Architect Archive

Posted here, Artisan, and General forums, cause i thought it important.

Metrics analysis of Harvesters vs Macro Surveying

I conducted this experiment to determine the current status of harvesting resources. For the purpose of the experiement, I set up a Medium Harvester right beside where I was going to Macro Survey.

My character:

Master Artisan (therefore Survey IV), Wookie

• Health 900


• Strength 650


• Constitution 361


• Action 1200


• Quickness 488


• Stamina 415


• Mind 700


• Focus 550


• Will 600

The site was a 72% Steel site. The harvester reported 2.90KG/HR as the rate.

My macro script consisted of 10 interations of the following:

1. /sample;


2. /pause 650;


3. /sit;


4. /pause 245;


5. /stand;

Note that due to the recent changes, my /pause time went to 650 (about 11 mine) from around 1800 before (about 30 min). A significant change. My rest time did not change

RESULTS:

The 10 iterations took 149 minutes to run.

The Medium Harvester harvested 434 units in that time. This is equal to 2.909 units a minute, which is in keeping with the theory that the KG/HR ratio is equal to units/minute.

I sampled 1096 unites in that time. This is equal to a harvester that has a reported rate of 7.35 units per minute.

To put that in perspective, it would take a harvester with a max capacity of 10.2K/HR to pull 7.35KG/HR from a 72% site.

ANALYSIS

Script surveying is still MUCH more useful than using even a large harvester. The only advantage to harvesters are that you can have more than one running at one time. As seen by the results above, the surveyor is 2x more effecient than a medium harvester.

I actually enjoy the ability to script survey. It makes me feel like my character goes about his humdrum business when Im not online, and when I am is when the exciting things happen, just like in the movies.

That aside. Harvesters need to be improved. I do not feel that surveying rate should lower, since that would seriously hurt starting artisans.

Also, during the 2hr 29 min run, I did not have a single special event occur with sampling. However, I did have a NUMBER of failures, which I felt I should not with Surveying IV. I should have low results, ie 1 or 2 on a typical 5-8 site, but failures should be much rarer.

Hope everyone finds this info useful.

There is little point to this comparison, because I am sure the devs are going to make afk macro samling a thing of the past, as they should. You can expect some changes to macros to defeat this exploit before long.

This is not an exploit. Please don't call it that.

The devs have said time and time again that macroing (even afk macroing) using the in game macro ability is as intended.

On the other hand, they have also said that they want harvesters to be more attractive than macro sampling.