Artisan Archive

Alright anyone know how to beat the surveying nerf? I don't like to sit down and watch my guy survey all day long, most of you can most likly agree with that. So anyone know anything at all, not the third party uo or whatever i've heard, don't want to get banned.

by nerf do you mean that dumb window that comes up and asks if you want to harvest resources??? If so I hate it to!

It doesnt seem to come up all the time though so I really dont see a way around it, but if someone has something by all means do tell

Just ignore it.

If you're running a macro which calls up a toolbarSlot then the macro will continue sampling forever.... wake up the next day and close 20 of those boxes but you have all the resources and XP from the sampling. I think that box will just end your current session (if even that) but then when your macro loops it does restart sampling (if it ever stops).

The best way is to simply stop AFK Macroing. Use harvesters instead. With the nice Survey mission payouts (assuming you've got a good weapon skill), you can get all the money you need to run harvesters.

This was clearly a nerf to stop bot mining. If it wasn't a nerf it would have gotten mentioned in the patch notes

The question is, why the objection to bot mining? I know a lot of crafters quitting now, esp. architects, because of the huge time investment required in maintaining their operation. As one put it, "I don'twant to play to work anymore."

Bot mining produces more resources over a fixed amount of time than harvesting. Running a bunch of mines is already too time consuming. The correct solution to this is to increase the output of harvesters to beat bot mining. Let players play.

I can't stand this popup. The macro system built into the game doesn't have a work around for this. It just sits there for ever waiting for you to hit the "ignore" button because you NEVER find the concentration anyway.

Buying harvestors is not an option for some people. I just started a new mediccharacter and I have to sample to get my supplies so I can start healing people.

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grimkai wrote:

I can't stand this popup. The macro system built into the game doesn't have a work around for this. It just sits there for ever waiting for you to hit the "ignore" button because you NEVER find the concentration anyway.

Buying harvestors is not an option for some people. I just started a new mediccharacter and I have to sample to get my supplies so I can start healing people.

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Or you could start out running delivery missions, like all the crafters had to do.

I usually click "locate rescource." It gives you a larger sample, I think.

All i will say is search these board pages closer there is a work around i did a 14 hr session lastnite

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NCIceman wrote:

This was clearly a nerf to stop bot mining. If it wasn't a nerf it would have gotten mentioned in the patch notes

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Um, it's been mentioned in multiple places by the devs, whether it was in the specific patch nots or not.

Anyway, my friend who macro samples (I use harvesters personally) says that the auto-log off will prevent you from sampling all night anyway. I know that I went AFK for about 15 minutes while waiting for my factory to finish a run and when I came back, I'd been logged out, and I had a macro running that had me stand up and sit down every minute just to see if that would make me stay logged in. It didn't.

So there may be no way around the auto-log out anyway.

I am positively dumbfounded by the number of people who don't seem to realize that this change was made intentionally to decrease the amount of macro sampling going on for resources. Except for the fact that you need a way to acquire resources before you can make a small harvester, I'd be all for removing hand sampling completely (except perhaps for a get-one-unit-for-half-your-mind-bar mode to determine statistics.)

Grn.

Oh, and as for why: the sink of money into harvester maintenance and power is a very important part of the economy. If minerals can be acquired more cheaply and effectively for "free" (specifically AFK sampling), prices for resources are artificially lowered, making it very very difficult to balance the economy against inflation by tweaking harvester costs, resource concentrations, resource demands, etc. It's bad news.

Note: I am not a crafter, only a miner, so I am somewhat biased in this. But I do understand that there are some serious problems with crafting that lead to massive grinding, which makes "startup cost" for crafters much much higher than it ought to be. From Holocron's big post, I hope something will happen on that front soon. Too many resources makes for a very boring market, because there's enough of everything (except ore, of course) once the "grinding" is done. Without shortages, you start to get a world where there's plenty of everything and prices lose all stability--varying from dump-prices one day (I'm grinding, might as well lose less money) to almost out of reach the next (everybody has so much money because it's not going anywhere.) This can sort of be seen with the way nobody wants to pay architects' prices for houses now that they're trying to actually break even, whereas everybody is willing to pay prices for weapons that far exceed the material costs.

Gah. End of rant.

For those who are suffering from the surveying nerf and are forced into harvesters and generators, pay VERY close attention. There is currently a combination of post-patch mechanics and existing resource distribution that I used last night to generate over 40,000 credits in just over an hour. Its commonly known that minerals and such are distributed through the cities themselves. There is almost always a high concentration of some material or another available. Survey your cities outskirts near the boundary, find the highest concentration of material you can find, 80% or more works best. Then go to a mission terminal at least 512m away from the spot and select a pair survey mission targeting that kind of resource, wash, rinse repeat as needed until you are adequately funded. Note I am a novice creature handler as well as a novice carbine marksman, so my missions pay out 1000-1800 for the most part. Grab two at a time and they both pay off at once. One hour of hard work and you can be running for a week or more to get the resources you need.