Is agriculture back in the game?

The issue with that @Time Lord is that it would break one of the design rules originally laid down in the game, namely that "Crafted goods should never be worth more to NPC merchants than their raw materials". Now that rule has been bent more than once, but it is generally still in effect. As far as I could tell, it was all part of LB's dream of creating a fully closed economy like in the release version of Ultima Online, which failed miserably for, I'm assuming, the same reason.

 

I will try and remember that when gathering and then selling to NPC, or selling 1000 coconut bras to NPCs or selling 100 rusty swards that I'm doing something illegal.

Time management is nowhere within those items, yet with agriculture crops it's a requirement to keep the schedual.

• 1) "The player keeping to the work schedual of each crop is the crafting of agricultured crops".

• 2) Agriculture is labor intensive on a set schedual that if violated the player loses more than they invested. No other crafted item has the restrictions of any time demands.

• 3) As long as cotton remains as the most cash for NPCs, all opposition based on the historically quoted design rule mentioned above by @Burzmali does not apply, as cotton has ALWAYS (from the beginning of all sota agricuture time) been the crop that makes the most gold from NPC transaction.

I can't help but to feel ripped off and now being argued with using false truths and false facts as the basis for having taken away my purchased asset's viable functionality, "unless you are a cotton farmer".

There seems no excuse accept the rhetoric of false data.

Why cotton? A medium time crop, then why not a quick crop and a long crop being the same as cotton?
Include a quick and long schedual crop and that way the time management game is not lost. We lost that time management game.

Why cotton since the beginning of time has been the most profitable of all crops?
Why did the other crops change their NPC prices when cotton was always the top cash crop?
Why not coconuts instead of cotton? Why not the potato instead of cotton?

Why is there no excuse for having taken away our time management game?
~TL~

 

The simple answer is likely that devs simply didn't want to create a separate raw cotton (farm grown) item to distinguish it from the version that can be gathered in adventure areas. It would have been a lot of work to ensure that all the cotton recipes worked with both versions of raw cotton and derailing a gravy train many of your most generous customers are riding is always a risk.

I have always come down hard on SotA's flaws, I think the state of the game is ridiculous given that it has taken in tens of millions of dollars, however, I at least respected the original economic model. There was something elegant about the idea that the total amount of value in the game was fixed, with gold sinks and faucets balanced with gold only entering the economy when someone purchased the game and maybe when folks bought crowns, that was never particularly clear. It was certainly flawed, and Port almost immediately abandoned it by selling bypasses as soon as the cash shop opened, but at least it was different from all the other MMOs out there.

 

Thanks for the responses,

I will not be playing Shroud of the Avatar until Agriculture regains what was taken from it after over a dacade of service to our game in raised funds for.

My/our Agriculture game was taken away with no reasons or logic while leaving only industrial Cotton Agriculture in it's place.

A player should be able to count on their game not being taken away from them after having invested to build that part of our game.

Adue, enjoy the game that there is, the game I finaced with many zeros is gone.
~Time Lord~

 

I respect your decision to not play a game that erased your fun in it.


It happened to taming with the power loss to pets by adding in easily worn down durability in balls/harness/collars, food to boost, taming gear that is hard to replace, etc.

Pets used to be great as they were now they are a fraction of their original selves. Just to have more items to farm continuously when they break.

I will always be here playing SotA and remembering what was so fun and how the game has been turned into.

 

Assuming that all our our agriculture's lost guts are on some cutting room floor, maybe a better use of time agriculture's management game can be found.

Raise your hand if you have ever played a time management game? It's, it's own genre in some gaming search engines, which is why I was surprized when our game ended it's time management game with nothing replacing it.

I can remember like it was just yesterday when countless Avatar stared at our skies timing each planet's passing. We are lucky that our planet's timing has not been cut from our game, but no one would notice because such effects are automatic and do not pose any care to come to gamer's mind because they cannot be changed or played upon. The moon and sun effect little in an almost un-felt very delecate way.

All that sota $ unto "time" with no game to show for it, now that gainful agriculture was ended.

