Artisan Archive

The Miner profession

From what I have been reading the majority support the idea of a miner professions being added in.

For anyone who dislikes this idea please post why.

How would you implement the miner professions? What skills? What kinda exp etc...

Pardon my newbyness, but Itseems that if someone specializes in surveying and creating harvestors and does it properly, they can come up with more resources than they can possibly sell or use. (I'm just starting to use harvestors myself.) I even wonder if it's a little too easy to gather resources in this game. It seems that mining would be not only sort of old fashion for the Star Wars universe, but maybe redundant as well.

On the other hand, if mining were to become preferable to machine harvesting, maybe we would see less industrial ugliness in otherwise natural terrain. Still, in order to avoid nerfing harvestors, mining would have to become so productive as to make resources practically worthless.

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.

---

Cephalo wrote:
On the other hand, if mining were to become preferable to machine harvesting, maybe we would see less industrial ugliness in otherwise natural terrain. Still, in order to avoid nerfing harvestors, mining would have to become so productive as to make resources practically worthless.

---

I don't see mining as an alternative to harvesters. Miners will have to use harvesters. They should be better suited for finding resources--possibly with a planet-wide survey skill, better combat skills than we can maintain, and possibly able to use up more lots of space. You are hanging on to the idea of mining still being profitable for the artisan. I think this is the wrong idea...make it more profitable to buy materials from a miner rather than gather them yourself.

personally, i am for the reintroduction of the miner profession. As a whole, artisans are dependent on resources, a miner would be the prefect elite to supply those resources.

As for skills:

novice Miner - enhanced surveying techniques - + 5% yield, -2.5% HAM cost

- enhanced range - add 10% to our effective scan range

- enhanced surveying tool schematic - make an advanced surveying tool that is miner only and combines the functions of the chemical, mineral, and organic tools.

- forging tool schematic - used in the forging line

the skill trees would be something like:

Sampling - would have gradual increases to sampling yield, +10% for each box

Rangefinding- gradual increase to surveying range + 5% for each box

Speed - increase in sampling speed by +5% and decrease in HAM cost by 5% per box

Research - forging skills line (I think this should be in miners profession because then it won't need to be added to artisan base profession) each box gives a forging experimentation bonus of 1 point and adds new metal types that can be made from existing metals (bronze, steel, etc.)

Master Miner:

+10 % increase in yield

+5% increase in speed

4% decrease in HAM cost

+2 forging experimentation points

+new forging combinations

I did not include any extractors because they belong in the architect line. This line of skills should be all about resource gathering and as such should have very few schematics in it. The architects are responsible for buildings, this line is responsible for getting them the materials to make those buildings.

Experience should be 2 types, Mining and forging. Mining xp from when we actually sample and forging xp from when we forge our sampled materials together.

This is just my vision of the Miner Elite Profession, but with these skills I think it could work.

It seems logical to keep with the organization of the skill tree in considering what a Miner should do, as opposed to what an Professional Engineer (armorsmith, weaponsmith, DE, Architect) should do. Ideally, the Miner would allow thestrictly artisanEngineers to devote more time to their craft and less time harvesting and sampling.

Possible Miner attributes:

1. Miners have a greater survey range and can use specialized surveying equipment that can, say, increase their personal sampling rate, or maybe even predict how long before a resource disappears.

2. Miners can use special harvesters that are more efficient.

3. Miners can refine materials to modify their overall quality, malebility, etc..

4. Miners get XP anytime someone uses their modified materials to build something.

Just some ideas.

I haveSOME problems with a Miner profession, but I STRONGLY disagree that harvesters should be taken away from the schematic list for the artisan. The higher up I get in the artisan tree, the harder it gets to make better items because I have a hard time collecting the resources, and am unable to afford buying them a lot of the time.

My suggestion for the miner would be to make them extremely specialized in mining and resource gathering, not exclusive. Skills like "Improved Mineral Extraction" where they get higher percentage values on resource concentrations than other players (but not over 95% say). Things like that.

I don't remember who suggested taking personal harvesters away from artisans and give them to miners, but this seems wrong since artisans can do all the items at a basic level. All they have currently is personal harvesters, and that's fine. Take harvesters away from architect and give them to miner, or make the miners harvesters more effective or something.

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 think the miner should be left off, and nerfing harvesting in general so that the miner can exist is not a good solution, since it hurts the beginning player.

I have a feeling that most people drooling after the miner profession are already master artisans. It's not easy to get there if you're not a power-gamer, and making it harder will just turn new players off.

------Fuzzy Animator

Well Jasarina,

If harvester maintenance was calculated correctly and I didn't lose days worth of credits in hours then I would have no need of a miner proession.More professions will mean more options for people. I doubt the dev's will go for it but ask away.

I think adding a Miner profession would be a good idea, if implemented properly. Greater specialization will help stabilize the economy and make it more efficient. A miner would be able to concentrate on gathering resources so they could sell them at a price that makes it worthwhile for other artisans to buy resources and focus on their core business (architecture, weaponsmithing, droid engineer, whatever) instead of running around managing harvestors.

