Artisan Archive

I posted this on Architech and Main forums too, I felt it was 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.

I expected more.. However I think that the efficiency of harvesters ramps drastically up as you get higher efficiency. For the simple reason that failure on sample is still high, but harvesters don't fail.

I"m somewhat disappointed with harvesters, looking at these numbers. They're good but not great :\

The only problem with the macroing is that you can't use it when you're logged off. Extractors, on the other hand, continue to work even when you're not playing.

Since I'm also a marksman, I can go out and earn cash by doing missions fighting, and trust the extractors will dig up enough resources for me to use when I get back from hunting.

Many folks do not log off when they macro harvest, so they do it, even if they do have harvesters, cause look at the results.

Also, harvesters amounts is equal to the Max KG/HRtimes the effiecency of the resource, thats it.

So as show, you would need a harvester with a max of 10KG/HR to equal me harvesting at a 72% resource spot, unfortunatly

• Personal Harvester: 2KR/hr max


• Medium Harvester: 4KG/hr max


• Large Harvester: 7KG/hr max

on a perspectives view, it does seem odd that a person could harvest more resources 'by hand' than with the help of a machine... even though star wars is far from non-fiction, on a realistic aspect, having a harvester is pretty much worse than working with your hands to dig up resources...

interesting... and flawed...

You are all ignoring the part where you can have 10 harvesters going at once. 10 heavies would be equivalent to 7 PCs working 24/7

Actually a heavy is 7KG/HR, so at the same 72% spot, that would be 5.04KG/HR extraction rate. So a single surveyer is better than a single heavy, still kinda screwy. Also note that if your using all 10 slots for heavies, you have none for factories or shops, so its hard to build items to sell to supply your heavies, much less the power to supply them. Off topic, but a good discussion

Well, there are also some people who can't dedicate the resources on their computer to SWG 24/7. When I go to work I disconnect from my home network to free up bandwidth for everyone else (they work on their computers from home) and to let other people get onto SWG if it's close to full. While I'm offline, my harvesters are still working. Half the resources I retrieve from them provide for more than the harvester upkeep. Not everything in the game has to be useful to everyone, if you find that something works better for you, go for it. That seems to be the rule of thumb.