Artisan Archive

As SOE took the mining profession out I'd like to present my idea for a new mining profession. First my background:

I have 18 Heavy Mineral Harvesters, 11 Medium Mineral Harvesters, 5 Deep Crust Extractors, 6 personal Chemical Harvesters, 4 Solar Panels, and3 Ion-Fusion Reactors. My primary game time is spent mining, clearing hoppers, marketing goods, surveying, exploring and basically, being a miner. However there isn't any difference between me and a doctor that has Survey IV. The market for resources is getting pinched as more people can afford to just go out and buy 10 Heavy harvesters, and then never buy resources from anyone ever again.

Mining is what I do. And I've been mining since the game came out. It drives the economy, and it deserves its own profession. More importantly, there are Economic Problems that need to be addressed or eventually, the market for resources will grindto a halt as merchants stockpile all they need of any given resource.

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Macroeconomic problems I want to address:

1. Anyone can mine, and there's no difference between what person A or person B mines regardless of skill sets

2. Anyone can use any type of harvester, regardless of skill

3. Any material pulled from the ground is automatically ready for crafting, which means that for example in issue (1), a doctor that has several harvesters never needs to buy fiberplast or chemicals from anyone else. This closes the economy.

4. There is no value to architects, the number 1 user of resources, in any quality values on resources.

5. Resources with stat X are rendered almost worthless if the same resource with stat X+1 appears.

6. Hoarding of resources by crafters

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Ok, now that's a lot to cover, but all of it addresses Macroeconomic concerns, not gameplay stuff like not having harvesters notify you when condition drops to 50% etc. I'll leave that in someone else's thread.

I want to propose a skill Tree for a Mining Profession, and then show how it can address problems 1-6.

Skill Tree

Survey 1 > Survey 2 > Survey 3 > Survey 4\

======Novice Miner

Engineering 1 > Engin2>Engin3> Engin 4 /

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Master Miner

Refining IVImproved Survey IVHeavy Machinery IV

Refining III Improved SurveyIIIHeavy Machinery III

Refining II Improved Survey II Heavy Machinery II

Refining IImproved Survey IHeavy Machinery I

Novice Miner

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Only 3 skill lines,its really all the profession needs and in terms of mining resources I think 4 skill lines is really pushing it skill points wise.

Skill Line Explanation:

Refining:Instead of raw minerals/chemicals/gas/etc pulling from the ground and being made immediately useable, refiningwould be used to make thematerials useable up to 110% of their value.

-Meaning that a non-miner can harvest materials, and craft with them, but they will only be useable atfor example, 50% of their quality

-A new factory would be introduced called a Refinery which would allow miners to "refine" materials. Depending on the miners skill, materials will be refined accordingly.

• Novice miner can refine a material to 70% effectiveness,Refining I to 80% Effectiveness,Refining II to 90% effectiveness,Refining III to 100% Effectiveness, RefiningIV to 110% effectiveness

Improved Survey:Surveying would be broken down into Increments for example:

• Novice Artisan > 32m // Survey I > 64m // Survey II > 128m// Survey III> 192m // Survey IV > 256m // Novice Miner > 320m // Improved Survey I > 384m // Improved Survey II > 448m // Improved Survey III 540m // Improved Survey IV 640m

This would make a miner incredibly better at locating rich deposits of a material then a non-miner, and personally, as a practicing miner I would definately put the points into a skill line like this to double my mining range

Heavy Machinery: Medium and Heavy Harvesters would be moved under this line, with decreased cost of operation and a bonus to materials mined

• Novice Miner : Use of medium harvesters


• HeavyMachinery I : No bonus


• HeavyMachineryII: 15% reduction in maintenance fees


• HeavyMachineryIII: 15% reduction in power needed


• HeavyMachineryIV: Use of Heavy Harvesters

As it stands right now, people, like myself can just have friends go plunk down 10 extra harvesters and blammo, they are harvesting double the product of anyone else. With a skill required in Heavy Harvesters, this would specialize the use of Heavy Harvesters only to miners that have the required skill. This is very important as it would really limit and control the number of resources that flood and saturate the market.

Master Miner: The master miner would recieve the following skills:

• Emergency harvester notification: would send the miner an email if a harvester stops operating for any reason (resource shift, maintenance)


• Mining Intuition: This skill would waypoint the miner to the highest concentration of any resource in the vicinity. However the miner wouldn't have a choice of what resource comes up. So for example if I'm in the middle of the desert and I used Mining Intuition, I might get a message that says:

You have located a high concentration of Cooge Fiberplast

• You would then have a waypoint to that particular spot, if intead Iron had a high availability in the area or Wheat, you would get a waypoint there instead.


