Artisan Archive
Thread: Question of the Day 7-31-03 Miner Profession
This is not necessarily a bad idea.
My only concern is that I suspect that a very large % of resources come from people in PA's or combat types loaning out lots etc. who have no Artisan skills. There's a guy on my server, not in a PA or anything, has 50 harvestors.
I agree with your idea of certifying harvestors in principal, but they have to be very careful in doing it. It also may not be possible. They may have to boost production so much to compensate that the artisans running them become unbalanced.
I agree that it would affect resource prices. Anytime you reduce the number of harvesters output, you will have lower supply. Now,one choice is to increase harvester output (and maintenance to keep marginal cost steady). This would benefit artisans as they would suddenly have more resources to sell and wouldn't have the bounty hunter competing against them. Or, you let supply and demand take it's toll. Resource prices go up, more non-artisans will take a detour into surveying in order to fund other things (like buying their armor or weapons). Or more artisans who don't currently harvest will be forced to start (a result that I'd rather avoid).
A side benefit of this is that it would make Surveying IV continue to be useful long term. I often here medics talk about surrendering their surveying skills back to novice artisan as they need the skill points for other things. This would make keeping surveying useful if you want to harvest in quantity.
I still like the idea of the profession. It is very much like the merchant class - it fills a specific niche in the supply chain. That said, I can either live with tying harvesting to surveying or just leaving everything as it is. I'm not unhappy with where things stand, I just think they could be better.
I apologize if any of these ideas were already mentioned. I just didn't read the whole thread.
Miners should be able to take care of harvester maintenance as a skill as opposed to credits. The higher the skill the more it adds to the maintenance pool. It could also be like Medics' /tenddamage where it does wound damage each time it's used so a Novice Miner can't accomplish as much as a higer level one.
They could also "slice" for lack of a better word (not to take anything from Smugglers) harvesters to get better results or use less fuel. This would be a one time thing each time the deed is used and only lasts until the harvester is redeeded.
Improved results on sampling over what Survey gives and greater range for suveying.
Harvester XP similar tofactory XP.
Maybe even exclusive resources only they have mine for.
Right now on the Naritus server there is one weaponsmith holding an entire monopoly on any intermediate and high grade weapons. And prices are rediculously high. I have intermediate pistoleer skills, and cant possibly afford 50k prices on pistols. The only reason the weaponsmiths and armorsmiths are millionaires is because they bought the game 2 weeks before the rest of us, and were ahead of the tide.
Allowing Artisans to mine, makes them totally self sufficient. I have often asked these people if they wanted to buy resources off of me. I have two brothers, and they lease all of their lots to me. So as a beginner player i have 25-30 mining machines going on all at once and I can barely make a profit. I sell water and inert-gas to keep up with enormous cost of running equipment. But other then that, I cannot get ahead.
A mining profession (nerfed Artisan capabilities) would force the engineers/weaponsmiths/armorsmiths to actually depend on other players. They either mine/artisan and die while walking to their mines, or they can be super artisans paying enormous sums to miners/scouts miners/marksmen miners/brawlers.
The low end of the game is very difficult if you bought the game a week after it was released.
"Why have a miner? Because many of us are playing it and enjoying it and would enjoy it even more if we actually had some skill tree content and advancement."
This argument is not valid, in my opinion. The profession was cut from beta because it was not an interesting line, did not have enough people playing, and because it was duplicated in the Artisan profession.
Also, using your logic SOE should create a class for every little niche. I don't think that is a desirable thing.
I concur!
as a welshman, coal is in my blood
literally! please help me!
butdoes this mean we'll be banned from cantinas?
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This argument is not valid, in my opinion. The profession was cut from beta because it was not an interesting line, did not have enough people playing, and because it was duplicated in the Artisan profession.
Also, using your logic SOE should create a class for every little niche. I don't think that is a desirable thing.
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Make it interesting. People who are already playing it get value added, others will play it if it is interesting.
With 10 zillion artisans and the over-referenced BH's doing miner right now obviously some people enjoy it. Hardly a 'little niche'. Free those up who don't want to do it by increasing de-facto miner's outputs, give benefits to those enjoy it and will be willing to invest the skillpoints, and give a 'clear path' to those who only want to do it. A month into it, I play 4 hours a day and all I have is survey IV, Eng IV, Pistol III, and Exploration II. There is no skill tree content for me to focus on. Any other profession for as much as I play I would be very close to master.
And the beta economy can hardly have been as dynamic as the live one. Go back and read the posts of others like myself in this thread who are doing it as a business, buyin and selling, it is a little strategy game AND a business sim all inside a rpg game.
The trick is to make it interesting and in this thread alone there have been at least 5 or 6 good ideas beyond just 'increased surveying skill' to make it interesting.
Cse Dale
Wandertech Subsidiaries Cse Dale Division
Correllia, Kettemoore
Hypatian wrote:
For the improved surveying, I wouldn't go above a 1024 radius with the additional ability to learn what materials are available on all planets, not just the one you're on. Maybe also provide the ability to see stats on all resources local to your current planet without having to sample them. So you can find out where to get which resource, go to that planet, learn the vital stats, and hunt down a place to set up a harvester.
I like that.
How about if advanced survey also granted you the ability to see the concentrations of all the items in a spot sort of like a harvester does instead of the usual survey map. This would be a great way to see what else is in an area you plan to put a harvester at.
