Gathering need to be changed before I go stir crazy

Nothing has changed in that regard since R23 came in with the accompanying wipe. We started with 10 in Proficiency in all harvesting skills ('cept Fishing).

Thx for the offer Moiseyev, but my main will be accompanying her on my 2nd monitor for that purpose.... She'll be fine, just p*ssed that she has to do the harvest that I always used to do.

My main:

 

Would help tremendously on harvesting, if your going to fail make it happen somewhere between 1/3-2/3 of the way into the harvesting timer. As to adventuring skills FrostII I would also add air *Cough*. Also there are not anywhere enough mining nodes in the lower levels. It makes it VERY difficult to raise mining till you reach about tier 5 level.

 

That's because you've had the advantage of the 4x multiplier.

 

You may have a point with that,

But getting to level 30 or 40 puts me in a position to do just about everything in the game. No need to max levels

 

Well, I used to disbelieve the success percentages, much as the OP does. However, I spent an afternoon grinding away at Iron Ore nodes, all with a 30% probability and guess what over dozens and dozens of attempts the probability of success was, in my investigation, 30.5%! It can be frustrating, but the laws of probability don't prevent 10 failed attempts on a node before success, followed immediately by 8 failed attempts on the next node. What I (and I suspect others) tend to forget is all the nodes, where I succeeded on the first attempt.

Having said that, I rather like the idea of, if it's going to fail, fail immediately. But what happens to the development of experience? Although I'm going to regret this, I think experience should be a function of time spent working on a skill, not just the number of successes, with that skill.

 

Aye, something to make it bearable.

I haven't done much of any gathering in a few releases except maybe gather once and while and go, oh yah, it is still miserable, even having prosperity tools that I use. I haven't used the starter tools to see how much worse it would be with them, but I did watch someone that tried it in a video with the starter tools and it was hard to watch, hehe.

Went to test it a few mins ago on a few 25% chance node, each had to wait 40 seconds try to find out if I was going to fail or succeed. Took 10 fails and on the 11th succeeded on one of the nodes. That's almost 6.7 minutes just working on one node for 1 ore and a piece of granite. Where as at 71% chance on a blue crystal was only 10 seconds and 2 failures. The crystal was bearable. I know it gets better once you gain more levels on it, having tested it in previous releases, but it's just too mind numbing and the yield is too low to bother with it in its current state for me.

The yield per node/tree doesn't make sense. If you were collecting stuff the whole time you were mining it would be a bit more bearable, even if I'm just getting useless rocks while I'm waiting or chips of ore or ore during the gather time....something. It would make more sense to yield something the whole time you're mining if the timer is going to be so long. Same with chopping wood. You chop down a whole tree for 1 piece of wood and maybe some bark once in a while.....it's a whole tree.

 

I'm at lvl 29 Forestry. I've been grinding for numerous hours during this release for maple tree bark and pine tree bark. I started farming at around 26 Forestry. Granted I'm doing this in a bit higher level zone than I should be... it takes me about 1 hour to obtain 3-5 barks of either type. Typically this is not enough to even make 1 dye. If I get drops of exactly the same type of bark (never happens), it will take me about 2 hours of farming to make one Dark Blue Dye.

Taking my forestry lvl out of the equation, there comes a point where the trees in the zone won't spawn fast enough within a given timeframe to increase my rate of collection. Judging by my progression, I think that'll be around a half hour for the same amount of materials listed above.

Is that challenging enough that the economy won't be broken by farmers? Is it too challenging to be a successful dye crafter? I don't know the answer to that question yet, but it seems pretty painful to me so far. I'm not sure how it would feel if I didn't have the 4x multiplier to get me this far in 3 releases.

This is just one example of one crafted item produced by difficult to harvest items.

 

Ah once again beat by feminine wit... hm I was gonna say... nice all that talk about failing, but people clearly don't feel like they're failing if theres many parts of failing you can do many things with.

Example : You fail at harvesting mandragora root (which is hard to conceive, but ok) you end up with leaves, so you can still cast a spell with that but theres a chance it won't be effective, so you effectively dilute the anti-fun factors in so many layers that it isn't so in your face anymore. Obviously a much more compex layering system is needed for crafting...

I'm really impressed that finally someone catches on that idea I've been losing my voice over since early releases I won't repeat myself but although I appreciate the professionalism that goes in developping shroud I feel its just not the "main stage attraction" for some devs, and some elements lack some love... love that is kind of engrained within our fibers as old UO gamers...

I'm not judging anyone's personal life in particular... its just that it makes a huge difference.

Right now I'm happy because I make no difference, someone else has caught the idea and my goal is getting the ideas out there. Change the whole paradigm...

High five Ice Queen

 

Tree bark will be easier to get next release for dyes because it is supposed to be aquired by processing the wood you find as well. As far as other advanced materials go, i get those faster by harvesting tier 3 or 4 nodes. The only reason i would wanna hit tier 5 nodes at the moment is to skill up without moving around much, or to get higher tier materials (like tungsten or borers) that arent used in crafting yet.

At the moment, there is no real reason to gather tier 5 nodes because the special materials they yield in more abundance than other nodes are not useable yet other than to sell for gold.

There are lenty of tier 3 and 4 node areas for trees and ore. Some regions provide more of one thing than another.

