Artisan Archive
Thread: Idea to slow lot trader, resource miners
Cigaran
Thu Jan 27, 2005 11:49 am
#14
GraySeven wrote:
I think I made this suggestion once before, but why not just require harvesters to be re-deeded and dropped again to change the resource being harvested? Reduce the cost to redeed, of course. Basically, when you drop the harvester, you choose the resource to be harvested and this can not be changed.
This would kill cross-server lot trades for the most part, as well as make survey and sampling a much needed skill.
It wouldn't appear to be very difficult, code-wise.....but then, I don't program....
Because 95% of the crafters out there feel like thier chained to thier stations as it is. This would make crafing a full time job and there's a very, very small amount of players that desire to do nothing but craft.
You want to make lot trades go away? Here's an idea that would better the whole mining community, miner and architect. Give a decay rate to the mining units in the harvesters. After so many days (30 or so to be fair), these will be in need to be replace. Only the owner of the harvester should be allowed to do this.
Architects get repeat business (which was killed with the 12.1 patch), and you all get you no lot trading.
Now, I realize that there will still be the guys that want to scratch each others backs and keep this going. What all of you that seem to think the traders need to be made to suffer, need to realise one thing.
Any system that SOE impliments to make them 'pay' will totally screw over people that legitimatly run a crafter on multiple servers. If it's going to be this much of a hassle, just allow us 1 toon per account and be done with it. Perhaps then I won't have to read posts like this daily by someone that feels like others should be made to pay.
Xoshosko
Fri Jan 28, 2005 2:01 am
#15
Ewach wrote:
Even on a 1% spot, paying 1.5 cpu for power, the cost per resource per harvestor is still less than 1 cpu.
You sir, are ignorant.
Heavy Harvester (BER 13) on 1% Concentration
Yield Per Day = BER * Percent * 60 min * 24 hours = 13 * 0.1 * 60 * 24 = 187 units per day
Cost Per Day = 2160 Maint + 1.5 * 1800 power = 2160 + 2700 = 4860
Cost to Mine = 4860 / 187 = 26 cpu
Lesson learned - you want to talk out the orifice you sit on, at least do the math first.
Amen to that brother!!!
As for lot trading or lot leasing, it's free enterprising at it's best and great business roleplaying! I even create jobs on my server...And make the economy roll!
Ciao
JeCy
Fri Jan 28, 2005 6:32 am
#16
acually a very easy way to get rid of lot trading miners would be remove permissions from miners and allow only the owner to operate them.. That way lot trades could be used for the factories, storage, store ect.. but the miners would be handeld by the owner.. and people wouldnt be sucking up 10-20 million of some shift like they can easily do now..
Je'Cy
Kassuff
Fri Jan 28, 2005 11:33 am
#17
Before you start calling for the guys (or girls) blood...please add the "fat-finger" variable into the equation. I think it was supposed to be 10%, not 1%. This in itself does not make it profitable, but factor in the -20% discount that most mass-miners have (at least the ones I know) from Merchant and it suddenly becomes profitable.
Ewach wrote:
Even on a 1% spot, paying 1.5 cpu for power, the cost per resource per harvestor is still less than 1 cpu.
You sir, are ignorant.
Heavy Harvester (BER 13) on 1% Concentration
Yield Per Day = BER * Percent * 60 min * 24 hours = 13 * 0.1 * 60 * 24 = 187 units per day
Cost Per Day = 2160 Maint + 1.5 * 1800 power = 2160 + 2700 = 4860
Cost to Mine = 4860 / 187 = 26 cpu
Lesson learned - you want to talk out the orifice you sit on, at least do the math first.
ElbowJane
Fri Jan 28, 2005 12:44 pm
#18
I think they should just make the cost of harvesters go up the longer they stay in one place. It would force people to move or abandon harvestorswhen the cost of maintenance outstrips the profit of the resources. It would prevent static harvesting over the long term, but allow it on the short term as long as the resources are strong enough to justify the cost. And it saves a bunch of unnecessarily complex (and indubitably bug-ridden) calculation for developers.