How much does the average player make per hour here? It was always more than could be made by agriculture, unless it's cotton farming for npc gold (someone important activity?), even then it's far less than can be otherwise made per hour.

Agriculture was mentioned in every fund raising outside interview, so I know it was once important.

Like a quest, this mystery has an answer somewhere to be found.

Shipping containers... maybe all that agriculture programing code was lost/ended as a result of these, but they do not accept agriculture grown goods either. These shipping containers evolved around the same time as our agriculture came under attack/change.

SOTA - Time Management Game - sorry, not listed in that genre even though we once were...
~Time Lord~

 

Did they reduce the amount of XP you get for making orange dye? Growing pumpkins was an agriculture boom for a while.

 

I .. think.. I understand what the Time lord is getting at here.
I guess a year or so ago I made a post about trees.. and how it detracts from the game and confuses new players. In short-
We have beautiful lush forests. But only two types of harvestable wood.
You can visit a a "forest" zone and there be very few trees to chop.
Despite there being visual oak, walnut, fir, spruce, palm etc, only pine and maple can be chopped (weird orange color)
Yet from the crown store, for example, you can buy oak, dark oak, cherry, walnut etc furniture.
And the few other types of wood we can craft with are using pine or maple combined with other ingrediants to create a few wood types without ever having those tree types to chop.
This is confusing, lazy, not very dynamic, or imaginative, and absolutely not "immersive". There's so much to add to the game if certain wood can ONLY be gotten in certain zones, and with certain skill levels. Maybe a certain type of metal in an axe to type a certain tree. Plus the skills necessary to actually craft certain wood. Basically if one wanted to be a lumberjack (and that's ok), there would be a more complete worthwhile experience.
As it is now, you can find an area you like and camp it and just chop the hell out of the same boring trees. (damn you devs for removing my Solace Bridge Outskirts tree farming runs!)

I know there have been similar complaints about mines.. if you want silver you don't go to the White Guard Silver mine which barely has silver, you go to elysium! If you want gold, go to the bottom of the Crag Mines, not Understorm Gold Mine filled with copper! you get the point.

That being said, I believe where Time Lord is going with his complaint is this -

If you decided to play this game and for some insane reason wanted to JUST be a farmer then to really have any kind of go of it, your only real choice is farm cotton.
You can get yourself some land, go buy an ungodly amount of cotton seed, plant it, water it a time or two and sell it to NPC and thats it.
Most/all other crops you're going to operate at a loss, with few exceptions.
It shouldn't be all about XP, double Xp, etc.
I like where majoria70 was going with what she posted.
If AG was more like a mini game that would be awesome.
Plants can wilt & die.
Fertilzer to grow robust crops.
Insects to lower yeilds.
Alchemical Pesicides to kill insects or fortify crops.
Shotages of seeds from NPC..
Ingame rain possibly flooding out crops or lack of rain possibly causing a drought that requires more watering.
A horde of insane rabbits eating a carrot crop!
NPC buying crops at a rate great enough to make seed/time investment worthwhile.
Daily/weekly quests to deliver X amount of a crop
Super rare seeds that have to be carefully maintained to produce a specific ingredient and if done 100% correctly maybe even give the item and another seed!

WOW!!! if I didn't hate farming (slightly less than I hate fishing), I'd be excited for all this!

With the exception that I disagree with it being a reason to not play, I believe Timelord is correct. Agriculture could and should be a more immersive game mechanic.
I do believe that's one of the main things that was always "promised" between this an even UO that's always been handled poorly.. The idea that you can come into this world and be whatever your want to be. I can practically hear LB saying if you only want to be a blacksmith you can do that. Or just be a cook and run your shop and bake non-poisonous bread, you can make a living doing that! Or maybe you want to hide in the shadows and be a thief, lifting the coin bags of nobles, or break into homes and pick locks, you can do that too!
You don't HAVE to be an adventurer.

