Some feedback on Gathering

Pretty much.

 

Yeah, I don't bother harvesting in scenes where I have less than 50% chance of success, it is just not worth the effort.

Stick to the lower tier scenes, they are easier to harvest, at least until you build up some skill.

 

Oh well on a SERIOUS note, being able to Salvage equipment GREATLY ameliorates some of the supply problems one has starting out. I'm not really complaining about anything here by the way. Once you figure out you can farm skinnies for rusty swords and produce 1 ingot from 1 ore + 12 scrap then things start moving. I had no idea how to Salvage for awhile there and I was just selling the swords. But yeah it's kinda weird that nodes ( like mobs ) of a given type have degrees of difficulty by map. I don't necessarily collect ore in the same zones I'm gaining adventure XP in.

 

Personally, I still think after several failed attempts of trying to harvest something, you should ruin the resource, preventing you from wearing down your tools on more failed attempts.

I don't get the thing about resources that are basically the same having different difficulties to harvest, though. Aren't all trees the same?

 

Well to their credit I seem to find rare ores in the higher tier nodes BUT ... just my opinion, I think your XP gained should be 1:1 with the duration of time spent on a node. We should be rewarded with experience attempting a more difficult node whether it succeeds or fails, otherwise I'm going to always go back to the noob maps when I need ore instead of picking an advanced node here and there. I mean copper is copper is copper right?

 

I think the extra time on the higher nodes is for "trying" to get higher tier resources like tin and zinc.

I want it to start out slow but pick up faster than now. I'm level 31 and still take 20 swings to maybe get some ore... a few more levels (10 hours?) and I may be down to 19 swings.

Perfect time setting would be so not every adventurer will want to mine (and eventually GM it) because of the time commitment but people who do stick with it (actual miners) will get the payoff eventually.

 

As for selling the rusty stuff, I found out that because of the wipe there was no economy, and I couldn't get starter money except by selling rusty stuff for a few days. Only today is stuff on the vendors finally starting to move. (In R20-R22 I was able to meet a personal goal of buying a vendor town lot deed for 200k with two weeks left, and I'm ready to see the economy move again once enough currency has been generated.)

As for the node difficulty, I think I heard there are five levels of them. The highest tier ones take longer to harvest and have lower chances of success. Higher-tier nodes are also more likely to drop extra items, like tin/nickel/zinc, spider carapaces, suet, etc.

The highest mining nodes can usually be found in mines, and the lowest ones in encounter scenes. I don't know yet where high-tier lumber nodes are, but hi-tier cotton is usually in areas with higher-level monsters.

From being in R20 (when you could see how much exp you got from stuff), the high tier ones give you a lot more exp. From what I saw of the exp pool bars in R22, it looks like you still get some producer exp even when you fail to harvest a node. In R20 you could pretty quickly buy the max gathering skills, and the producer exp from refining/crafting stuff helped a lot too.

 

No, all nodes of the same type are NOT the same.... There are 5 Tiers of nodes and they correspond to 5 Tiers of mobs....
It's been this way for many, many releases now...

A successful harvest (mining, forestry, whatever) yields skill points - and unless they changed it in R23 - fails DO gain some points.

Absolutely correct.

Nope.... Tier 5 areas that are not within the earth - ie - areas other than mines - yield as many resources as the highest tier of mines do. It's just that mines often have concentrated areas that allow harvesting of a large number of nodes in a fairly small area....

 

Yea I know.. I just don't get it

 

Risk vs Reward....

Tougher mobs guard higher yielding nodes....

Higher yielding nodes give you the most harvesting xp's and the highest possible yields, but are also guarded by stuff that's equally tough.

You want to get the most you can out of harvesting a node?
Get your harvester capable of harvesting Tier 5 nodes...
And, when you get your Meticulous Harvest trained, you will be very happy.

It's been this way for a long time, and it makes perfect sense to me....
And, it's fun !

 

Yeah, sounds like redfish is looking for a reasoning beyond simple game-play mechanics/balance.

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Maybe the higher tier trees are old growth, and therefore tougher to chop down ? Taking a hand axe to a 2000-year-old Redwood would probably take a bit longer than your regular old cedar.

For that to be plausible though, we really need a greater variety of choppable tree artwork. *hint hint*.

 

Be still my heart.... !

