Architect Archive

I generally agree with the tighter controls put on mining introduced with the recent patch. As others have pointed outharvesters now function as originally designed. Fair enough.

But fromthe perspective ofa"casual" player, who prefers to solo most of the time instead of co-oping with a larger group, and who has chosen Architect because it is arguably the most challenging profession, there is a flaw with the original design. It is flawed because it assumes a player can arrange for regular game time to monitor, feed and maintain harvesters. Between credit and power requirements and now frequent ore shifts ithas in fact become a very speculative occupation where there's a good possibility of losing your initial investment if your operation is not monitored closely. Below a certain loss threshold it will become very difficult to get an operation back up andrunning smoothlyagain. Again, some of us are in situations where nightly monitoring is just not possible. As much as we may like to we can't dedicate all of our real life free time to this passtime. Thus as a casual player I am unfairly penalized simply because I have real life obligations. [Some of these obligations enable me to pay the subscription fee by the way!]

Now some say, "So what, that's your problem. This profession is just not for you." Maybe. But I believe there's a workable compromisefor both parties.Casual playerscan run a modest operation without worrying about losing their shirt and Power players can achieve a level of market dominance proportional to the effort they put in. Neither customer is excluded from a particular mode of play.

The fundamental problem is the high credit cost over time of maintaining a functioning harvester and the high cost of a completely failed harvester. Here's what I propose:

First, eliminate the harvester maintenance fee. It makes no sense that I, who can build a harvester from scratch, have to pay someone else to maintain it. (Somebody is receiving that fee no?) Instead, make harvesters, while running,degrade in performance over time and makethe damageirreparable. Stopped harvesters still degrade but at a much lower rate. This way an abandoned harvester will eventually disappear. But once a harvester is placed it cannot be redeeded. So an intelligent decision and a commitment must be made.

Next, keep the power requirements as is. With the above in place a harvester that runs out of power will stop and just degrade at the slow non-operational rate.

Finally, and this is the key: Given that we are limited to 10 lots, itcan beassumed that there is some galactic agency that regulates this kind of thing. You are "licensed" for 10 lots.Furthermore a deed is essentially a licenseto placea given structure. Now we just take this concept a step further. In the case of harvesters, ** require a similar permit to extract a given quantity of a resource **. Say at 1000 unit increments.

These permits, which are in deed form,are then placed onto a given harvester and it goes to work. When the permit limit is reached the harvester shuts down automatically and refuses to start on that resource until it is provided with another permit (to prevent its owner from getting into big trouble with regulators). The price of the permits can vary with the given quantity of resource onthe world at that time. For example a rare high-quality ore permit might cost 2 or 3 times as much as say an ambundant Inert Gas permit.

What this effectively does is shift the current involuntary maintenance fee, which disproportionately hurts the casual player more than the power player, to a voluntary cost per use model.

This accomplishes four things:

1. Power players can assure an unlimited right to extract by plowing some of their profits back into extraction rights. They would also have a hedge against ore shift because permits are good until their stated quantities are filled. They won't be able to move the harvester but at least it won't cost them anything while its down.

2. Casual players are no longer held hostage by their extractors. When not operational extractors become effectively no-cost, except for a non-operational decay rate to eliminate abandonded extractors. For operational extractors, the cost shifts from a constant over time model to a per usage model, regulated by the permits. ** Extractors at this point would then have an equal net cost to both casual and power players **

3. A new market for extraction rights will be created. Permits can be freely traded as just as deeds. Wise players will purchase extractions rights in advance as a hedge when a given resource is in abundance and permit costs are relatively low in case the resource becomes rare and permit costs skyrocket. Or just tradethem on the market like commodities contracts.

4. It would provide SOE with a new resource regulation tool: the permit. Without a permit for a resource it can't be extracted. Permits may be temporarily suspended if necessary. In my mind this is a much better way of controlling global extraction than silly and quite unrealist ore shifts.

Well that's it in a nutshell.

Cheers,

Slamdango, Solo Arch