Also buying materials from other players is a super quick way to get anything

 

It might help a little if we came across a stray silver node now and then in the lower tiers. Having decided to finally learn the Taming Skill, I had to make whistles and collars, so I needed silver. Mining silver at a snails pace drives me even more crazy than the failures, 'though I am none to fond of the wait/wait/wait/fail/repeat either. I agree with the previous posts that it would help if it failed part way through the cycle.

I've leveled all my mining skills a number of times since I first hit 60% chance at the mines, yet I still have 60% chance. Unfortunately, I don't recall my skill level when it rolled from 59% to 60%. Yes, I did notice that it has to level 2 or 3 times to see a percentage increase, but I feel like I am stuck or capped at 60%. I was wondering if anyone else is having that problem.

Once, I had Survey Distance off for a long time, and when I turned it back on, it didn't start to fill the green bar at all. After several on/off attempts on different days, it finally began to fill the green bar again.

In the beginning, I left Gathering Time Bonus on, but turned off the other three because I wanted to level that skill so I would fail faster. Apparently it does not work that way because that didn't seem to help, so I turned Skillful Harvest and Meticulous Collection back on too. So using the Pickaxe of Prosperity, say in Graff Gem Mine on the silver nodes, with 53 Skillful Harvest, 25 Survey Distance, 46 Gathering Time Bonus, and 38 Meticulous Collection, does anyone know what percent chance should I have? Or know what level I can watch for it to roll to 61% chance?

 

If the skill failed part way through the cycle youd have to increase harvest difficulty to compensate.

As it is now, anyone can gatheranything without any skill. But until you get better, the higher tier stuff that yields rarer stuff more often is really time consuming and inefficient. It needs to be that way so that everyone in the game isnt selling everything in the game.

 

Making nodes out of your skill range easier for you to harvest defeats the purpose of having harder nodes. Maybe the issue is in the ease of skill training or something, but most scenes have an abundance of some type of resource over others, as do most regions. Being a lumberjack in grunvald, for example, is gonna be alot tougher than being one in the perennial trail

 

At around 30 harvesting skill, a tier 5 node has about 40% success rate (tho im sure that there is a hidden producer level that affects gather rates by 1% per level still). Thats what it is for me anyways. At 20ish swift gathering your gather speed is increased by 15 or 20% i think. Your meticulous collection essentially gives you a shot at an extra, garunteed success node during harvest. With all these skills at or near 30 it is easy and quick to get nodes tier 1-3, and tier 4 is around 60%.

Theskull markers in a scene give indication of what tier the nodesyou will find in a scene are.

 

I want to address this in particular, both as it is and why that system might not be ideal. Okay, so tier 5 nodes start with ~30 pickaxe swings. Every 4-5 levels of swift gathering reduces that by 1 swing. That means that going from 0 to 5 offers a reduction in your current mining time of about 3.3%. If you go from 95 to 100 the reduction in time is about 14.3%. This is just the result of the formula that they use for swift gathering, but I believe the degree to which the payoff only occurs at high levels is both unsatisfying and tricks players into undervaluing the skill.

For some of your other concerns:

I expect your survey might have had skill decay that delayed skill gain when you turned it back on.

Mining % chance actually has 2 factors instead of 1. Something like every 4 levels of mining proficiency and every 2-3 producer levels each should increase you chances by 1%. These numbers are approximations and might be somewhat inaccurate.

 

I am not much of a crafter but I do like to harvest. I have not found it too difficult to harvest when I stay in the appropriate zones, just like in UO. I set up a harvest path that I constantly circle back to which brings in high yields. It is not the most exciting thing to do but it works. I use the same type of approach in all MMO's and I tend to supply crafters with resources fairly quickly.

One of the suggestions which I really like is if a "fail" is going to happen it should be quick instead of going through the entire animation.

I also didn't realize tree bark was used for dyes. I had so much of it I just tossed it all...."sigh"

 

Tree Bark is not used for dyes. Maple Tree Bark and Pine Tree Bark are. Both are new items for this release. I'm guessing you tossed plain ol' tree bark.

And basic resources aren't so much the issue. The boredom in the grind is....especially when you're seeking carapace/suet/maple tree bark/etc. Finding ways to make that grind a little more tolerable might be nice.

 

Do we have many suggestions for making gathering more engaging? I understand that node location, skill tuning, experience calculations etc might change - but at the end of the day resouces can't get too easy to get without economic consequences.

How do we improve that "grind" without eliminating it?

I know some people(such as in thread) enjoy watching shows while gathering. Is there any way not to alienate them while making gathering better or should the expectation be that gathering will require more focus than that allows?

 

I had mentioned it before but harvesting should be just slow enough early on so that every adventurer doesn't eventually become a GM miner (and GM every other gathering skill) just from their time wandering around.

The way I see it, if a regular Joe can GM gathering from just the time wandering around, what's the use of miners actually specializing in mining by actually going to a mine? It should be just slow enough at low levels for regular Joe to think "mining takes too long, I'm going to leave that node" but should pick up speed quickly.

 

Not sure I follow what you're saying here... What do you mean by "wandering around" to become a GM miner?

 

Tree bark (and the two new variants) can also be use to make bark bread. This is worth 71 profit per tree bark after the cost of the other ingredients.