount of time.

    That's the headache I see discussed here.
     
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  5. Berek

    Berek Portalarian Emeritus Dev Emeritus

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    As was mentioned by Starr on a few occasions, we haven't changed the totality of ore spots, though the adjustments we've made to the scene may make it feel like there is less now. I have sent this feedback to the team
     
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  6. ldykllr

    ldykllr Avatar

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    That may be so @Berek , but because of how they are spread out it really affects how much mining can be accomplished. It would be nice if the nodes were in a smaller area to facilitate mining. The amount of resources it takes to craft is quite a bit and making it take longer to collect the same amount of said resources (unless that is the intent), is very disheartening and doesn't make anyone look forward to additional mine unclonings.
     
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  7. Scoffer

    Scoffer Avatar

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    For completeness
     
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  8. Lifedragn

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    I think you are spot on that this is really being miscommunicated. The player complaint is about Ore Density in the Scene, not Number of Nodes in the Scene.

    Let's say the Ore was the Wage and the Scene was an Hour. How would a worker feel about being told that they will make the same hourly wages, but the number of minutes in an hour has been changed from 60 to 90?

    You've kept the same amount of ore, but put it in a larger area. The larger area has provided for more monsters between each opportunity to mine a node. The opportunity cost per ore has been multiplied.
     
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  9. majoria70

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    And also the complaint is not about the area we love it. There are many missed opportunities to scatter ore in hidden places that we explore, in the water, I saw one node in the water, and in the cave areas there was -0- ore at all , slimes and they do not yield any ;) and also other hidden discoveries, but I'm sure more touch ups are coming. This is feedback not criticism of the area.
     
    Last edited: Apr 10, 2017
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  10. Selene

    Selene Avatar

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    I felt the same way when they clogged up verdantis shardfall with all the water elementals and crocs. Before it was a great place to gather wood but now it's just meh.
     
  11. Sentinel2

    Sentinel2 Avatar

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    As I understand it, if you don't pay attention to Survey, the ore respawns at a slower rate (the lower your survey is).

    A couple of mining nurfs ago, I hardly noticed the change in node respawn while other's in my guild mentioned the nodes were taking forever to appear. An unscientific test yes. But that was the impression at least :D

    Perhaps someone can correct this or show where it's been documented :)
     
  12. kaeshiva

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    The "same amount of nodes as it had before" isn't really relevant, compare the size of the place now to the previous size. Ore density is what matters. In the previous iteration of the mine, you had 20 or so metal nodes and a dozen gem nodes in a room not much bigger than a city lot. Not all of these were "spawned" at once, but passing through a good amount would be. The mine had three such chambers - entrance, mid level, and bottom level. Take that same amount of ore and spread it out into an area 10x as big and fill that area with even more monsters. Add some ridiculously high level stuff that has no business in a mine, collapsing walkways that can't be re-traversed, a homicidal mine cart intent on killing the unwary player, flame traps, spike traps, a giant pit of death, etc. etc. and well, its easy to see why so many people are frusrated with the change.

    If you wanna have all this other crap in a 'mine' - fine, do it like Spectral - ore up top, random other stuff below.
     
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  13. Tiina Onir

    Tiina Onir Avatar

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    I love spectral... It's easily the go-to place for iron
     
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  14. Lace

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  15. 2112Starman

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    you know people, we could pull a UO style mass protest some day about this. Have everyone meet at one spot on some weekend and protest to get more ore in the mine.
     
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  16. Zader

    Zader Avatar

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    Ore count # matching doesn't matter when you radically change the size & flow of the zone. Seems a short sighted stat to hang your hat on.

    If the Devs can normalize the ore as in X nodes per square foot, and keep the old and new zone matched in that manner, you'll be less likely to face a revolt.

    Like another said: density. Keep the density the same IMO. Why put all that work into creating a beautiful & dynamic mine yet shoot yourselves in the foot by making it suck for mining?
     
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  17. Arkah EMPstrike

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    In serpant spine im now pulling, i can confidently say, about right at half the rate that i would pull from the old cloned mine, and thats if i only target Iron.

    Before, serpant spine mine was THE best spot to get iron. It was easy, the entire mine was nothing but iron, now i feel as though the weight of regionally available iron has shifted a bit, with regalis being on the edge, Grunvald having a decent supply of it, and Spectral being the decent, higher level mine on the perenial side of the spectral peaks bordering that and grunvald.

