Artisan Archive

I am an experienced artisan on Tarquinas (only Bus4 to go for master) andfind the current state of resource availability andrarity a promising sign.

First of all, here is my understanding of the resource system - gathered from beta experience and live game experience.

1. A specific, uniquely named mineral will have the same statistics throughout the galaxy, but may or may not be present on all planets at any given time.


2. Each uniquely named resource appears in the galaxy with a finite amount.


3. Resources will fit into classes of varying specificity, each a subclass of alarger class.


4. Specific classes are more rare than others.


5. Higher-level schematics call for more specific resource classes.

I have repeatedly heard weaponsmiths and other professions complaining about the availability of particular items (Plubnum (sp?) Iron for example). Some of these items have disappeared from the game and the time of their next appearance is unknown. I realize that this is somewhat discouraging in the short-term, but I believe it will serve to make SWG a much better game as time passes. This system encourages the formation of a trade in resources and will add an interesting complexity toartisans' decisions. Should a weaponsmith craft allher plubnum iron as soon as it comes available, or keep a stash in reservein hopes that ahigher-quality secondary resource necessary for the weaponwill become available at alater point? A type of Plubnum iron may only appear once every two or three months, and what will its stats befor thisappearance?

Advanced crafting professions may not always be able to craft upper level items with quality or ideal components. If the first appearance of plubnum iron has poor quality, then the first set of those weapons will be of poor quality. However, the fluctuation of resources' presence, as well as their quality, will continue to keep the game interesting. To have the "best" weapon in the game, you may need to find a master weaponsmith and bring him the plubnum iron from 6 months ago and the whatever chemical from a year ago (since those are the two highest stats ever to exist for those two necessary resources), then have her experiment that weapon as a custom job and hope she has "amazing successes." I think this type of potential complexity could also be an answer to some of theallegations that upper-level weapons are not as good as lower-level weapons.

It is my opinion that this will lead to a continually changing and dynamic system wherein there is no surefire system for having the best weapon in the game and ensuring that weapon remains the best weapon in the game (you never know what that next batch of plubnum is going to look like). Also, I can envision someone setting up a nicheindustry that merely serves as a trader ofexpired resources - an expert resource trader, if you will.

I am a big fan of the SWGeconomic model and think it has the capacity to expand and grow as the game matures. Now if only I hadn't used that Lodi copper (992 conductivity, I think) to grind out all those scopes on day 2. D'oh! - learned that lesson the hard way!

Sweetpickle Perrish, Tarquinas, novice resource collector

Okay I hear what you are saying and agree with most of it. What you did not address was the unrealistic way that resources disappear. Ihad harvesters paid for days and fueled for days in a 85% concentrated area of a fuel resource this past Friday. I log on Saturday thinking that I am going to be on for a couple of hours to get my Engineering IV Skill then go about my day. I discovered when looking at my Mineral Survey Device that the Radioactive fuel that I had harvests on a 85% vein of, had disappeared overnight. That isn't just in my area, that is over the entire planet of Naboo! How how realistic is that? How can I set up any kind of predicatable operation if I don't know one day to the next if a resource will still be there or not? Why not go from 85 to 80 then to 75 or 70 down to 0? You see what I mean? I could have some prediction that way. Instead of filling with fuel and paying maintenance fees for 7 days, I might do it for 3 or 4 thinking the vein will be at a level then that I might seek a better concentrated source. It is INCREDIBLY discouraging to have them just disappear overnight. Some say "oh, its just a game!" It is a game where the creators are trying to immerse us into virtual world. You can only do that when the world that they have created makes sense to the gamers that have paid to play in it. I can not accept that in the Star Wars universe resources don't slowly get depleted in certain areas, butjust suddenlydisppear planet-wide. This has happened to me twice now and it completely throws me "out of the game" because of the unreality of it. As truly amazing the professional creation of SWG is, this suddenly disappearing resources stands out even more as very amateurish thingfor SOE todo. I really hope they finally publish something saying that it is a temporarily thing they are doing and that the depletion of resources will be more realistic in the near future. I really hope so because it keeps destroying my immersion into this game that I have waited years for.

I agree, the disappearance of resources is very unrealistic, this needs tobe addressed. I also prefer the method of lowering the concentration as time progresses.

It is very discouraging to waste money on harvesters to discover that the resource you located the day before have completely disappeared.

Yes, it's unrealistic, but we all know it is part of the game and so we just have to adapt. Never pay your harvestors that far in advance, or just change the material they're mining up if this does occur.

Personally, I think it would be boring to set up a harvestor, let it run for a week and then return. The artisan class already is monotonous and boring, why make it even more so?

