Artisan Archive
Thread: Question of the Day 7-31-03 Miner Profession
Why does everyone want it to be an elite profession? I'm not saying make it one of "the six" but rather another skill tree off to the side with no pre-req's and not a pre-req for anything else. Take away the surveying line and break up either engineering or dom arts.
That said I've seen a lot of good threads detailing some ideas for the skill tree for miner so I won't go into that here.
I do however think that harvesters should be restricted to just miners. Maybe make personal harvesters part of novice miner so that if someone wants to run one they can pick it up.
Sohgin said:
I do however think that harvesters should be restricted to just miners. Maybe make personal harvesters part of novice miner so that if someone wants to run one they can pick it up.
Ok, someone is suggesting the only miners use harvesters...
As an elite profession, the barrier to entry would still be incredibly low. 93 skill points to master is all, and most artisans already climb the survey tree anyway. I think there is a place for personal harvesters without being a full-fledged miner. A crafter should be able be the complete supply chain if they choose - picking the resources, building the product by hand, and selling it people on an individual basis. I just have objections when crafters can gather all the resources required, craft, run a mass production operation, and sell in mass (via vendors) all at the same time. They become become a one-man Standard Oil.
I think in addition to Survey IV, another prerequisite forthe mining professionshould be one or two branches from scout (I'm thinking Exploration and maybeHunting). I heard rumors that at one time in the Beta, there was a "animal resource harvester", which acted like an automated trap: catching,killing, thenskinning/fileting/deboning creatures. While it's kind of a grisly visual, something like that would be useful for chefs, tailors, and makers of bone armor. And just to keep the scouts placated about getting competition for their harvesting results, you could put the schematic for thisin one of the high level Trapping skills. And some other balancing issues might be needed; say amax harvest rate belowcurrent personalharvesters, with an appropriately reduced power/maintenance cost.
FuzzyAnimator wrote:
But I agree that the miner profession would cause a glut of resources on the market, plummeting the price and by extension lowering the prices of items until all crafting classes can't make a decent profit. Not good.
I agree with most of your post, but the part quoted above confuses me.Say you're currently paying4 creds per unit for raw materials, and charging (say) 10 creds per resource on the finished item. If a miner comes along, "floods" the market, and drives resource prices down to 2 credits per unit, why does droping your item price down to 5 credits per resource unit lose you money? Ok, you're making less raw credits, but if the economy as a whole drops down, items will be costing *you* less money, too. In addition, more of your items will fit under the 3k limit of the bazaar, and vendor maintenance is (I believe) dependent on the item cost of what you have up for sale.
Now because of some fixed costs (house, vendor, and factory maintance comes to mind), there will be a lower limit to what you can charge, but this is just called "overhead".I'm pretty sure customers would understand why you're selling something requiring factory-identical components on a personal vendor in your own small house for 10 creds/unit when resources are going for 2 or lower.
Disclaimer: the above prices are pulled from the blue sky over my head, and probably don't have anyrelation to any real-world or SWG economy.
kasuta wrote:
I'm not sure about it being 'too easy' to get resources--the good spots seem to be fairly dangerous.Wait until you near an elite profession and realize that you need to start giving up combat skills so you have skill points, and then try to get out to your harvester without combat skills. I'm not there yet either, but I see it coming down the road. Miners would be able to focus more on combat skills, then us artisans wouldn't be constantly dying out in the wildnerness.
Kasuta, this has not been my experience with harvesting. I'm able to find many good spots (60-90) without fear of death. I even AFK sample while I'm there, so if there was a red mob around, I'd be dead. Hasn't happened yet.
This is also somewhat anecdotal Kasuta, and I'd like to see some evidence that good samples are being placed in areas which are too difficult for someone with high artisan skills to get to.
CrossBreed said:
Why do we need a new class? What in the current system prevents Artisans from being effective miners?
Nothing. But many crafters don't want to run harvesters (which they are almost forced to do now because the market for resources isn't particularly stable). Also, if you actually enjoy mining, wouldn't it be nice if you could actually somehow do it better than the amateurs? That's what a profession is for. It's the same reason there is a merchant profession. It allows specialists to be better (all personal skills being equal) at selling product than someone who just has Business IV.
When I read the suggestions in this thread, I still can't help but think that the most kickin' miner of all is the architect. Why be a miner when I can be a better miner with one branch of the archtitect tree? To make a miner work, you would have to seriously nerf architects by taking away potential customers. You would have to either force architects only to sell those staple products to miners, or take even the building of those harvestors away and give that task to miners. Then what's the architect left with? Otherwise, you can give miners a bonus with the use of those harvestors, but if the bonus is so high as to be worthwile for a full tree of skill points, we would have too many resources floating around, the market would tank and then being a miner would be useless again.