• This wouldn't be the end all to finding resources, but it would be nice to get a good handle on what is highly prevalent in the area without having to survey 40 difference resources

Problems 1-6 Revisited:

1. Anyone can mine, and there's no difference between what person A or person B mines regardless of skill sets

• Refining would take care of the difference between a miner and a non-miner in a suitible fashion

2. Anyone can use any type of harvester, regardless of skill

• Moving Medium and Heavy harvesters up to the mining tree would nicely restrict who is mining the bigtime materials

3. Any material pulled from the ground is automatically ready for crafting, which means that for example in issue (1), a doctor that has several harvesters never needs to buy and fiberplast or chemicals from anyone else. This closes the economy.

• Refining would make a miners refined good extremely valuable, and a Master Refiner would have a very lucrative market indeed

4. There is no value to architects, the number 1 user of resources, in any quality values on resources.

• architects would be able to use non-refined materials, which would specialize the market for armor/weapon/droid/doctors etc. towards miners that have the highest refining skill

5. Resources with stat X are rendered almost worthless if the same resource with stat X+1 appears.

• I think scarcity is actually handling this at the moment. Even if a new resource appears that is superior to the old one, when it runs out the old one will again have value. Plus the threat of a better resource appearing or not appearing makes it exciting.

6. Hoarding of resources by crafters

• Unaddressed at the moment

Implementation:

Just a short note, that in order for this to be implemented smoothly, there would have to initially be no XP cost to take any of the skills. The only restriction would be having Survey IV and available skill points. This would allow current players to step over into the profession without disrupting their ability to use heavy harvesters until they earned the xp needed.

I'd like to hear feedback from the Artisan community on what I've wrote, suggestions, feedback and flames are welcome, I will incorporate all of them into version .2

Cheers,

Toofan / Eclipse

Arjun, I really like your idea. Very well thought out. My opinion is that this game's economy has been shot all to hell thanks to newbies who sell their stuff well below market value. Eventually their price becomes market value. Another advantage to your system is that if other professions have to buy resources from a Miner, they will more than likely sell their wares at a more realistic price. If you spend 10k on resources and supplies to make one droid, you will be less likely to sell that droid for 5k. Right now there is no economy when people sell their products at 1/10th the price and everyone can find resources to build their products.

And it would fit in the SWU. What was Uncle Owen? A Moisture Farmer. (a Miner)

My addition is to the Surveying skill. When a Surveyor surveys, he only gets a broader area as he advances levels. I think they should get a % to the density of the resource too. Let's say once reaching Miner, when a player takes Improved Surveying, they get a bonus of +5% per level to the density. So at level 4, A Miner would havea 90% chance to find a resource instead of just a 70%.

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Puck_Starfire wrote:

My addition is to the Surveying skill. When a Surveyor surveys, he only gets a broader area as he advances levels. I think they should get a % to the density of the resource too.

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Well, I think being able to refine the resources to 110% effectiveness is pretty darn good. In addition miners would be able to find the best resources the quickest, and will have the medium and heavy harvesters.....

That said, since miners will be providing the majority of resources to the economy, giving them a 5% bonus to resources harvested would just be giving a global bonus of 5% more resources to the entire economy.

Puck_StarFire Wrote:
[quote]My opinion is that this game's economy has been shot all to hell thanks to newbies who sell their stuff well below market value.[/quote]

i would like to address the noobie issue, being a noobie myself.

im sorry if i have no sence of market value. ive been busting my butt just to buy basic stuff like armor and a decent weapon cuz i have no idea what constitues a decent weapon or decent armor. all i know is that its waay expensive on no salary. im jumping back and forth, mission after mission just to buy a single peice of armor one at a time. i have no idea of how to gather all the resources i need to craft, and the resources on the bazaar are waay to expensive for me to afford. so when i scrape together enough resources to make a weapon, i need to sell it to recoup my time and costs, and the only way to do that is to sell AT COST!
my weapons arent top of the line, and no way someones gunna buy it at what everyone else is selling, but then again cost is no garentee that it will sell at all, cuz the stats are so poor compared to those who have the good resources. and who knows what makes a resource better than the next resource for a particular slot, all it says is that it will take such-and-such resource, but no indication wether it needs high conductivity or not, just that i have a choice of steel, aluminum and/or copper. does a housing need a harder material and a relay a soft material? i dont know, so when i experiment, i sometimes get weapons even i dont want, so instead of just practicing and maybe throw away the resources and a potencially good weapon, i craft it and sell it AT COST! cuz its crap anyway, and im always broke, and it hardly ever sells anyway, so what are you complaining about really? how do i look at the stats for a weapon and add this to that, divide by this and carry the remaineder, then i have the price. there is no such formula that i have found and ive been hounding every guide i can get my hands on, and i still dont know. it makes me want to give up crafting so i can go kill things, partly for the money, and partly cuz it seems to be the only things that really works in the game. point, shoot and kill.