    We know they want materials to be valuable (hopefully the value of cotton will increase with agriculture changes), and we know that so far, mining ore for yourself has been the dominate way people have obtained ore for training crafting (If i can mine 230 ore an hour and that ore costs 40 gold each, thats abouts 9000 gold coins worth of ore an hour, then farming gold is not much better than mining the ore. Especially if its over 40 gold each). Doignt he old halaberd farming thing i could make abouts 8k per hour. So we arent gonna compare this to spawn caping chests in the rise or whatever.

    Just ol average Joe, non-multi-accounting 70-90 strength guy pullin in just under 10k an hour JUST farming gold.

    That makes mining the ore yourself far better than buyign it from others for the XP.
    But gathering resources for XP is not neccessary (nor is it the quickest) to get crafting XP.


    So, the dominant force driving the ore market is a desire to avoid mining. You can definatley GM craftign skills without ever gathering any resources. In fact the highest (and most expensive) yield for crafting XP IS from the actual crafting itself.


    So why do folks feel the need to gather for XP?

    Because there is extremely low income in advanced material crafting. And unmasterworked, unenchanted advanced items are still considered low end and udnersireable.


    For TLDR: The biggest jump in the right direction for all of this atm would be to add a better return of income for the higher end stuff that yields decent XP. Quest givers that give daily craftign quests with rewards or a order system similar to what UO has.

    Either that or make un-enchanted/masterworked stuff more desireable somehow.
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2017
  18. psteg

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    I did too
     
  19. Tiina Onir

    Tiina Onir Avatar

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    Serpent Spine has been worse than Spectral for iron for quite some time. The only strike against it is, arguably, that you have to be able to fight skeleton footman, archers, and mages, but since that's the ONLY thing you have to fight, you can come in with a pure-anti-undead loadout (don't take this as my approval of what they did, it's not).


    Most crafting recipies offer less than 500 xp per (which is what an ore node gets you in a high-level mine), and most take more than that from your pool. Only a handful of things give high XP from crafting, and many of those take a good number of resources.


    Part of the answer you said yourself: it's the "most expensive" XP. The problem is, in order to get good conversion, you need a high pool, the only way to build up your pool is to use a skill with it set to maintain, gathering skills are the only things you can use without costing anything, and you're going to use the resources when you're crafting later anyway. As long as there is a "crafting skill pool" that a percentage of comes out of each time you use a skill, rather than directly getting the experience applied to your skill, people are going to use it to fill their pool to 1-2M, before working on the skills they want.



    Frankly, I don't know what you expect them to DO about this. Cause items to blow up more? Increase decay? Remove masterworking and enchanting? Even if they could come up with a way that didn't make all our weapons into glass-shatter-fests, and it becomes worth-while to get your XP from crafting directly, buying the goods you need, everyone will just use that to fill their pools. That will create an influx of advanced items, less people gathering, demand for finished goods remains the same while raw resources increases.

    So, your solution is to have NPC just buy them up? Most games like this balance their economy through a series of "taps and sinks." When you add money to the economy, you generally have to balance it with some leaving, to ward off inflation. What you're suggesting is adding more "taps," which means there has to (by necessity) be more gold sinks as well, or they run the risk of rampant inflation (let's be realistic here, even trying to balance with taps, most games eventually suffer from runaway inflation). I may not be vary creative, but I'm hard pressed to think of any more sinks they could add. Maybe make the wagons, boats, etc charge to take you somewhere (no, I'm not really suggesting that)?

    There's a long list of suggestions (https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/aggregating-vendor-requests.79544/) about improving the player-to-player market, almost all of them are good. Unfortunately, I doubt many will greatly affect the problem you're talking about.

    Other than making it more durable (which is already is), I'm not sure how that could be accomplished.

    Don't get me wrong, the situation as it stands now is not good if the objective is a diverse economy. If you want to get people purely crafting, buying goods from dedicated gatherers, the only solution that's going to be really effective is getting rid of the intermediate "XP Pools" and go to a pure usage system for our skills.

    (I apologize if this came off overly harsh, that's not my intent. My point is balancing a game economy is already a (nintendo) hard problem, trying to use it to solve the deficiencies in our skill development system at the same time is easily a nobel level problem.)
     
  20. Arkah EMPstrike

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    You can get thousands of XP crafting a single item, and you can get over 500 refining a single item

    With this i was thinking having the materials give the bulk of the bonuses, and have masterworks and enchants give smaller additional bonuses
     
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