Mining, Are You Serious?

@RichardGarriott @DarkStarr
Those of us who actually craft and gather resources are spending hours of real time mining and gathering resources. One pass through one of those few mines that yield silver will yield enough ore for 2-3 mastercrafts. An associate who is a dedicated armorsmith spends three day of their playing time mining in order to gather enough ore to make one set of plate armor. Now you want to make mining slower and more difficult? Be warned, anger and distrust toward the developers of Portalarium is starting to grow among those players who actually craft and gather resources. I spend my time playing the game. I post when I am angry or I am somewhere I do not have access to the game.
According to Steam I have over 2300 hours in this game. Much of that time was spent doing things related to gathering resources or crafting. Much of what is required to process materials and craft items is useless time sinks. If any of the developers at Portalarium actually spent the time in game needed to collect the resources to craft anything they would not have time to work on the game.
If you want a player driven economy you need to give us the capacity to actually produce items. As it is now most of my effort goes into making equipment for myself. All the buying public is likely to get from me under the present circumstances are items which can be mass produced, my retired equipment, and my "failed" crafting experiments. Even if I did produce an extra piece of worthy equipment I will not sell it. I will stash it away for the time my current equipment wears out. How are those who do not craft going to get premium equipment under these circumstance?

 

you want to be able to dish out the best top tier armor like a factory less than a month post final wipe.... ???

 

My humble opinion is I think they have this reversed. Harvesting resources should not be this monumental task. The actual grinding out the skill should be. We are not even a month in and already there is all this gear on the vendors and gold? Good lord if they do not wipe some of this stuff out of the game it will be horrible a year down the road.

Some new person enters the game to find a so so sword or bow going for 200k and premium stuff going for 15 to 20 mil a shot. I want the OLD UO feeling back, where you worked HARD for everything you got OR made. To GM a skill was a task, and one you were proud of when you got it! If they do not see a problem with people already running around with over 100k in gold? We are screwed.

 

I will not disagree with you, @Xander Xavier , as I have about twice as many hours in this game as you, so I can speak from experience. Much of that time has been either harvesting myself ( well, not so much lately ) or accompanying guildmates on resource gathering expeditions.

However, with only 3 weeks into persistence for raising skills - I'm not yet prepared to start screaming at them..... But in certain areas I'm getting closer.

Black Pearl and Mandrake root most especially are gonna need a lot more love from the dev team in terms of how much time they expect us to dedicate to their harvest.

All the ores are available in quantity if you know where to look and are prepared to take on the mobs necessary, but single players will be challenged a lot in that regard.

No one in my guild is GM in any harvesting skill as of today, but we discuss things like Meticulous Collection skill level vs harvests on a nightly basis.

And no one in my guild wants anything handed to them on a silver platter. We want things to matter and take time. We understand and agree with that.

But at this juncture, I'm feeling the need to re-iterate what has been complained about for over 2 years now - and that is that there is a serious shortage of resource nodes at every Tier level.

We simply need to be able to gather more per hour of grinding than what we're currently getting - given the need for all the resources.

Either up the node count or up the count per node. As it is now, it feels pretty ridiculous to everyone I know.

 

I think they want to stop it that evryone can be self sufficient so easily.. and crafters are supposed to buy some of their resources if they really want to run a business. I am crafting to be self sufficient and I have to say before it was too easy perhaps thus ruining it for real dedicated crafters.

 

There's always going to be a tradeoff in the time/effort spent gathering materials, and the usefullness/value of the materials, that's fine and I accept that - but I am concerned that, even though this is a complicated thing to balance, we seem to be veering from one 'extreme' to another in how the systems work. Yes, I know, we are not at 'release' yet - but we ARE three plus years into the development of the game, and we still see 'corrections' and amendments to how skills work, how much time it takes to gather resources, or how elements of the game interact that are far too extreme.

