Producer xp

I don't think the devs have any reasonable explanation to not fulfill this request.
Trees, cotton, skinning and mining should have all the same XP in the same scene. Skinning should have some higher rewards for stronger mobs within the same scene.
Reagents in general should yield MORE XP than trees, cotton, skinning and mining.


No matter how many times they will deny, mining is both highest XP output and highest profit / hour.

 

That makes some assumptions about what the devs desire for the game. In theory, and I stress the theory part, making the mining nodes worth more XP encourages players to prioritize mining which increases the availability of ore and ingot in the market which promotes crafting of those resources over other items. Since gold and silver don't have analogs in the other branches, it makes sense that if the devs wanted to ensure that higher level gear was more available, mining, particularly of gold and silver, should be more profitable than other producer options.

I wouldn't be surprised that there is a 12-page dissertation on the subject, from someone who hasn't worked on the game in almost a decade, somewhere in the earliest forum posts, back when all of this was originally decided, back when LB and crew saw themselves as the reembodied invisible hand of Adam Smith.

 

That makes sense @Burzmali, but even if that's the case some retooling is probably needed now because the best spots to mine gold and silver are actually half the xp of the iron and copper nodes in Tanglemire. Maybe that was on purpose to inject more iron/copper into the economy? I doubt it though. And if you take a look around on vendors, there are tons of resources available everywhere.

I think it's probably time to take a look at these values overall and ask what can be done to make the gathering process and economy better overall. I personally believe a more simplistic approach would be well received from players.

I also would rather have a choice between a handful of different places to effectively gather each type of resource. Instead of grinding the same old scenes over and over because they are the best spots. If prod xp values for all types of resources were the same, it would probably create many more efficient areas to gather. And in turn make the world seem larger by increasing foot traffic in underutilized scenes.

 

What i would really like to see, is the devs opinion on this subject...

 

yeah having more options would be nice. but there is a path to take which gives iron, copper, gold and silver and earns up to 6-10mil / hour. watch Jemma streams or Asylum they do the same path always. but over time its Yawn. more options for farming circuits always welcome

 

Highest XP nodes are all iron and copper.
Silver and gold nodes are on par with trees and cotton when it comes to XP.

Mining is either going for highest XP or going for silver and gold. You can't do these together at the same time.

So basically there is silver and gold in the market because it's profitable to mine it, nothing to do with XP.

E. g. Tanglemire for XP; Elysium / Crag for profit.

 

Good to know! What are the zones they run? I don't have time to watch streams unfortunately.

 

A big part of mining is opportunism. Even though the respawn has been slowed down so you have to flip between two mines to consistently mine, its possible with zone scrolls and patience for a lot of load screens to mine mine mine and plot a route to do so efficiently. And while there are good generalist outdoor areas that are heavy in harvesting, these don't really compare.

I'd love to see a proper forest scene - set up like a mine, but with trees for miles, so a player could just go chop chop chop with minimally required fighting. I'd love to see a huge field of cottonbushes that is forageable, there's plenty of scenes with old farmsteads etc. that could have fields gone wild. There's no real "great" concentration for these items, they are all scattergun across scenes.

There's plenty of good xp to be had skinning, but meticiulous skinning just gives you more useless (and heavy) animal hides, so its less appealing and usually a waste of time. And the creature respawns never fill up to initial scene load levels, and the tiers are often inconsistent depending on where you go. So its a mixed bag with skinning these days. It used to be fairly lucrative but mining has eclipsed it with the changes this past year.

We've seen evidence that players will do LOSS MAKING activities in the pursuit of producer xp. I'd be happy enough to sit there and bang rocks in a clay mine or something that gave a completely useless item (small ball of clay) if the xp was good. If we're worried about economy, anyway. Could be interesting to tie it into some sort of quest objective perhaps.

 

There are no risks in our game, there is only time and nuisance risks for increased that time needed to be spent in any producer activity.
PvP zone's nuisance time spent is no different than any other zone's nuisance time spent.
~Time Lord~

 

Well you can play a scene entirely private in this game, except for a handful of pvp scenes. So if one of those select pvp scenes were changed a bit and by far became the best place to farm xp, or loot, or something needed, there would be a huge risk there. And that would create a lot of conflict and pvp. So the possibility for something like this will always exist.

And it didn't have to be exclusive to that scene, but if you get more there, people will fight over it.

 

PvP = Nuisance, not fighting over anything.
There are no risks in our game, only nuisances.
The fantasy in SOTA is that there are risks.
That's not anything bad about our game, that's just the way it is. There's no gambling here.
~TL~

 

my thoughts would be to make traps deadly, and to add a skill to Sub. tree for disarm.

As to risks there are... my gear takes the risk anytime I die. it gets damaged which has a cost to it. I can either repair it using in game mechanics but it break, or use crowns to prolong the use longer but that is at a greater cost.
so death is a risk of damage to durability.

