Meticulous Collection

Is it worth it and is it working as intended?

I understand the base concept in that Meticulous collection means you have a higher chance to get more stuff but the numbers don't seem to make it worth it at all.

I recently tested this using Elysium as a basis. To give you some idea my mining Meticulous is currently at level 107 giving me a base chance of 21.4% chance and I use a pickaxe of prosperity giving me another +3% so 24.4% chance. To test I ran Elysium using the obsidian potion of Precision to give me the difference between 24.4% chance and 34.4% chance.*

For the run I ran the same route, all the way to the bottom hitting every node and then take the mining cart back up to the entrance until I was full. Typically this takes me 2.5 hours or so of solid mining until I'm full, mainly of weapons and stuff so I ran the numbers based on producer xp and cash gained per hour. With the cash its assumed that gold and silver sells at 50 each and includes cash drops, selling all weapon drops, potions etc into a final cash price.

So, the numbers:
With +10% meticulous chance due to the potion of precision over 161 minutes:
Total ores mined: 702
Total cash gained overall: 15,905 per hour
Producer xp gained: 54,596 per hour

Without meticulous potion used over 148 minutes:
Total ores mined: 681
Total cash gained overall: 16,842 per hour
Producer xp gained: 59,797 per hour

So, bottom line:
21 more ores gained by using the potion (but 13 minutes less time used).
With higher meticulous you gain about the same ore but overall come out with less cash and less producer xp.

@Chris
Can we confirm that the obsidian potion of Precision is working as intended and adding a base flat rate of 10% or is it 10% of your base? So from 24.4% is actually 34.4% or 26.8% (10% of 24.4 = 2.4% increase)

Suggestions to make it less crap:
1) Each Meticulous offers more xp as well as ore. So the first node gives 500 xp, meticulous 2 gives an additional 100 xp, meticulous 3 gives an additional 50 xp etc etc so if you manage the meticulous 8 you might come out with 900 xp overall instead of 500 (please don't quote numbers, this is an example)

2) Each meticulous offers you the same base chance of getting a "rare". At the moment if you meticulous copper and get tin you will end up with 1 tin, 8 copper but give all meticulous the same chance to get a rare so you might end up with 8 copper, 4 tin etc

Anyone else got any other analysis, suggestions etc?

Edit: Also for comparison sakes:
With potion: 262 ores per hour
Without potion: 276 ores per hour

 

This was brought up a while ago and yes it seems detrimental in both producer xp gain and ore gain to even bother levelling this up. The meticulous collection only gives you 1 more of the 'base' item on trees, bushes, etc. as well. If I'm picking cottonbushes in the wild, I'm not doing it for the 2 raw cotton, I'm doing it for the chance of a beetle, and if I see meticulous start to happen I immediately stop it as it isn't worth the time standing there. This is less severe with ore as extra ore is always good but over extended testing, yes, you'll end up with about the same in ore but far less XP. The only scenario in which meticulous seems worthwhile for mining is hitting a single node out in the wild somewhere; in mining scenarios you are better off moving to the next one. Add to this that the meticulous kills cost 2x as much XP to level and you're left feeling a bit cheated.

 

Remember hearin it wud be worked on a few months ago... maybe it got lost and should be /bugged again...

Anyone can confirm its known ? @Lexie ?

 

Before they nerfed it, you could get 2, 3 ores on EACH meticulous collect. Now it's a worthless waste of time anyway you measure it.

 

Must have been a long time ago, ever since I played metic was always 1 per. I get more ore without it and more exp because of that.

 

I think the current trend is to reduce ore yield from mining to 1 / mining action. It already happened with copper and iron nodes. Thus being in a mine with limited nodes and long respawn times is where probably metic. collection will come in handy in the future. You wont have wait times between collecting nodes.

 

Meticulous is pretty underwhelming for the cost, but it's not true that it's useless or detrimental (at least for mining and forestry).