Regards,
Artuk
Anyway, I guess we'll see how things go. I'm certainly interested in such a profession in any case, even though it will dilute where I want to take my character. But, well, I'm already thinking of ditching some of my dancing skills. I could go all the way if I had to.
For details on such a profession, I'd suggest that miner be "harvester" rather than miner--anything that you can survey for, it applies to. Having a separate profession for minerals, etc. would be foolish. It *might* be worth it to have a profession that had separate lines for different resource types (a different way of looking at it than we've been describing). So one line would be organics and water, and one line would be minerals and gasses. I haven't looked at organics yet, so I'm not sure what all goes into them. It might be good to have, for example, the Farmer line, the Miner line, and then two other lines--one for improved surveying, the other for improved resource management. The farmer/miner lines would improve harvesting efficiency (speed increase, cost decrease) as you go up them, perhaps with one or two other perks, or providing access to more interesting certs.
The resource management line would provide the ability to make various admixtures (crossbreeding plants, alloying metals, etc.) possibly working with other professions (BE for helping with crossbreeding?) I'd design the later in such a way that it's intended for *low* quantities, high cost, and extremely high utility. For example, say you alloy 100 metal A and 100 metal B and get 50 metal C out (or worse). Perhaps there would be specific recipes like "Use 100 copper and 100 steel to produce 50 titanium aluminum". Set it up so that some features (malleability?) of the source metals determine experimental values as for normal crafting recipes. Make it possible to set up a factory to do it for the larger scale (but still limited.) Good experimentation could produce good result statistics on the material. Now you have a way to produce materials that aren't currently available, at potentially higher qualities than naturally occurring, at high cost for special orders from artisans. "You want to make a *really good* pistol? Let me show you some of the stuff I cooked up the other day..." Aim for limited quantities so that an item made of an admixture material is special--which also gives people with too much money on their hands something *really* expensive to buy.
For the improved surveying, I wouldn't go above a 1024 radius with the additional ability to learn what materials are available on all planets, not just the one you're on. Maybe also provide the ability to see stats on all resources local to your current planet without having to sample them. So you can find out where to get which resource, go to that planet, learn the vital stats, and hunt down a place to set up a harvester.
Whoa. Okay. I went on for a while there.
As a final comment, I'd suggest that this new "Resource Engineer" profession (or what have you, it doesn't make sense to call it miner if it's not just minerals) be based off of two lines--and I'd suggest either Surveying and Business (which makes sense, since surveyors probably need to have business skills for sales) or Surveying and Exploration from the Scout line (which again makes a certain amount of sense.) I'd be inclined to say Surveying and Business.Oh, a final note. I take back my suggestions about giving "miners" improved abilities to sell resources. Make that part of the business skill line and/or the merchant advanced profession. I hadn't thought about them, and that is their bailiwick. That also gives us another way to interact and another choice to make--are we going to do our own business deals (specialize in business and merchant) at the expense of narrowing our focus, or are we going to work with other more specialized players who can do a better job of that for us?
This gives niches for merchant-only traders who specialize in collecting and selling resources from outside sources (and have other skills for whatever business-people want skills for), collector-only harvesters who specialize in digging things out of the ground and growing things (and have skills for self defense if they need it to get the best stuff from a tough spot), and merchant-collector combination players who do all the work from start to finish (and probably also work with other people to get more coverage.)
End of... interestingly speculative two cents worth that probably won't resemble the final product at all.
If you wanted to have a miner profession, you would absolutely have to take mineral gathering away from everyone else. This would put architects in a similar situation that bio-engineers are in, only being able to sell their main produce to a very small percentage of the population. This results in two watered down professions, where we now have at least one useful one.
I would also say that before any change is made, we have to find out where the economy is going to level out when most of the players aren't newbies anymore.
Another suggestion, which may or may not be a good one: allow the extraction profession to have an increased number of lots for harvesters (but harvesters only), similar to the increasing number of vendors that businesspeople get. This makes it more reasonable to have more diverse operations spread across the worlds. Might not be necessary--maybe this collecting resources together part should be more business and less extraction.
In any case, there's always room for more efficiency. Heck, *everything* I have produced so far has sold on the bazaar within 24 hours of posting, and I haven't even begun to get into more efficient production yet with the tools we *do* have.
Atuk,
Like I said, this thread is full of people who want to be miners. There is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with wanting a mining profession. The thread is full of people who want new powers, fancy titles the works. My point is, what would this do to the general economy. Joe crafter, whether its an artisan, architect, or doctor, is the one who is going to buy the resources a miner makes. Where does mining fit into the economy and where would it lead it? I'm for a mining profession that allows me to quit mining to gather resources. I'm not for a mining profession that doesn't improve the economy. Making one person rich, the miner, at the expense of someone else, isn't going to help the economy, it just shifts money around.
This thread is not about a miner profession, but what use an miner would have in the economy. Resources are the key to the economy. You state that the artisan would keep personal harvesters. Now I guess that miners would run the more advanced types, though there are some miners who want to be able to do all the mining.
I"m not against a mining profession. I just want to know what impact such a profession would have on the economy. Taking large harvesters out of the hands of certain powerful crafters might help the economy a lot, or maybe not at all.
My big concern is would each world produce enough miners to meet demand.