Miners should have larger survey radius. I don't know about planet wide as someone suggested, but maybeup to 500 or 1,000 meters or so. Miners should also be able to operate harvestors more efficiently so they get more yield than the typical artisan (not a huge increase, but say 5 or 10% more per harvestor). Finally, as Miners increase in skill they should get bonus land lots that can only be used to operate harvestors (you could probably have a entire skill line for this, with each skill level granting +1 harvestor slot, then Master Miner granting a final harvestor slot for a total of +5 slots).

The trick of course is making it so that every artisan can't/won't take up the Mining profession. The idea is to encourage those who are interestedharvesting resourcesit to specialize in Mining without making it so uber that every artisan will feel they have to become a Miner so that they still harvest on their own, butmore efficiently/productively than ever before.

My 2-creds worth.

Slim Vargo, Corbantis, Mos Eisley

It's very much Star Wars. Owen and Beru Lars were moisture farmers after all.

I think the biggest reason miner is necessary is that currently it is way too easy to get resources. Everyone can use the largest harvesters. You don't even really need novice artisan since you can just plop a mineral harvester down anywhere and mine whatever comes up. Now, if you cut back on regular player's ability to use harvesters and allow miners to gather more resources than any single player can currently do, they will have a built in market for all the artisans (particularly those who run factories).

Let the crafters craft (except those that want to dabble in mining) and let miners provide them with materials. I think you will end up with many artisans who don't bother with harvesters, some artisan just using personal harvesters (assuming these are still allowed for non-miner artisans) for small quantities of resources, some artisans will dabble in mining in order to use bigger harvesters to be more self-sufficient, and a handful will become full-fledged master miners feeding the hungry appetite of factories. This also should help the artisans who have no desire for weapons skills. They won't have be forced to run their own harvesters in the wild for a steady supply of resources.

We've covered other aspects of mining in other threads, most recently in http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=artisan&message.id=8250and http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=artisan&message.id=9166

I'll cover what how I would like to control production in a little more detail -

1) Require novice artisan to run harvesters at all. Even better, require some surveying (low), like Surveying II. This will keep the Master Bounty Hunters out of the harvesting business completely which is probably a good thing (if they are harvesting, they're probably just basically renting their lots out to someone else anyway and letting others admin their harvesters).

2) Only Novice Miners can use medium harvesters. If the only pre-req for the miner tree is Surveying IV (which makes sense), than an Master Weaponsmith/Architect/Whatever can still dabble in medium harvesting relatively cheaply (Surveying IV + 6 extra skill points).

3) Large harvesters come somehwere around a skill III in one of the miner trees.

4) Create a bigger harvester than the current large that only a Master Miner can operate. Perhaps create 5 tiers of harvesters rather than just 4 (again with the largest being one only the master miner can operate). This has the side effect of making the architect tree a bit more interesting as well as they have new harvesters they can build at higher levels. A master miner should be able to produce 20 times or more (I think SOE could look at current resource consumption to determine where this should be set) in resources than someone with an existing string of personal harvesters. Ultimately, for each 10 or so artisans, you probably need 1 miner.

I think that many people will play a miner. I like to dabble on the artisan side, but ultimately, I like scouting as well. Miner is an interesting way to stay out in the wilderness while still being commercial. Some people are already playing de facto miners running major operations and only crafting as an afterthought.

Does it make any sense that someone can get their own resources, craft their schematic, run their own factory and run vendors all within 250 skill points and do this on a fairly large scale? They probably should be able to do this on a small scale (a weaponsmith who makeshighly experimented rifles1 at a time for example), but as soon as factory production comes into play, there needs to be some trade-offs, forcing the artisan to give up part of the supply chain to prevent them from being the one-stop player supplying the entire galaxy with product X.

I'm confident that with my survey IV skill, I could fairly quickly find any resource on the planet. A planetwide survey might become not so useful, since everyone with that ability would quickly fill up the harvestor space there, and a planetwide survey would miss all the other resource 'peaks' that while not the best, are still pretty darn good. You could extend the ability to map out all the peaks, but then you eliminateany sense of adventure and descovery that might be had. As it is now, adedicated surveyor might well be able to find his own little known resource cache.

You could include some combat advantages to a miner profession, buthow would that affectthe desireabilityof the dedicated combat professions? It could be that though a miner has less pistol ability than a pistoleer, the resource gathering capability may be too tempting and make the pistoleer profession obsolete.If the miner's combat abilities are not to be redundant, but enhancements to combat, then you can't be the best warrior you can be unless you're also a miner. After thinking about this, I think I can see the difficulties in finding a balanced useful role for aminer profession.

A miner shouldn't have any specific combat abilities within their tree. But since presumably the only pre-req would be Surveying IV, it would only take 93 skill points to become a master miner (same amount as other master elite crafters for what it's worth). That plenty of points to become a master in an elite weapons class (which also only take 93 skill points) and still have points left over for some medic, scout, or merchant skills. Or they could do master miner/master merchant and be competent with a weapon.