Enchants and masterworks are risks. that is close as one gets to gamble in the game lol, again at the cost of great durability.

beyond that though you are right. the virtues are no longer a risk as you can offset them easy with a reset etc...

 

It is still a very fun game for me, but I'm a player who never or rarely wishes to hunt in top content. I prefer to play in the middle, so there is a feeling of helplessness at some point in the challenges of the content. It helps me stay in game knowing there are things I can't handle alone.

My only wish is there would be a less robotic operation way of playing, but that's not unique to just our game. Most games of the same style have finger banging keyboard controls.

There's always something about any game that doesn't custom fit all it's user's desires.

My wife and I stick mostly to the deco and piddling around game play (Such are the Adventures of TimeLord & Coconut)
~TL~

 

I agree, there is more to a game for sure than just killing. I try to do things beyond my level all the time just for challenge. but than it becomes robotic as you call it. I spend most my week in one spot killing over and over just because of my levels and the requirements to level up are so great that I need to maximize the xp to get there or it will be a life time to get a single .1 per skill.

What this means is if the progression on skills slows down too much than I have to look at other things but those other things will not help character development which is important to at least myself.

I do love deco in the game alot... but with promises of ability to convert homes to moveable objects which means that we would have to redecorate if we want to us I have since halted all deco until that comes or I am wasting time knowning that I will have to do again after.

Crafting fills my other time as I have a market and have to keep it for the most part fresh to make enough money to feed my in game habits.

I do like as well though that I must rely on others for some content as that is another avenue to continue to have fun well waiting for changes to come.

dungeon building is my fav but with limited options in that for rooms as well still no added spawners its stalled for me as the tools and options need to be expanded on further to make it better experience.
give us more tools so we can build the content we want. give us ability to dress up npc's than you will see a lot more money spent on costumes for npc's and vendors.

Everything in time is what I say

 

Nobody can solo everything in this game with one single account.

That is true for sure. But I've never found a less robotic and more immersive game than this one. There is so much to do these days it's great. The grinding scenes are growing now too, so I even when I get a lot of playtime I can still mix it up enough so I don't get bored.

 

Ahh but the great ones could! Jobe was one example, I think Espada was another.
~TL~

 

Boy, I've got to wonder what other games you are playing. Last time I played for any meaningful length of time 100% of the public parties I found that were, err, all ages appropriate, grinded out XP at one of 3 control points by having their summons do all the work while the characters casted buffs. There were parties where my job was literally to stand still and chain together bard glyphs for as long as I was in the party. For immersion, I've got to wonder what fantasy medieval world you think 40' high glowing markees that would look gaudy in Las Vegas fit into.

SotA has plenty of points to recommend it, for instance it is probably one of the best MMOs for powerleveling, it's great if you want to turn off you brain and click fishing for a while and it has a solid 5-10 hours of quality sightseeing. But, were someone to ask me for a recommendation for a game that is immersive and not robotic, I'd offer decent odds that a random game selected from my rather sizable collection would be head and shoulders above SotA in those categories.

 

That's not the most popular opinion, but it is the best guiding opinion, because strait ahead in the direction we're headed is extemely even more robotic where randomness goes to die.

None of this is game breaking, it's just an accurate description of our game, where every minute detail can predicibly be measured down to .00001 chance of not knowing the percentage outcome or function our robot will perform upon command.

It's world of robots, from consept to outcome, conceived from a guy who makes robots.

There is no chaos, only order...
That's not an insult to the game, it's just an accurate description.
~Time Lord~

 

You know you don't have to join those parties right? I've never grinded control points and I'm doing just fine. I honestly find it strange that people play a game and do things in it that are mindlessly boring. There is so much to do in this game, I never advise people to join airship or control points. So boring, I just don't get it I guess.

This game is what you want to make of it. I have a bunch of scenes that I enjoy playing in that are quite immersive for me. Obsidian pantipticon, the fall, the rise, Tanglemire, outlaws run, despair, tartarus, just to name a few.

It's a fantasy medieval world, sure. But isn't the whole story about outlanders that travel here from different places? Doesn't seem so far fetched that some futuristic technology would also come with them.

 

Control points and "RP" were the only parties available on LFG or via global chat the last time I played, and that was a two week stretch. If I wasn't joining one of those, I was playing solo and there are so many far better options for solo play than SotA.

That's the same reason people give for why games like Dwarf Fortress are frustrating as hell to play, but can still be fun if that's your bag. It isn't a good thing, it usually means the game is either so unfinished or so broken that the game can't be enjoyed in a traditional sense, so you are going to need redefine what you consider to be "enjoyment" to what the game provides to enjoy the game.

If you take a fantasy medieval world and inject the level of technology needed to support Desolis becoming the Las Vegas strip, I would expect the lords of Ardoris and Britannia to have given up lighting their palaces with torches in sconces.