The more often I see the 'nerf this to destruction and maybe rebuild later' philosophy in action, the more uncertain I am that the people designing these systems really have a clear idea where they are heading with them, or what the implications of their choices for the players really are. I used to have a lot of faith in how this game was being developed - sorry to say that is slowly draining away as things evolve

 

Perhaps - but as is far too often the case, they won't actually TELL us what they are trying to do and how, or genuinely discuss those things. We're left 'thinking' we can 'guess' the way they 'intend' us to go, then being surprised or disturbed by changes that just drop on us - and I find that's wearing a bit thin at this stage of the process.

 

I don't really mind the current time investment required for making nice sets of armor, but it does make it very impractical to craft these items without already having an order or a use for them. Most people just don't have the gold to pay a fair price right now and probably wouldn't want to even if they did. That might change as the player pool gets stronger though.

I do agree with you that mining in general is pretty messed up though. Zones are poorly thought out with very inconsistent risk versus reward and adjustments that have been made so far don't really make much sense.

The Elysium/Graff/Verdantis/SS model seems like how all mining should be. There are a decent amount of resources, but they are guarded resources, so you can't just stroll in and take whatever you want at will. That's how all other gathering in the game works.

Then you have zones like ECM, and to a lesser extent Owl's Nest, where you can just stroll in and take what you want with little to no risk. In the case of ECM, you can literally mine uninterrupted for hours with no risk or downtime, even after the recent reductions made. For some reason, the zones where you actually have to fight for limited resources also saw those reductions, and it made a lot more difference in those zones I'm sure.

I'm not really sure why anyone would ever go to SS, which is a guarded iron mine, when at much lower level they can just go to ECM and get much more with much less risk. ECM is also a ridiculous production xp generator for all things crafting, as well as a gold coin generator due to excess tungsten and nickel that vendors for 50g in Soltown.

If there were more consistent and logical levels of risk versus reward in mining zones, then it would be much easier to tune crafting that depends on mining.

edit: Just to elaborate a little on that, iron is used to make as many special ignots as copper, and it takes the same amount of gold to enchant something as it takes silver to masterwork something. It's kind of hard for all of the different recipes to be well tuned when they are equivalent but half of the mats are 10x easier to obtain than the others.

 

Is it even possible to be a crafter only, wihtout fighting skills?

 

As far as I can tell, it's possible only if you have a gatherer to supply your materials, since the rarer materials you need to make anything other than the most basic things is only in areas where you need to fight to survive long enough to get them. You could in theory maybe buy your materials - but how you would make the money is beyond me, unless - again - you have friend or a guild who sponsor you to get going...

 

You can't be a pure crafter in this game. There are very few safe places to gather materials, and fuels - of which you will need tens of thousands to level your crafts, cost money.

Final product items are most of the time selling for far less than the raw materials cost due to absurdities like 40 ore required for a single ring which does nothing unless you risk blowing it up at the cost of 20 additional ores per attempt. And even then you wont get the stats you want necessarily, you'll probably have to make 5 or 6 of them to actually get the bonuses you want, with say, 2 enchants on.. Lets say 5. We're now at 400 ores used, to make a single ring with stats you want, and this isn't taking into account the fact that statistically, at least 2 will blow up, so tack on another 160 ore for two more goes. Add in the 120 mandrake root you'll need to achieve this for even more cost! 560 ore. To get a ring with specific bonuses. If you're trying for a specific GEM bonus then double all of it and add in the gem costs since you'll need to try that many more times to get the proc you want. Throw in another 10 mandrake for every gem and every attempt and this is now costing you a few thousand gold PLUS the thousand ore and there's still NO GUARANTEE of getting what you want. It could all be a complete waste of time netting you absolutely nothing.

How long does it take to gather all that? Its measured in days, rather than hours.

Personally, I have no issue with spending the time to gather. What I do have an issue is wasting my time using up resources on a crappy random system. I'd say ..double the cost ef everything but uncap the "95%" success chance and let it be 100% at high levels - since the 95% fails a lot more than 5% of the time and is dubious anyway. Let me CHOOSE my enchants/masterworks that I'm spending a fortune to do.

