Artisan Archive

Ive had several emails upset with harvester maintance. I'd like to see everyone discuss how they feel about harvester maintance. It is too little, too much? How would you change it?

Its too much IMO. And wind power isn't nearly as abundant as it should be. Maintenance is also way to high on wind Gennies also.. Its ridiculous, really. Trying to work Tailoring skills is a major drain on resources and time, which is cool, I can handle that part. But, if you are spending all your time running missions to maintain up keep on equipment, you've no time for working up your skill tree..Or, maybe I'm just missing something.. ( wouldn't be the first time )

Lysta

Novice Tailor, Bria

I have no problem with paying maintenance or powering them, but the mechanics of it is what gets me.

Why is the maintenance figured on half hour increments and the power on hour increments? I'm used to it now but it just seems a bit off. Not mixing units is basic math...

Also the running around to harvs gets a little spotty, although since the fix of my dear friend "Harv LD" its a little better. I'd like to see Power Droids implemented into harv maintenance. Load them walking trashcans up with creds and juice and have them run around doing the power/maintenance.

Guess its a bit off topic, but that's my only thing with harvesters

Hydrargyrum

Intrepid

Master Artisan

Weaponsmith

Well, its definitely not too little

Absent a miner profession in the game, to me its the combination of maintenance and power. I would have been in favor of one or the other. I realize there is an arguement that "in real life you have to..." but this is still a game. Crafting, in and of itself, is pretty challenging.Adding the harvestor routine to it is a drag at times. Running around to my harvestors and feeding them takes up more than half my on-line time. Without a miner profession, the cost of purchasing resources on the open market is too high. No way I could get any significant crafting done paying 4-5 credits/resource on the open market. I'm a novice weaponsmith with Firearms I and nothing I make sells that consistently. So, I am left with the harvesting routine.

I'd be in favor of no maintenance fee or a lower feeand just a power requirement. Let me have to pay to run my wind harvestor. It would also help to have remote monitoring of harvesters. That would help with some of the down time from running around to see what needs what.

Oh, is there a harvestor droid in this game??? If there is I need to buy one. I give it power and money and it goes around to my harvestors and pays and empties hoppers. If there isn't a harvestor droid,that would be a nice addition.

IMO, it's just right. The problem is that people are trying to support large scale mining operations based on personal mineral harvesters. If we got the miner profession back, it would make doing this too expensive in cost per unit of resource and it would stop being a problem.

The cost in time is much greater than the credits. If we had droids that could perform maintenance (or pay it) and deposit power, it wouldn't be such a big deal. At release maintenance pricing, I was getting about 3 hours of play a night. I'd spend 2 hours running missions, 45 minutes paying fees and power, and 15 minutes trying to advance my character. This was the case every day. They reduced the costs, and then I only had to do the above every other day. That felt right to me. I had to accept that I couldn't do it all. 9 harvesters plus a house was living above my play-time means. Just because I CAN have that many machines, doesn't mean I'm playing well enough to balance the need for it.

Reducing costs willdecrease non-scout resource and finished item prices. Maybe we could target the time costs instead of themonetary costs. It would lighten the load considerably if radioactives mineral harvesters could power themselves from their own hoppers. I would also like to see harvesters placed adjacent to a power genenerator (i.e. Wind Power) be able to draw power directly from it. Excess power reserves could still be deposited to a harvester, and would still accumulate in the power generator.

"You meanI can have hyperdrive, blasters, and sentient droids, but I can't run a 20ft power cable from one machine to another?"

Here is an observation....

If we are artisans, and most artisans achieve ENGR IV at some point and we create these harvestors and Power Generators...shouldn't we be able torepair the things we created? It would be cool if the class that built the item could repair the item he/she created at a lower maintenance fee or simply have a utility that alllows a repair at an expenditure of one of the HAM stats. Then rest up from the taxing mind effort it took to repair said item and on to the next. Its a good point that the dev's want to simulate real life ...but in real life Mechanics and Engineers dont pay a maintenance fee on stuff that broke, they just repair it.

This is a simple observation, and since Jasarina asked for opinions...well, here is mine

I have no problem with the amount of harvester maintenance right now. I think the much more important issue regarding wind harvesters is the bug that allows credits to disappear overnight! Yesterday I had to destroy another wind harvester because I left it at night with over 24 hours maintenance and woke up, seven hours later to find it was 2500 credits in the hole. Fix that bug first, then you can futz with the amounts.

I think the prices are ok. Actually, I would support a slight raise in price if it would knock out some of the other competitors that don't really know how to utilize harvesters to their potential.

What I would like to see changed though is maintenance rate if the machine is turned off. There's no logical reason why a running machine costs the same as a dormant machine. It would make resource **edit**s that much less hectic.

I wouldsuggest something like 1/2 or 1/3 of the cost of maintenance if the machine is turned off. I don't even know if power is used when it's shut off, but the way some of the other things are, it wouldn't suprise me if it was consumed at that time...

If anything it is too much for Wind power gens ~1400 creds a day can hurt, and I only have one. I mean why should it cost TWICE as much as mineral extractors all it does is give me power so I can run my mineral and chem extractors.

And I definately think we should be able to pay maintenance remotely. To give harvesters power maybe they should give the droid engineers a new "power droid" that can do that while we aren't there.

Oh, and we should be able to recover excess power and maintenance when redeeding a harvester.

Lower the redeed cost it is way to high!

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Jedi_Titus wrote:

And I definately think we should be able to pay maintenance remotely.

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I think this is important, and we should focus on this issue.

Great topic Jasarina! I think you are doing a great job. Keep up the good work.

"The cost in time is much greater than the credits." -- lund0529

I agree completely with this statement. I don't think that the maintence costs or even the power costs are too steep. Allow me to provide you a real (virtual) world example:

I ran 2 fiberplast harvesters and a wind generator for about a week. I acumulated >30K Fiberplast in that time, which I then sold for 5cr per unit. That's 150K in one bulk sale. If you figure it cost me even 40K credits (overestimate)to maintain my equipment for that week, I still made a profit of 110K. So I don't think the price of maintenence is too high. Plus I have resources left over for my own crafting. However, what this really cost me was time. Itwould say it was atleast a 30-40 minute process each night of checking on these harvesters. That was a large chunk of my playing time. And it wasn't much fun. Now that I have the money, I could pay several days in advance on maint, but I would still have to visit the harvesters to check power and make sure the resource hasn't moved on me. I think the only time I should have to visit the harvester after setting it up should be to empty the hopper or re-deed the structure.

Here are my suggestions for improvements to the system:

1) Allow for more proactive notification of resource shifts. Email notification when are resource has changed would be sufficient for me. I've also heard others suggest a "time remaining" indicator like for power and maint pool.

2) Allow for remote payment of maint fees or automatic withdrawel from bank.

3) Allow for power to be pulled from a nearby generator. I also like the suggestions of droid handling this sort of task.

4) Allow for remote monitoring of harvester status through datapad.

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Crossbreed wrote:

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Jedi_Titus wrote:

And I definately think we should be able to pay maintenance remotely.

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I think this is important, and we should focus on this issue.

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I third this. Some of us like to stock our machines up so we don't have to constantly check on it, but we're screwed if we have 5 days of maintenance/power left and nothing to mine. It actually kills all long-term planning and you can only try to plan one day ahead with this current system of losing what you've invested.