this is not what i had hoped for when i put over a year following the development, another 3 months foaming at the mouth for it to come out, 80$ for the Collectors Edition, another 2 months for the first patches to make the game somewhat playable, and finally the 750$ i just dropped to buy the extensive hardware so i can revel in all the beauty and glory of the Star Wars Universe. this noobie has invested in this game, and i will continue to invest in it till it is playable, i dont care, for better or worse, im in for the long haul. marriage is not just a word, its a sentence!

so when i say i dont know what my products are worth, its because the game give me no indication. why does a bantha doll sell for 10k? it boggles my noobie mind.

we noobie are as frustrated with the state of the economy as you, because we simply dont understand how it works, or how to work it in our favor so the game is almost nearly playable.

any other noobie questions?

btw... i think a mining profession is a great idea. it should have never been cut from the original professions line-up, cuz imo, it is one of the most profitable of all the professions. without being an actual profession. the devs would be mistaken to ignore this, fundumentally the lack of a mining profession makes for a lot of the games imbalance, right up there with the powerful CHs and the poor forgotten DEs.

a mining profession sounds good to me... just becouse you make a droid doesn't mean you should have the skill to mine the material for it.. same with an artisan.. now.. for everything other then a painter and maybe someone that works with wood. not every artisan is the master of metalergy lol

maybe the profession should just be refiner, because let's be realistic, artisans are gonna be pissed if they have to go to the store and buy their fiberplast (ooo, I'm not even an artisan) for 10k or so, when now, they can just run a few thousand meters. I love the refinery idea, though, because then the richer artisans could get higher quality mats, while the newer artisans get the same mats, just of lower quality. very well thought out, Arjun.

Its just to late to take skills away from classes best is to expand on what we have now you just wait till corpse runs come back OMG the flames will come.

I already can't make a decent living as an Architect. If I had to buy my ore or use only personal harvestors, I wouldn't be able to afford to level. As it is, I spend my time running crafting missions to get money to feed harvestors to mine material that I use to make structures that sell for less than the material is worth. At least now, I can keep in some type of business. If I had to add a middle man who made money off my ore use, I'd have to give up and become a Commando or something.

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LasloCorellis wrote:
I already can't make a decent living as an Architect. If I had to buy my ore or use only personal harvestors, I wouldn't be able to afford to level. As it is, I spend my time running crafting missions to get money to feed harvestors to mine material that I use to make structures that sell for less than the material is worth. At least now, I can keep in some type of business. If I had to add a middle man who made money off my ore use, I'd have to give up and become a Commando or something.

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Answer the following if you would:

What level architect are you? Master?

How many of each type of harvester do you have now?

For a fourth branch of skills something that goes along the Merchant Vendors +1 but would be Lot +1 so you get the opportunity to place more harvesters than other classes, combined with the idea of miner only harvesters that means you really are a miner.

I love it. Arjun, you get a cookie.

unofficial Proposed Changes

Resources Changing Qualities

* raw harvested materials should not decrease in quality when non-miners mine them, this would cause huge database issues in the game. If you make different players instead harvest different named resources it would be a HUGE headache for all crafters everywhere.

New (& very different) Refining Proposal
... to replace changing resource quality or adding a "quality modifyer" that would not be implemented because it's too complex of a change to the existing system.

* I like the refining idea. Refining is the combination or distillation of materials. If you have an unknown petrochem you should be able to distill it to a Known Reactive and a Known Inert petrochem. Refining should produce other named materials that are in the game, but the distillations and combinations should follow these basic patterns:
1) you always get less than you put in
2) there is a maint and power cost
3) the bennefits are not always worth it (no free lunch)

It would be great to have a "refinement process schematic" whereby you don't just chunk materials in a factory and expect something to come out. A miner should have a special crafting station and experimentation tool whereby they consume many resources in different proportions to create a "Refinement Process Schematic". This schematic would go into the factory with its requirements and it would produce crates filled with the result. Anyone can use a refinement factory but only "miners" can make these schematics. The numbers in parenthesis (1 -> 2) indicate number of input resources -> number of output resources. This keeps refinement realistic per material.