 

+1000000000000...........

 

The other barrier to being a pure crafter is that harvesting generates a lot more producer xp than actually producing things.

 

Please read this. I'm going to make another attempt to educate you. I don't mean this to be patronizing, I'm sincerely trying to help you.

OK, stop.

Why are you gathering everything? Stop doing that. You need to make your mind up. Are you a hunter or a gatherer? If you're a gather, then you either need to come to grips with the fact that it is going to take a LONG TIME to gather or you need to find someone else to do that for you. There's all kinds of ore for sale in the public market, why not buy that?

If you decide that you're a hunter. Stop gathering. Go hunt, kill things, get loot, sell loot, buy ore, and don't worry about the time it takes for those guys to gather ore because they're going to charge you based on supply and demand which will make it all worth it for them.

So the problem is that you're trying to be a hunter and a gatherer at the same time. You're trying to do it all. As I've stated before, that's not going to work well for anyone in this game and that's by design.

You have that capability, what you don't have is the capability to efficiently do EVERYTHING in the supply chain. You can't gather AND refine AND produce because it takes up too much time. The game is working very well for what it's designed to do, you're just not used to it because barely any other games go to this level of sophistication with their economy.

 

One trip into Verdantis mines (literally just a single full sweep through all chambers, in and out) got me 36 silver ore. That's 9 ingots. Plus all the loot I took to the nearest weaponsmith, all the copper and all the gems/shards I pulled out.

I'm not sure what the issue is exactly. It was like Christmas in there.

 

I think you absolutely can be a pure crafter in this game.

You just need to understand how the game works. Seriously, I almost want to be a pure merchant that has ZERO combat or crafting skills just to show you guys what I'm talking about.

There's nothing stopping anyone from paying warriors to protect you as you walk through trade routes. There's nothing stopping you from hiring miners to go out in a group, guarded by warriors, and farming the heck out of a mine. Then taking that ore to market where you already have a network of crafters waiting to purchase your goods.

You pay the guards, you pay the miners, you keep all the ore! Then when you sell it, you figure out what your profit margins need to be and BOOM you're in business! No skills needed!

It doesn't even have to be that complicated. You can easily do this on a shoe string budget with just two to three people.

 

Silliness. Paying mercenaries or paying miners would cost the same as just buying the ore. Otherwise who would do this guard duty instead of just doing and fetching the ore themselves to profit?

How are they getting enough producer xp to level crafts at what, 40 xp per smelt? Without gathering?

Where is the crafter getting all this money, since raw materials sell for more than crafted goods?
How are they paying for this without fighting? How are they paying for fuels? I think with the current price we're seeing its not even close to being viable. Maybe down the road.

 

Baron, the game actually isn't very well designed at this point for people to all have different roles from harvesting to production. You're right that all the steps are time consuming, but the harvesting is where all the production xp comes from, so that doesn't really work out very well right now.

Also, your ore is going to be ridiculously expensive if you pay a bunch of guards and miners to gather it all for you. It's a great plan other than the fact that you'll never sell anything.

 

Drocis - you've previously said in various places you can make 10k/hour fighting.
If potential guards can make 10k/hr fighting, why would they take a 'guard duty' job at anything less?
You can't get 10k worth of ore in an hour even if you were selling the straight ore.
100 ore wont even make you 1 sellable item...even assuming half that ore was silver/gold to enchant it up...you're not going to get 10k for it unless you had freakish luck.
(40 ore ring + 40 ore for 2 enchants, assuming no breakage, maybe ring sells for 3-4k if the random stats you got on it were decent). MAYBE. Don't forget you gotta spend more money on mandrake and coal.
Sorry it just doesn't add up.
Crafters cannot make income just from crafting to afford the cost of crafting.
Crafters cannot gather anything without fighting, even killing low lvl crap in solace bridge to get the handful of nodes still requires fighting.
What you suggest is just incredibly impractical.

 

Why doesn't it work this way in real life I wonder?