But the fact is it is unrealistic. Part of the lack of reality is that the same resource can pop up again on the same planet (or another) a small amount of time later. Is this how nature works? Or is this how a designed game environment works?

They tried to tell us they were designing a fairly realistic system, but they didn't tell us that their primary design was to control and limit our abilities to interact with that enviroment. In a real-world enviromet a good surveyor would be able to find a high concentrated strain of an ore and either mine it himself, or also put the word out to others. All involved would get lots of useful resoutces for quite a long time until it was all mined out. But they want that "quite a long time" period to be at the most just over a week.

This isn't realistic. And I also believe some of their "decay" mechanisms set up in the game are also unrealistic. As well as the fact that a Harvestor that you build and place needs not only power, but also creds to work.

OK - my rant is done for now...

I think we're all speculating somewhat on game mechanics, butI have understood this to be a realistictouch to the resource tree.As I understand it, the resources that disappear rapidly are not "decaying away,"but are rather being intensely mined by players. From what I understand, the result of there being a finite number of resources means that when everyone is sampling or extracting that resource is that that resource will bedepleted more rapidly. My biggest example of this is Ithma on Talus (a 972 overall quality petrochem - excellent for powerups).Two Fridays ago, it was 96% concentration AT THE CRAFTING STATION IN DEARIC! Therefore, you could sit and craft all day, while sampling 8-10 resources every 25 seconds. It was perfect -but by Sunday night it was gone. I have seen similar (but not so drastic) drains of the Miefa currently on Corellia, but my suspicion is that larger planets may have larger fixed amounts of minerals.

I realize your criticism is that the resource mining system is leading to unrealistic results. I think theidea thatplayers "strip mining"(thinking about that godforsaken industrial wasteland outside of Coronet, here) will deplete resources more rapidly is actually very realistic.

Remember that the fixed pool of resources, eitherby galaxy, by planet, or both, does not necessarily mean that the others mining the resource must be right next to you.If there is a fixed amount of a certain mineralon the planet, then a strip mining operation across the planet from your location will drain resources from your pool. I think this is where the effectiveness ofextractors comesintoplay, and those who use harvesters ar rewarded. A single character may be able to sample as fast, or faster than, a PME. However, if a mineral is highly prized, he will never gather as many minerals as the player with several extractors running. Timebecomes a factorand that player may only have to or three RL days to gather as many resources as possible.

I also believe that some minerals will have a fixed decay time, so that they will cycle even if none of the mineral is being mined. While this is somewhat artificial, I can see it is necessary. However, I don't believe it is that decay mechanism whichleads to the drastic decline in resources that occurs at times.

Anyway, that's Sweetpickle's 2 creds, from Tarquinas.

First off, tell me how many days that radioactive deposit had been in the game before you put your harvester on the 85% spot. I bet you CAN'T tell me the spawn date. In fact, most of the people who are complaining about resources disappearing don't really understand the game mechanic behind resource allocations.

Each resource spawns on a 5 to 8 day cylce. If you put your harvester on a radioactive deposit, only to have it 'disapper overnight' it's because that deposit spawned 5+ days ago.

I've been trying to educate people on this subject, but still people waste Power and MPs on uncertain resources.

KNOW THE SPAWN DATE OF YOUR RESOURCE, or risk financial ruin. Plain and simple.

The system is desinged exceedingly well. I leave my havesters alone for up to five days at a time, and spend most of my time in the cantina oogling the pretty Twi'leks, and tipping like a drunken spice miner.

The system works, people just need to learn how to play the game.

Well, I agree with your frustration, but I think we might be missingeach otherhere. I think the instances where a resource dries up quickly is the result of overmining,or possibly overmining coupled with decay. that's obviously just speculation.

I think one of the major problems, which seems to be the driving factor behind dissatisfaction with the resource shifts,is the fact that maintenance pools are lost when an installation is redeeded (a word?). I can understand and live with pools needing to be at 100%. I can even live with a fixed cost associated with redeeding the property (e.g maint. pool reduced by 1000). However, what seems mostunfair to me are people who have thousands of maintenance paid up in advance and lose it all when they redeed.In that regard, theissue is not resource shifts, but maintenance on harvesters. I think it's understood thatit won't necessarily be efficient to place a harvester and leave it forever, but paid maintenance should not disappear upon redeeding.

