Artisan Archive

Does anyone really understand why the resources cycle?

It makes the process of surveying and sampling absolutely tedious and unnecessarily difficult.

I just put down a few harvesters on saturday, only to find that the resource I was harvestign was gone on monday!

My only option is to destroy the harvesters I put down and find a new resource that has similar attributes.

I began to contemplate what would happen the next tim e I put down a harvester, how long would I have before the 'new' resource was mysteriously gone???

How can an artisan or anyone who mines these resources ever feel confident enough to put down a harvester, if we don't know how long that resource will last?

The other thing that seems really silly about this is the utter dissapearnace of resources...It's not like it can o nly be found in ceratin places, it more or less dissapears completely from existence. How ridiculous and troublesome for those who depend on these resources to advance their characters through their respective professions!

you can re-deed your harvestors, you have to have x amount of credits in them(it will tell you) and they will return to your inventory. I personally like the resource shifts, if they were not there 2-3 people per server would control all the best resources. As it is now everyone has a chance to get there harvestor down on shift day.

Resource shifting is the only thing that separates the Masters from each other. If all of the resources were always available, then every master would make the same quality equipment all the time. That would be very boring imho. Staying on top of the resource shifts is part of the game if you want to make the higest quality items. Planning ahead is key, since some resources are gone from a server for upwards of a couple months.

Resources will usually shift in 7-8 days. If you want to be sure a certain resource will stick around, you will need to know when it shifts on the server. That's part of the fun of 'mining'... getting to that new, really good resource before anyone else.

One main reason for this is so that harvesters have to be moved. If the resources never shifted all the high % spots would be taken and nobody would be able to get any for themselves. Some resources are in a rare shift cycle to give them value and keep people logging in to look. Dolovite Iron was a perfect example. It wasn't seen (on Sunrunner) for 4 months (since launch), then when it spawned every spot over 50% was taken within the first 48 hours. This was around for 8 days and I managed to collect 113K. There have been a couple more spawns of it, but nowhere near the same quality. If resources didn't shift nobody would be able to get Dolovite except from the people that got there first. And I've seen people sell it for up to 100cpu.

I keep my eye on certain classes of resources on several planets almost daily. That way I know when something new pops up. If that new resource is useful to me or known to be rare to another crafter, I can count on it being there for the next week or more.

Any shifting for a given day occurs at server reset, 0400 Pacific time. If you're able to log in right after, you can check to see if you need to shut down/move operations.

It's not magic. It's attention and a little skill.

Sorry, this process involves anything but skill...It's just repetitive, tedious, manual labor. You ehibit no skill by waking up at the @$$ crack of dawn to check and see if the resource you're harvesting is still available so you won't be wasting time, money, and energy by getting a few extra winks of sleep.

I understand all of the points about hoarding resources, but there has to be a better way. At the very least there should be some kind of warning about the duration that a particular resource will be available.

How difficult would it be to add a feature to the survey device itself that will give the life of a vein? You see Ewedoehi at 98% but the 'Life of Vein' shows that it is at 80% of it's life cycle as well. This way poor Novice Artisans like myself who don't want to drop the 1-2k credits required to re-deed if we're only going to get a couple of hours of use out of our harvester at a particular location, can opt to simply sample the area manually to get what we need and move on.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how this would cause any issues, as we still wouldn't know where the new resources were going to be, right?

I remember back in the good ol days when there was no resource shifting. And i mined the hell out of a 80% deposit of ore. Then one day in the patch notes, boom. There it was, resource shifting. And the resources shifted like every 3 days for almost 2 weeks in my server. Man that hurt...

This is just a flashback for any of you who have been here as long as me.