A normal meticulous collection takes about 5.5 seconds. If you had a 100% meticulous chance at an unguarded node, you would collect about 650 of the base material per hour, plus a little bit for criticals. Getting attacked once in a while will knock a little off of that, but unless you can gather 600+ ore per hour somewhere, if your goal is to maximize ore gathered, it's better to have meticulous collection than to not have it. If you want to maximize production xp, than obviously that's not the case, and if you want to maximize overall money, it may or may not be the case, depending on the area.

 

I mentally figured this one out long ago and completely agree. This is one reason why I use the Belt of the Butcher (since on my main, most my prod xp comes from animals). Think of a few more variables. Im interrupted all the time while skinning. I walk into a pack of 5+ wolves, kill them all with aoe and quickly try to skin them. Im interrupted 2+ times at least while trying. With the belt, I can skin them much quicker and move on to the next mobs. Whenever my meticulous Collection kicks in I usually cringe because Im expecting to be agro'ed and interrupted most of the time. Consider that most the time I really could care less if I get more hides since I literally have 12000 of them sitting in a chest right now.

 

The numbers above would suggest otherwise. With an extra 10% added to meticulous collection I get less ore per hour.

 

I do the same run top to bottom.

If I don't have metic while mining I'm a bit too fast and get ahead of the node respawn curve.

 

That could easily just be the result of variance in a small sample size. Guestimating the collection rate at 100% meticulous is pretty straightforward and easy to do. The only way meticulous can truly lower your ore expectation in the current available scenes (other than it being broken) is if some other factor comes into play, like slightly longer collection times resulting in fighting more respawns in particular areas or something like that.

 

Based on the example in the OP, I don't see a statistical problem. The example given is only looking at a single comparison. You'd really need to do that test run 100's or even 1000's of times to see the true impact of the potion.

The reason is...(this isn't exactly what the OP said, but the logic is the same if we're asking a question about RNG working correctly or not)


I find it difficult to believe that meticulous collection is not worth it, but I'm also basing this on anecdotal (and not statistical) evidence. I commonly see MORE resources (including ore) gained with meticulous collection, and if that didn't happen I would surely have far less returns.

The real question here is not if it's worth it to you. If it's not then you won't use the potion and you won't train in meticulous collection. That's something that Chris and team monitors a lot, what skills and items are players using? For me the potions have a clear advantage over time. Not just one run but many runs. For the sake of argument let's say the true value is 21 ore per run. You have to multiply that times the number of runs you're planning to make with a single potion. For me, if that's all I ever did, I would have a huge amount of extra ore with the potion than without it during a 7 day period of time.

But here's another example. Currently we get 10k XP every day we log into the game. At low levels that is a fair amount of XP but as you play more and more it's really not that much right? Well if you're only going to log in casually, no it's not. But if you look at that 10k XP per day over the course of an entire year, that's 3.65 million XP! Or to put it another way, that's like GMing 2 or 3 skills or spells.

In summary, I don't think this is much of a problem. It appears the potions are working as intended and the design is solid.

 

I'm actually conducting several runs, the stats used for with potion above was the average of 5 runs with a total of 13 hours using that potion. I'm collecting more data to get an average for non potion usage.

 

Thats the kind of ad they use to prevent people from spending all their social welfare check on luck games

"You think you can control the machine ? The machine does not like to be controlled..." type of infantilisation.

The law of probability, whilst not rock solid science, is still quite reliable. It even was a study subject in school.

Does it apply to pseudo RNG that is another story, but in real life if you play the roulette, the number that hasn't gotten out for more than 3-400 spins, is likely to come up sooner than later, and we were successful to prove it in my 50 people class, we had pretty much consistantly the same result, even if the supposed gambler's fallacy says the number 30 could be drawn an infinite number of time, as true randomness suggest.

Logic dictates you'd fall 50/50 on red/black numbers, but its far from the truth I've seen 40 in a row of each in the day we spent taking samples.

Of course this is no casino games you can keep betting on the same number according to law of probability, but its a good example...

 

Good.

So what we would want to look at is, does using the potion that gives you a 10% bonus really make a difference. I don't know if comparing it by the hour is the best way to do that. I think you have to compare it by attempt.