Personally, I have addressed this issue by only setting up my harvesters on Fridays and redeeding them on Sunday. I get a nice amount of resources and shifts have yet to crush me. I realize this strategy may not be the most ideal, but I'm waiting for maintenance times and other changes to be made. This is a personal decision made because I can not guarantee I will be able to get home every night of the week to make a harvester run. I'm not saying everyone should have to do this, but I admit it hasn't greatly affected my gameplay since the first week.

One other thought I've had on this topic concerns the red and grey numbers indicated on the survey tool when surveying. I would like to know if these somehow relay information regarding increasing or decreasing levels of a resource, or the possibility that the resource might change rapidly. I know the highest concentrations are usually red, but I don't think the color is neessarily tied strictly to quantity of resource - it may be reflectingstability of resource quantity. I've seen 25% areas that were red, but 50% areas which were grey. Taking it a step further, this could add another dimension to surveying. What if that color means thata redarea could possibly change faster than others? Are we supposed to be weighing whether to place on the high-concentration red area (with the possibility it could dry up tomorrow) or the lower-concentration grey area (which we can depend on longer)? Another bout of speculation of in-game mechanics. I don't think the red and grey is just another indication of concentration, because that would be totally unnecessary - we've got the numbers.

Thanks CerionSkydreamer for the5 day spawn date information. That is good to know. I have no idea what the spawn date was for the resource that I sat my Harvesterson. Since it disppeared the next day, I would think based on your calculations, that it had been 4 days earlier. For some reason CS, to have to keep track of spawn dates for every resource in my Survey Devices really bugs the heck out of me and I feel myself really balking at it. I love micro management, but that is even too much for me. I don't know CS. I am more dismayed by your helpful information than encouraged by it. 5 day spawn dates on a planet's resources. Have anySOE designers or representatives come out and spoken about what their reasoning was for this or is everyone just speculating on it?

Maybe my solution is to secure a source of power of 1 unit per 1 credit from the person in the Bazaar who has been selling it for that price. If I can get a deal with this person to supply me with it each week, that would make it easier on me to just have to worry about the other resources. Those might be easier to manage. I just can't have my power resources screwed around with. Having to look for a new source of Fiberplast when it dries up will not put the intense pressure on me as having to immediatelylook for new power to run my Harvesters the next day. That is probably the solution for me and will take this nasty taste out of my mouth about this resource thing in this game. I have waited eagerly for this gamefor years and highly anticipated the trade roles that were promised. I want this to work out for me.

My main point still has no follow-up that could explain it. There are set resources per spawn time per planet, and those resources can be dried up by anyone on that planet.

So for instance if somebody mining for Steel down in Brazil finds a decent spot and sets up a field of Harvestors they could conceivably deplete the entire Steel reserves on the whole planet for a bit until they respawned - so Steel harvestors in North America, and Europe, and Africa, or Russia would be out of luck then. The Brazillian Harvestors had sucked that steel right over to them...

Reality is what I had in mind. Things are not everlasting - they degrade and break down - that's a hint of reality. Resources are not infinite - hint of reality. You run up ahill but run much slower than on level ground - hint of reality. Watching a pretty girl, or a hairy Wookie, or listening to a short clarinet player heals your fatigue - kinda based in reality. Resources play a game of "Hide and Seek" on every planet they exist on - where's the reality? There is no penalty for killing Jawas and no Bonus for killing Ewoks - where's the reality? After traning for a long time to gain a skill and then practising that skill for more times than you care to remember you (finally) get better at that skill - where's the reality? Well that's kinda realistic - though there should be some sort of curve based on your species and possibly other skills already known to speed up or slow down your gaining of for instance Droid Engi knowledge from making countless Mouse Droids.

Thanks Perrish for your viewpoint on this, but one thing just does not make sense. You say that the resources are a planet pool and the area I may be mining them the concentration may be higher or lower than in a different area. It is still unrealistic not to show a degredation of that concentration in any given area. This resources thing feels manipulated instead of natural. It feels like a built in cheat against the players instead of a natural Artisan obstacle that must be overcome.

What is wrong with dropping a hopper and not having to worry about it for another week? In the real world oil companies would go broke very quickly if they built oil rigs and had to tear them down almost immediately simply because without warning, a huge concentration of oil would disappear.

Don't we have plenty of other things that we would like to be doing? We have 3 other skill branches besides surveying that we could be working on. We want our Elite professions, we want to craft items for players and either sell them directly "on the street" or instores or in the Bazaars. I can't see how the Artisan profession would get boring if we didn't have to run out to our harvesters every single day.

This game has been designed so incredibly well in all aspects by SOE. It makes this unrealistic method of handling a planet's resources very disappointing to me than even being frustrated by it. I just find it very hard to believe that such obviously talented people could handle this area in such an amateurish way.