Maybe it's simple-minded, but it's better than trying to decide what counts as "alarge clusterof harvesters" and whether priority is given to those who show up first, etc.
Z
GraySeven
Fri Jan 28, 2005 12:55 pm
#19
Because 95% of the crafters out there feel like thier chained to thier stations as it is. This would make crafing a full time job and there's a very, very small amount of players that desire to do nothing but craft.
Hunh? Resouce harvesting is 50% of the crafting ability, granted, but not time-wise. With speeders and now with the ability to survey while mounted, finding high-concentration sites is easy and not at all time consuming. I harvest my own resoures, for the most part, and Surveying was never a concern for me. I don't static site, but search out hi-quality resources, buy the low and bulk stuff.
Removing the ability for others to pay maintenance is not the way to go, as it also punishes groups of people on the same server that share harvesters.
Lunariel
Fri Jan 28, 2005 3:57 pm
#20
Lot sharing
Pure static harvesters are not really the problem. It's kind of the poor man's alternative. You don't need extra accounts nor a social network. The downside is that you mostly pull grinding resources. Even though it's an exploit, it enables other resources than uber resources to enter the market. Stopping static harvesters is fairly easy with some of the methods mentioned in this thread, but not worth the trouble.
Dynamiclot sharing is where you have agreements to move the harvesters on each shift. Even though you inconvenience this sharing by different methods, it will continue. And there's no way to detect the difference between a player from another galaxy sharing out lots and a part-time player on that galaxy. The only way to stop this is to restrict the number of lots for each account. But that will not go down well with people who play multiple galaxies and mine on them.
A more common alternative among powerplayers is multiple accounts and renting lots from friends on the same galaxy. This is not an exploit and is a valid way to play. They can try to make this as annoying as possible, but they can never ever stop it.
In my opinion, the only thing which have any effect is to restrict lots for each account. This will cause some players to quit and maybe others to get more accounts. But I suspect renting lots will be far more common so there won't be too much reduction in resources.Most of theother options will just make far more problems thanthey solve.
Hoarding of resources
Hoarding is natural with the way the resource spawn system works. If something great spawns, a decent replacement may not spawn for over a year.
Personally I believe it's too easy to get massive amount of resources. It's become almost like inflation. Just witness Shipwright where you need 6 million resources to master and 150k for the largest ships. Then take a look a the 'older' crafting professions...
And I also believe it's too late to reduce the number of resources entering the game. Trying restrictions now will only hurt new players and not the people with huge resource stockpiles. Some people have enough to last until the last galaxy shuts down. 
A better solution would be toincrease resource requirements across the board. If every schematic needs 4 times as much, it's the same effect as reducing resources by a factor of 4 including existing stockpiles.Still crafters with huge inventories will have an advantage and every harvester will be pulled to place a factoryonce this enters the Test Server...
A more interesting apporach is to put an expiration date on resources. If resources only will be usable for let's say 6 months, there's no need to grab more than you need except for selling. And prices will go down as you get closer to the expiration date. This will dramatically reduce stockpiling. The resource shift also needs to be changed so that each rare resource is guaranteed to spawn a few times within that period. Also for this to work, the crafted items need expiration dates. Otherwise people will stockpile items instead of resources. A few items should have no expiration date, especially houses. This way everything will be recycled every resource period plus item period. And it means new players will be on equal footing once they have been playing for a full recycle period. The bad thing about this plan is that being a veteran crafter loses much of its advantage. A lot of players keep playing because of all they have invested. If they lose some of that they may quit.
Of course none of this will happen if SOE doesn't consider hoarding a problem. I'm not even sure myself. But the expiration option would make it a lot more interesting. Currently every itemis edging closer and closer to perfection. With expiration there would be far more variation.