What I'd really like to see is how many attempts (nodes) you mined, with and without a potion. Then I'd like to see the results of at least 100 nodes with and 100 nodes without. Whatever those numbers show us, we should reasonably be able to say if it "makes sense" and is worth using a potion or not.

I'm curious what you think would be worth it? If you get a 10% increase in total ore is that worth it? What if it's only 5%? Of course if the total is really low or arguably the same then maybe it does need to be raised.

 

This has nothing to do with statistics. We aren't even talking about the chance of additional items yielded mining, which would be based on some sort of stat. How it works now is:

Click on a node:
Get some amount of randomly generated ore applicable to that node (1-3 of the main ore usually, and possible tin/tungsten/nickel/granite depending on type.)
Get 500 xp (assuming you're in a T5 area)
Move to the next node
Repeat

If you meticulous, you spend twice as much time (or 3x as much, or 4x as much, depending on how many metics you are doing) at that same node, but each meticulous will only give you 1 more of the main ore, and you get no further xp.

Provided there are sufficient nodes for you to keep going, it is better to get a fresh node each time than to sit and metic the same one as 1) you'll get xp out of it and 2) you'll get more ore out of it

Bear in mind that while you are mining mobs are also respawning and if you're sitting around meticulousing the whole room is going to respawn before you can clear it, whereas by not doing so you can often clear the room before the mob respawn, thus also significantly reducing your fighting time and increasing your actual 'mining things' time.

The only time meticulous is beneficial is if you are mining or harvesting an area with very few nodes. It is better to spend time meticulousing than to spend time standing around waiting for things to respawn. However most people who have spent thousands of hours mining/harvesting these areas know each potential spawn point and have come up with a very efficient route to keep that from happening.

The new "mines" like Serpent Spine which have extremely spread out/fewer ore nodes - you may do better with meticulous, since there simply isn't as much ore to get and if you powered through every node you run out and then spend time chasing water elementals waiting for them to respawn.

The issue as I see it is that drinking a coto potion should HELP you do more / get more, and the reality is, it simply isn't the case if you're doing dedicated mining/harvesting.

Starman's brought up another excellent example with skinning - its the same thing, a meticulous only gives you 1 additional animal hide and no additional xp or items, so why bother? You're better off moving to the next one.
Same thing with trees - 1 more wood, no more bark/borers ...Same thing with cotton - 1 more cotton, no more beetles/cutworms.

The only way that I could see benefit in actually using precision potion or investing additional XP into meticulous collection would be if each metic gave additional xp, or each metic triggered the initial yield again as when you hit the ore for the first time. In my opinion, I think it needs both behaviors to be worth the xp investment and using the potion, but at least one or the other would make it less of a punishment.

 

Not sure why I was quoted? No offence taken.

Also I can grind 335-360 ore an hour so I feel like I understand how it all works.

 

If it's possible, it would be interesting to take note of how many mobs that you fight in each run. I think in any case where you end up with less of the base material with meticulous over a large sample you will also see more mobs fought.

The hourly is what's important. Meticulous definitely increases ore yield per node. It would still be a debuff if the first swing reward was large enough relative to the bonus swings.

Sure it does. Ore and mob spawns, criticals, meticulous, etc, don't run like clockwork. You don't get exactly the same amount of ore each time you mine for an hour in the same spot, so making a minor change in stats can quite easily not be reflected in the results over a small sample.

 

If you think it's bugged, file a bug report. I've found that's the most effective way to get something to the dev team.

The question often arises... is X function broken or "working as intended"? Unfortunately... we can't always tell from our end. So when in doubt, report a bug.

 

Fact of the matter is Meticulous collection plain is NEVER worth using UNLESS you're limited by available nodes (or you see that it's critting). You will always net more resources (you can't get tin/beetles/bark etc. from Meticulous and gold/silver can't come in x2 and x3 varieties) and similarly you're also getting less experience if there are ANY respawns of nodes/animals/trees/etc. before your loop ends. As expensive experience wise as it is, I find the extremely limited use very disappointing as in almost any real situation where someone is doing it "right" .... sitting and waiting for meticulous collections yields less exp/hour and less ore/hour.