None of this is really necessary though, is it?
In my opinion, any "miner" profession ought to allow more efficient management of harvesters and more efficient sale of resources. Easier surveying would also be a plus, but easier hand sampling is not desirable. (Nobody who is doing bulk trading in resources ought to be hand sampling: it doesn't make sense.)
What I would like to see is up to 1024 range surveying, and the ability to extract resources more quickly using harvesters (even if the costs increase along with the extraction rate: to be honest, current costs are rather ridiculously low.) Other tools that would make managing a large set of extraction stations efficient would be a management tool (datapad or home) for monitoring mining stations, even on remote planets, and for checking the full resource list on every planet easily. That way when resources shift, you know where to head right away, but it will still take a reasonable amount of work to locate the perfect spot.
The final thing that would make resource sales more efficient is perhaps a way to use a vendor for "per unit" sales. You put a large amount of a resource in and set a price for that resource, instead of having individual batches for sale. The purchaser decides how many resources to buy. Perhaps be able to set a minimum and maximum number of units to set up variable pricing depending on the size of the transaction.
Anyway, I don't think that a special mining profession is necessary, but I *would* enjoy it, since it's a big chunk of what I do every day. I *do* think that more-efficient-and-or-faster-mining-with-harvesters is the way to go. Even this will decrease the huge mining sprawl somewhat, since miners would be more likely to use one of the larger more efficient extraction buildings per resource site, and less likely to build on conveniently-near-town-but-low-concentration areas.
Happymob wrote:
CrossBreed said:
Why do we need a new class? What in the current system prevents Artisans from being effective miners?
Nothing. But many crafters don't want to run harvesters (which they are almost forced to do now because the market for resources isn't particularly stable). Also, if you actually enjoy mining, wouldn't it be nice if you could actually somehow do it better than the amateurs? That's what a profession is for. It's the same reason there is a merchant profession. It allows specialists to be better (all personal skills being equal) at selling product than someone who just has Business IV.
Fair enough, however I think that the market will become more stable as time goes on, and to implement a new profession into the game so early into its release is, in my opinion, premature.
Already I am seeing the miner profession happening inside of the current system; I am one of them! I do not intend to move up the chain Artisan chains, and instead will use skill points on combat professions. So then, in my opinion we do not need another class becausea miner is defined more by what a person does all day. We would need a class if the Artisan class was somehow lacking in an ability to provide resources, but I feel that it is not.
Thoughts?
I wasn't in beta, so I want to ask: what was miner profession originally and why did they do away with it?
As for harvesters being in dangerous areas, I have 2 locations in Kor Vella, one of which I have died due to a nearby swooper camp spawning while I was depositing power, and the other in which I nearly died due to a nearby Rogue Bageraset. Now, either of these enemies I could have disposed of had I not been in another window at the time, but my rifleman skills kind of depend upon surprise. I have also read complaints on the boards of large harvester fields spawning large numbers of enemies. And last night when putting down harvesters on an 85% Iron, I was warned to watch out for a roaming band of slice cats (?) or something like that...my friend was warning me as he ran back to his corpse. I realize this isn't a mountain of evidence, as I have other harvesters with no problem. But it seems like the really rich spots are a bit more dangerous. Although, upon reading some of the other posts in this thread, I may be persuaded that miner combat skills are not necessary.
Yeah, see I'd need soemthing like a Dev saying "Yes, the higher the resource count, the harder and more likely to aggro the mobs are" to convince me of this point, because I do not believe in anecdotal evidence, especially in MMORPGs.
kasuta wrote:
I realize this isn't a mountain of evidence, as I have other harvesters with no problem. But it seems like the really rich spots are a bit more dangerous. Although, upon reading some of the other posts in this thread, I may be persuaded that miner combat skills are not necessary.
I would love to see the mining profession in here.
Ideas for skills would be:
An increase sampling spead and surveyingrange (allow it to scan deeper as well).
An increase in quantity when sampling (not likely I know that all ready).
Being able to purify the resourse the they gather in to higher quality! I would love this one and so would any other artist out there!
Give them a unique skill of Anti-Claim Jumping for fighting Claim Jumpers off ( Aggressive NPCs that sem to start spawning near the best sites for ore.
make it an elite class off of Surveying.
I think this is an excellent question, and we should look into answering it before we go forward.
kasuta wrote:
I wasn't in beta, so I want to ask: what was miner profession originally and why did they do away with it?