Lunariel
GraySeven
Fri Jan 28, 2005 4:47 pm
#21
The current crafting system makes an expiration date impossible to do.
Good spawns happen randomly. The crafting system requires good stats. You have to hold onto good resources until you get all that you need to craft hi-quality items.
Unless they change the crafting system or introduce a way to make good items from bad resources, hoarding is not only required, its encouraged.
Kassuff
Sat Jan 29, 2005 1:01 am
#23
cl0kwerq wrote:
I thinkthat you're underestimating the profitability of lot trading.
Even on a 1% spot, paying 1.5 cpu for power, the cost per resource per harvestor is still less than 1 cpu. Since you can sell grind quality material for 1.5-2 CPU on pretty much all galaxy markets, this means the more the better, and no one wants to mine grind quality, so the statics will always have their niche.
One thing I would worry about with your plan is that the shifts would start moving to unfriendly terrain, making it impossible to mine a quality shift the regular way. If Guru's advice is taken and they reduce the terrain restrictions on mines then that would move to counteract the problem.
What sort of disturbs me is that you think working against lot traders would somehow "level" the playing field, and the expectation that someone who started 1 week ago can compete with someone who started 1 year ago. If that were the case we may as well be playing mario bros., as the role-playing element of "building" your character would be totally shot. There are people out there with litterally billions of resources. I don't think it would be fair to them if someone could come in on their first day and start competing as though they had been there a year, but that's pretty much the way mining is set up. You're capped only by Architect prices, and if you choose that as your starting profession then you'll quickly amass all the resources you want and need.
I agree 100% with this statement.I'm not a cross-server-lot-trade resouce magnate, but I am a long term player. To slant the field in favor of new players (in any respects) would have little direct effect on my game, but besides not being fair, it would annoy me to no end. I'm a player with hundreds, if not thousands of online hours invested in developing my charachters. Why should my contribution to this game be devalued by making life easier for new players?
If SOE is really interested in getting the hoarders to give up their lots, their going to need to give them incentive to do so, as there is no rule about making a character on another server and dropping lots. It would probably include making a mining profession that would be able to expand a characters lots. Then there would be an associated skill cost with the ability to have a few hundred harvestors down.
I think the "incentive is already happening". I've noticed a steep drop in prices for mined resources (at least on my server) Even some old server "bests" have been going for <20 cpu when just 6 months ago players were paying 200cpu. Creature resources still command a premium, but if the scouts and rangers can get a great price, good for them! They work hard, they put in the skill points, they deserve it IMHO.
Another thing I've noticed is there's many more resource vendors, and they are swelling with both great and grinding materials. A resource vendor near my city has a "ONE CPU or UNDER" vendor. Want a 100k of water for 50k credits? No problem, it's there.
I belive the root cause is thelack of credits coming into the server (probably a no-brainer, but I had to say it) Few credits mean fewer people can afford exorbitant prices for resources. The CU might de-emphasizethe value of resources even further by making teamplay, and not super weapons and armor, the deciding factor in battle (but this is only a theory)
Another point I'd like to make is that a lot of what the static miners get is grind quality material. I think it's necessary to have the grind quality material, as the really high quality material only supports the higher end crafting economy. What about the new players who aren't interested in mining? They need suppliers who will give them low prices, and I can tell you from experience that no one will sell you 10 CPU resources at 2 CPU no matter how nice you ask. Lowering the availibility of resources (as what you suggest would do) would only serve to drive production down, and then the crafters wouldn't be able to meet demands as supplies and back stock thinned, and so you'd have a high-demand market, or a sellers market, and most merchants would start raising prices, making some of the medium ranged items too expensive to be afforded by newer players. In essence, I think what you're suggesting would have an opposite effect on the economy in the long run than what you desire.