Novice Miner
* Refinement Schematic: Water Purification (1 resource -> 1 resource, with reduction in volume based on quality of schematic)

Refinement I: Mineral Milling
* Refinement Schematic: Mineral Refinement (2+ -> 1 slight reduction in volume, only one where zero reduction is possible) (all ores & metals, excludes radioactives & solid petrochem)

Refinement II: Chemical Distillation
* Refinement Schamatic: Chemical Distillation (1 -> 2+)
* Refinement Schematic: Gas Distillation (1 -> 2+)

Refinement III: Solid Power Refinement
* Refinement Schematic: Radioactive Refinement (1 -> 2+ high-end resource is greatly reduced, the slack is poor-er quality)
* Refinement Schematic: Solid Petrochem Refinement (2 -> 1, combine solid petro with wood, or turn wood & chem into solid petro)

Refinement IV: Flora Grafts & Splices
* Refinement Schematic: Flora Engineering (2 -> 1)

Master Miner
* Refinement Schematic: Fauna Engineering (2 -> 1) (yes, hide & bone -- this would be huge)

New Survey Proposal

I think it's laughable that Survey 4 is "regional surveying". Miner's surveying should give players a *REAL* regional survey skill. I would take this skill even further than your proposal.

Novice Miner
* Survey range 384m (+64 over Survey 4)
* Certification: Advanced Mineral Survey Tool

Improved Survey 1: Expert Survey Instrument Use
* Schematic: (all) Advanced Survey Tools.
* Certification: Advanced Wind, Water, Chemical Survey Tools.
* Survey up to the maximum range given by your tool (usually 384 m, but advanced tools could be crafted).
* With an advanced tool players can sample 1 unit of any resource available on the planet regardless of the concentration. In addition the player can sample newly shifted resources.

Improved Survey 2: Basic Planetary Survey
* Certification : Advanced Solar, Gas, Flora Survey Tools.
* Planetary Survey: The basic planetary survey gives the player a 1km overlay gradient on their planetary map of the concentrations. This survey data is a new data element. Players can view one overlay at a time on their planetary map. The data elements are like waypoints but display whole regions (gradient based on your UI color). As the player travels and surveys more the picture of the planet fills out. These data items should be sale-able (as should waypoints!!!).

Improved Survey 3: Survey Teams
* Planetary survey range: 2km
* Group Survey: Players surveying in a group relay all planetary survey information to each other.

Improved Survey 4: Survey Droids
* Planetary survey range: 3km
* Droid Survey: Players can direct droids with survey modules to relay survey information to them. Grouped droids with a survey unit relay planetary survey data to all group members with the "Droid Survey" skill. These droids only perform surveys when their owner (the person with the PCD) surveys. They survey the element their owner surveys.

Master Miner:
* Planetary survey range: 5km (huge range, but even as master there is no free lunch)

Heavy Machinery

I definately agree that this line should reduce maint, but I dislike certifications. Miners should be *very* good with mediums & heavies, but they should *not* have a monopoly.

Novice Miner
* Installation Efficiency +5 -- flat +5% concentration output with all installations (this makes a 55% concentration a 60% one)
* Installation Maintinance +5 -- 5% reduction in maintinance fees on all Installation line structures.

Heavy Machinery I: Intermediate Installation Use
* Installation Efficiency +5
* Intermediate Installation Construction: Players have additional leeway when placing medium & heavy harvesters on uneaven ground (+/- 1m instead of flat for medium/heavy, tall as an Ewock)

Heavy Machinery II: Intermediate Operational Procedures
* Installation Efficiency +5
* Installation Maintinance +5
* Installation Power +10 -- 10% reduction in power usage of all Installation line structures

Heavy Machinery III: Advanced Installation Use
* Advanced Installation Construction: Installations can be placed with +/- 3m land elevation leeway, tall as a Wookie
* Installation Maintinance +5
* Installation Power +5

Heavy Machinery IV: Advanced Operational Prodecures
* Installation Efficiency +5
* Installation Maintinance +5
* Installation Power +5

Master Miner:
* Expert Installation Construction: Installations can be placed with +/- 5m land elevation leeway, tall as a baby Rancor(?)
* Installation Efficiency +5
* Installation Maintinance +5
* Installation Power +5

Review of my solutions for 1-6
1. Miners are better at mining, but everyone can still mine. Mining will only be very profitable for miners.
2. Everyone can still use medium & heavy harvesters, but only Miners can place them on hilly & rocky spots.
3. Materials are still ready-to-craft, but Miner's Refining makes bad resources desirable and good resources GREAT!
4. Architects bennefit greatly from a master miner's +25% harvesting. Architects won't bother refining ore because quality isn't an issue.
5. COMPLETELY solved by the new refinement system
6. Somewhat solved by the new refinement system, miners will now be hording... but they will be experimenting all the time to create better refined resources thereby continually reducing their stock of materials.