 

Yea, but seems like tougher monsters should either be guarding rarer types of resources, or more of the same type of resource, or have their own loot/rewards that have nothing to do with the resources around them, or have some other purpose in the game like guarding a dungeon passage. Plus, I don't get the business of two monsters that are exactly alike being completely different difficulty anyway Timber wolves are timber wolves, like maple trees are maple trees

Nah. Grinding and farming isn't fun. People will just go to the scene for their tier, and then progress on to the next scene when they're ready. Just grinding and farming to me...

 

I'm hoping that all this is placeholder right now, to show that the systems work. Then when they drop in the story, we'll see some gameplay to support why some nodes are more difficult than others, and if there's monsters guarding it, they'll have a good reason.

Right now they're saying, 'uh, all the animals are attacking everyone on sight all a sudden, this isn't normal, and we don't know why they're acting this way." So I hope the story will reveal some good reasons, along with some alternatives to killing them. After all, a wolf is not a monster, even if it happens to be acting like one right now. I want to avoid killing them, round them up, put them to sleep, cage them up if I have to, until I can find the antidote, or the source of the problem and fix it. Don't make me kill everything just to tell me later I'm a bad avatar because you didn't give me any in-game choices!

 

Monsters of a like kind - ie all Timber Wolves - have the same degree of difficulty - ie %chance to harvest -no matter where you find them.
Static resource nodes of a like kind - ie Cotton plants - have varying degrees of difficulty depending on what Tier level they are found in.

I like the fact that the highest yielding resource nodes are surrounded by mobs of the appropriate level.
That seems proper IMO...
But yes, grinding resources is grinding resources - and we're gonna need a LOT more lower level nodes than we currently have for people to harvest when we finally go live.

 

@FrostII,

Haven't checked this release, but in the last release or so, monsters could have the same exact name but be different difficulty. Personally, I don't even see how the difficulty levels of wolves can even be so spread out even among several variants, just IMO.

I've talked about that issue before, and maybe this is a bit off-topic, but I'd rather the game was logical and intuitive; I think that matters for gameplay, too, not just realism, because I shouldn't have to find the "right scene" with the "right wolves". And leveling shouldn't be a ladder like that, where I'm just expected to find the right level monster in the right level scene for my character level. Low level monsters should be able to kill you even when you gain skill. Level shouldn't matter that much in the end IMO.

I feel the same way about resources: they should be logical and intuitive. If there's a reason for different yields from the same type of resource, okay. If there's a reason for some nodes to be more difficult to harvest than others, okay. If there's a reason for a high level monster being in the same vicinity as a high level resource, okay. But they shouldn't try to force the game to fit some risk vs. reward model that doesn't make sense, if in the end, all we're talking about is grinding and farming. There should be role-playing reasons to go into certain areas and defeat certain monsters -- that's what will make the game fun.

Just my view on all of this; though it may be OT a bit.

 

The big problem I have with the lack of lower tier nodes is that it holds back skilling up. Since you only get one skills bump per attempt, if each attempt takes 5 seconds, you'll get a lot more of them than if it takes 50 seconds. And it takes a lot of attempts to gain a level. So I end up with hundreds of thousands of pooled producer exp because there aren't enough low-tier nodes around to help you use them up... and no gustballs for it, either.

And unlike most adventuring exp, you only skill up in the craft you are using, so chopping down a bunch of low-tier trees doesn't do anything for your mining skills.

 

Is the game, even in its pre-alpha state, not technically in a state of soft-launch?

 

I've been killing mobs daily since R11, and monsters with the exact same name have ALWAYS been the exact same difficulty and xp's rewarded for the kill. Until R21 or so, we could confirm that on every kill in the game text.

Not quite sure what you mean there.... There are no "variants".
Here's the current list of Wolf types (not counting the Desert Wolves) - in order of difficulty:
Grey Wolves
Large Grey Wolves
Timber Wolves
Large Timber Wolves
Elder Wolves
Obsidian Wolves
From Grey's (the easiest) to Obsidian (the hardest - although really no more difficult than Elder Wolves) Not sure of the level for Arctic Wolves, but I have fought them and it seems they were about as difficult as Large Timber Wolves.
In Tier 1 areas you will find Grey's, in Tier 5 you will find Elders and Obsidians, the rest in between.

Not sure how you would work RP into gathering resources, but it does make sense to me that in order to maximize your harvest you have to work up your skill ability to go after the highest level of resources.
Resource nodes with the highest possible return should be guarded by mobs that are "appropriate" to the "risk/reward"......
I mean that's your basic Risk vs Reward thing, is it not ?
The higher the risk the better the reward.
Isn't that what RP people want?