 

Honestly, as far as I can tell, any "time management game" introduced, was entirely by accident, or at least not be design. As I mentioned before, the game was originally designed to have a closed economy. Once it became clear that that was a non-starter, they moved to a model where the amount of value created per hour in an adventure zone was capped, which a variant of is still in use today. The model has always been that value is created in adventure zones and sunk in towns. Once farming was implemented, that got broken, since farming was profitable in towns, even for characters with zero adventurer level, and, frankly, could be scripted, though the devs did hunt scripters. Eventually, the devs decided to fix that loophole by reducing profitability of farming most crops, but cotton was a problem since if you just reduce the price of cotton, you'd impact the value gatherers were making collecting cotton in the field (though this didn't stop them from nerfing the value of wild garlic) and would also disrupt the pricing of everything in the cloth crafting chain, since if you reduce the value of a raw material without reducing the sale price of its products you just encourage folks to craft up a level and sell.

Fundamentally, the question is, should farmers be able to out perform gatherers in adventure zone? Currently, only cotton growers and maybe brewers can do that, but historically most farmers could.

 

I hear "there's only cotton left" often enough that I think it's worth pointing out that Mandrake and Nightshade both now earn 97.5% as much as cotton did before the most recent round of ag changes. Cotton earns 122.5% of what it did before. Garlic is at 95% of old cotton, and on the player market Pumpkins and Barley are the current high-return choices.

 

https://www.sotalore.com/farming
See things for what they truly are, not what their name implies. Gold is nothing and everyone here is filthy rich if gold is the measure. Gold is not a value, it is a "currency" (providing current flow) for small things such as the cost of seeds.

Cotton was always the most profitable crop, "always", this is important to realize that all other crop's npc profit made far less gold. The importance of the npc profits from these lesser valued crops was to be able to have something beyond the npc cost of the seed.

For all those who know our friend @majoria70 and followed the "artwork" that is the POT of Wizards Rest. Art is important! Art of the garden is also important.
Each of our crops have a unique hight, color and shape, as well as having 3 unique planting time groups.

You are cought up in the mercenary and are disregarding the paint to create the artwork, "the gardens" that were once able to npc exchange support themselves. The art of the garden was supported by those "lesser npc profit crops". With the new boarderless planters all the more reason to bring back the paint which the gardener used to create the garden. The art of lighting and shadow with each crop's shape. That's what was lost.

I disagree with that view of what was planned and not planned. SOTA has always been a time management game and intended as such. The planets and sieges along with different magic getting buffed and unbuffed with the time of day, fishing times and crops having different harvest times, make/s SOTA a time management game.

SOTA pays the bills through selling doll house pieces that are fuctional, over 70% of all our crops lost their functionability as garden plants.

A robotic supply chain of wealth is and always has been cotton.

Without agriculture as it was made (before it was ended without known logical reason), sota left the industrial agriculture mercenary and took away the gardens from the gardeners as well as the organic paint brush of the artist.

My entire motive was to keep designing and working in/on the look of my gardens.
5 POTs full of differnt ever-changing gardens and house lot placements, houses.... everything starts with gardening because it sets the stage, enhances the enviorment.

3 hollow holes in the ground and 2 barren pots above ground, all having been purchased for my gardening art, which we once had when I bought them all... just before agriculture was ended with no logic, regard the equipment from the coto store, of what had been sold to me, "for an agriculture game we then had" (OTHER THAN COTTON)

Gardening... I can make more the mercenary way, the easy way by just harvesting (ever-replanting, ever respawning) monsters.
~Time Lord~

 

Also just to mention on harvesting you get decorative plants galore now included with harvesting but guess what, each decorative plant counts against your deco cap so you are really unable to place many of the plants you harvest which renders them not that viable for decorating too much with them.

 

I'm just adding objective information that has been overlooked in this conversation and others on the subject. If I'm honest the rest of the discussion is a bit too quixotic for my taste.

 

Sorry this caused me to laugh. While we don't tilt against windmills, we actually do fight against imaginary giants....

 

I think you missunderstand, the mercenery parts of agriculture are what most deviates from the subject. Sales are the saught after end result of robotic players, where bank account and commodity amounts are the only motive. In that monetary mercenary style of player view, a playstyle of creation art is lost, the gardens are lost or stagnate without function. Everything natural in such money player's consideration becomes robotic. Everything natural becomes a machine that feeds a machine mechanics. Player's are forced into the robotic where time doesn't matter, only the robotic process is allowed due to the human robots wanting "Gold, not Currency". Gold is a hord thing, Currency is what buys commonly useful small things, it is the oil between them to ease exchange.