Pricing medium range (regular, run of the mill, etc) items on vendors at premium prices simply means they will not sell. Someone else will always be building it cheaper, and perhaps even better. Merchants that do this will quickly realize the error in their ways, or go broke and bored, restocking the same items every 30 days. I cannot envision a price gouging artisan lasting very long..on any server.
Cheers
In respect to "hoarding", could someone explain to me why it's BAD to hoard good materials (or any items for that matter). Attacking a great new resource (especially if it has not surfaced in months) with as many harvestors as possible only seems like common sense, not a source of game imbalance. If Sony has some sort of technical problem/limitation with the number of placed structures, the number of resources players have stuffed on their vendors, that's their problem, NOT ours.To penalize your some of your oldest and best players customers for some hardware or software inadequacy would be....ill advised.
Ending this before I start ranting too much....sorry fellow artisans!
GraySeven
Sat Jan 29, 2005 1:32 am
#24
Hoarding isn't bad, and I don't know where that argument came from. Without hoarding, you wouldn't see Hi-quality goods on the market.
It took me over a year to collect the HQ resources I needed to make Composite with 70% resists. I couldn't bear to use my 20k units of Wooly hide with all numbers in the 900 range to make armor with the rest of the resources average at best. So I sat on that spawn of Wooly for endless months. As I harvested HQ resources, I stashed them away with my Wooly until all my resources were far above average.
As a 10 point AS, I was crafting armor equal to a lot of 12 pointers.
The spawn system encourages hoarding.
Lunariel
Sat Jan 29, 2005 7:25 am
#25
GraySeven wrote:
The current crafting system makes an expiration date impossible to do.
Good spawns happen randomly. The crafting system requires good stats. You have to hold onto good resources until you get all that you need to craft hi-quality items.
Unless they change the crafting system or introduce a way to make good items from bad resources, hoarding is not only required, its encouraged.
Yes, they have to change the resource shift for this to work. Here's one way to do it.
There are 128 different Inorganics if you don't count Native resources, JTL resources and Unknown types. All of them now last between 7 and 10 shifts, with each shift being slightly longer than a day. This means that everything is shifted out at least every 10 shift.
Let's say we want at least one spawn of each within 60 shifts. Once every 60 shifts they divide those 128 types randomly into 6 lists. In the first 10 shifts they will first grab the resources from the first list and once it's empty they will continue to draw random resources for the rest. Then they do the second list for the next 10 shifts. This means there have to be at least 128/6 = 22 resources available at all time. To get additional bonus spawns and allow unknown types to still spawn, that number should be increased to at least 30. With this method the spawns would still appear random and we would get one of each every 60 days or so.
Currently we have more than that number in each galaxy (37), but a lot of it is reserved for Iron (14). The current distribution favors some subtypes. That's why some resources types now are more rare than others. All they have to do is to unreserve Iron and change the distribution to the method mentioned above.
The quality of items will of course drop. If an expiration period is 6 months, then the quality of items will be roughly what it was 6 months after launch. Crafted items would have good and bad seasons. One expiration period the best Kiirium might be OQ 200 making a bad Composite season.
On a positive side, it will make crafting more dynamic. You have to evaluate when to use your resources. Timing will be the secret to what makes a good crafter. It will also require more effort since you have to run subcomponents far more often. A downside is that massive factory fields will be an advantage when the best window of crafting isduring ashort period.
I believe implementing expiration is too much work for it to happen. Still it's an interesting thought experiment.
Lunariel
GraySeven
Sun Jan 30, 2005 10:06 pm
#26
If something were to occur like this, it would have to be done through a huge Crafting Revamp (Like the Combat Upgrade going on right now). The crafting system is so dynamic that changes that directly affect the base crafting system would need to be implemented in such a manner as to not totally destroy the crafting professions.
Basically, if a Master Rifleman needs a group of 19 other Master combat-characters with High-Quality weapons and 80% resist armor to take on a POI, and you make all craftables 50% of what they were, the POI will need to be updated at the same time...
A daunting task in the least.