No one gets rich from agriculture unless they are high skilled cotton farmers. There is no finacial reasons for the loss of lesser valued crops than cotton.

When we point to gold in this discussion, we are pointing to something that was not effected by the deletion of (for example) letus/carrots/ext, as those crops did not sell for the most profit, as cotton does and always has. There was no problem solved through deleting the npc profit of carrots (and everything else).

These are what you see or site here as the first motive that comes to your mind, profits, "large profits" without mention of the fun in planting or seeing your crops planted or meeting the challenges of 3 different time groups. I'm not saying that is somehow wrong of you, that's the element of it that first motivates your own personal intent. Yet there was no dangers posed to that intent, your intent, your motive by the npc price of carrots.

My own motives are not robotic nor quixotic, they/these lesser crop's profits were a part of our game for years! Years of selling things in the coto shop to engage in agriculture's gameplay enjoyment as it was and then to throw that part of our game away as if it were never a paid for activity with real money... What we had was an artful activity that robotic players can't understand because they cannot see in the same way as the human-immersive player sees their garden as art.

Neither are right or wrong ways of playing. One I see as robotic and the other immersively more human. Our agriculture was once important. Now only cotton is important and for entirely gold lust reasons.

Tell me the reason agriculture changed and I'll show you another failed explanations to this mystery.

Gold ain't it... but I hear you when you point to it being all you are able to see. Industial agriculture is not the subject lost, as cotton is and has always been king of the for profit crops.

The subject lost was gardening that would pay off for itself.

I feel at this point I need to define the word I'm using "gardening", because it's differs in my mind from industrial agriculture. A garden is a living artwork where harvesting means gain, yet the fun is the artful way the garden was designed to be living, not stagnate or sterile.

Thus far there has been no logical reason lesser profit crops were eleminated from being npc resale rewarding.

We lost a game mechanic, a part of our game was taken without logic or reason.
It should be able to be replaced as easily it was taken away without harm to anyone's current game activity.

I hope I'm not comming accross harsh about this, but it was a feature of our game for years and planed for by players like me through their sota-coto-store purchases.

What's the future hold?
~TimeLord~

 

Take care how you word things, not all of us can afford the real life cash to build the things we want to make in the game so have to make gold to get there - labelling it 'gold lust' is damn near insulting. I want to make things in the game me, my friends, and others can enjoy, not just pile up pretend gold to have a pile of pretend gold, or get any kick out of having more pretend gold than someone else. As I have time, if nothing else, I'll use the mechanics in the game to get what I want to achieve, it would be nicer if there were other options but there really are not if you can't handle the tougher, higher end combat for the rarer drops you can convert to gold to let you build things..

 

The reason I mention our game's funding, is that it was said here that "our creators" never intended for our game to be a time management game, which was false. Our game has been financed by the things that are purchased through our store and our store has shown every intent that agriculture be worth more to the player than a single planting bed or greenhouse, which is why they sell as many as a player would like.

@Aurelius Silverson , you can be offended by whatever you wish, this is how it was. Mass agriculture was and is encouraged through the things that are sold in the coto-shop.

But further, I have many characters across many accounts and some very low level that can all make more gold per hour than agriculture ever could. So, if you are having difficulty hunting for more gold than the cost of a carrot seed, there are many here that can help you achieve that goal.

Agriculture the way it was helped make our game, then when programers began to be laid off, the mention of "treated seeds" was what was said to be the reason agriculture would be temperarily changed while being modified. That programer then left SOTA, leaving without having replaced what he had changed. Alot of money went into developing agriculture in the way it was before those temperary changes which became perma due to his employment ending.
(That's my best description of what happened from this player's "outside" point of view).

SOTA Gold is nothing more than a fantasy of human imagination of having worth. I suspect you already knew this and took offence to me braking the immersion you've put so much effort into, for that I am truly sorry...

"I know exactly how thaat feels, but in an agriculture time management effort game sort of way" ...
...which is the very nature of the harm when that portion of our game was ended with no logical reason for having done so.

What we buy from our coto-shop not only funds our game, it is a bond between the seller and the buyer that what the buyer purchases will retain it's gaming worth after the sale.

Unless you're a cotton farmer that was and is no longer true after the deletion of our player funded and developed agriculture.

If that portion of our game's programing was deleted, then I'm sure we can easily choose a new agriculture time management game. through adjusting what crops NPCs buy from us at what price.

~Time Lord~

 

I'm not sure what to say. SotA was designed with a fairly generic reward loop: take risk, make money, more risk more money. I'm not lying when I say the game was designed that way:

• Adventurers take risks by fighting monsters and make money of their drops, they take more risks by fighting harder monsters and make more money from those harder monsters drops
• Gatherers take risks by harvesting in adventure zones and make money selling to NPC, they take more risks by selling to PC and make more money because market value exceed NPC prices
• Crafters take risks by buying the ingredients they need to craft and make money selling to player vendors, they take more risk by buying from player vendors and make more money selling on player vendors

Risk = reward, not time = reward, though obviously time was always a component of it. If they still exist, you can dig through the earliest posts on the forum, the early devs where quite up front with the core design of the game, much to the frustration of crafters. The idea that you could, and still can, earn money (via trading with NPCs) from farming where blacksmiths can't, is an aberration introduced by later devs trying to insert a square peg into a round hole with as much force as required.

 

I'm not sure how I can more clearly state that my comment was only a factual correction of an error being made throughout this discussion and others. Again, and I stress this mostly to save you the personal time and aggravation that might be inherent in writing another lengthy response, I don't find the other discourse in this thread worth commenting on personally. Just correcting a common misconception that seems overly persistent despite the numbers.

 

This reminds me of this old ultima story;

The bold stanger

by Old Fabio the Poor

In a time before time, the Gods that Be assembled a group of artisans, craftsmen and lore masters (for, yes, even in those days, art existed) to create the world of Sosaria. To this group, the gods gave a tiny world, Rytabul, in which to test their works, to see if they were of the quality desired for the true world in which they would be placed. And though the gods were tight fisted with their gold, this small crew worked hard and long, and were happy in their tasks.

A small corner of Rytabul had been claimed by the artisan Selrahc the Slow. Though he was not the fastest of the assembled workers, the gods smiled upon his work, even presenting him with a mystic talisman proclaiming his work the best among the newer artisans. And so Selrahc went about his business, creatin (sic) hundreds of designs which would one day add color and variety to Sosaria.

One day a stranger appeared to Selrahc. His chest was bare and he wore the trousers of the brightest green, and wherever he went, plants grew in his footsteps. This caused Selrahc no en (sic) of trouble, the stranger always looking over his shoulder, and the plants sprouting in places Selrahc required to ply his art. And so Selrahc approached the stranger and bade him speak. But this man in green remained silent. Selrahc pleaded with the stranger to give his name, and would he please leave Selrahc to his work. But this mysterious stranger remained mute.

This angered Selrahc mightily. Who was this silent man, interfering with tasks the gods themselves had entrusted to Selrahc? In an attempt to embarass this interloper, Selrahc stole his green trousers, leaving him naked and open to comments about his very manhood, and still the stranger would not speak, would not leave this tiny corner of Rytabul.

Vexed to his very limits, Selrahc took his war axe and smote the silent one mightily, again and again, until the silent stranger ran away, having never said a word, and never showed himself in Rytabul again.

Thus endeth the tale of the bold stranger.

This is what you wrote;

Those are not the same. I took the first quote as being about sota not having been planned as a time management game which was incorrect, and the second quote being about risk = reward which is correct.

and @Coswald_Dirthmire is correct about so much to say about an unresolved mystery in such a just few unanswered questions:

Do we still have that release's data to replace what was taken?

The elements of time are still here, yet have no motive or gain to be made from.

Time management is an element in game theory which needs to be back in our game in a meaningful way which would fit the agricultural items our COTO-Shop is selling.

~TL~