Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Weekly Rountdable Discussion (Week Ending 2-1-04)
Yes, I remember your posts and I agreed with most of them.
Thunderheart wrote:Actually Im a big fan of the miner profession. I wrote several monster posts during beta and fought hard to keep it in the game way back when. Its something that players and devs want alike, but there is a really difficult balance issue to consider at this point.
Miners mine (go figure
). That basically translates into, "survey, place harvester" Sure, there are lots of other secondary skills that could be added to make the miner class more interesting, but their main focus is pulling resources from the ground. As it stands, there is as much resource pulling as the game economy can handle and in essence, its a redundant profession.
There are alternatives for sure, but its something that wont be considered until a lot of other current activities are completed.
However, I don't agree that a miner profession would be redundant. The harvesting abilities in Artisan should remain more or less the same. Nobody wants resource prices to go through the roof. Yes one part of a miner profession would of course be the ability to "survey, place harvester" more efficiently, with additional lots for harvesters, increased extraction rates, reduced maintenence fees and off-planet survey droids ( did I just make up a new utility droid? ), but, a miner would also be a crafting profession, with the ability to experiment with and manipulate existing resources, refine resources into other resources and so on and so on. There are a lot of great sugesstions out there but you know that.
Maybe miner is just misleading, how 'bout Resource-Engineer
I do appreciate you taking the time to comment on it though, especially since it sounds like it might happen, eventually, in a galaxy far far away
Oku Kee'lus Personally, Although I fully support the re-introduction of the MINER Profession, I would NOT like to see survey/mining capability taken away from the Artisan profession, just scaled back a bit maybe. I believe that every player should be able to hand sample a reasonable amount of resources for use in their everyday work, and even be able to operate a basic personal harvester.
What I disagree with is the ability of ANY player that has the funds, regardless of profession,to be able to own & operate a fleet of high-end heavy harvesters and pull up millions-upon-millions of units of resource..!!
CURRENTLY, LARGE SCALE MINING INVOLVES NO SKILL WHATSOEVER.
This is unrealisitic in terms of professional integrity. For example, to be able to make a high income as a WeaponsmithI needed to expend nearly 90 skill points to make Master, before I could build weapons that are worth selling. Yet I can make millions harvesting resources using almost no skillpoints whatsoever..!!
Just to illuminate the issue further, the same can be applied to almost every crafting profession available, such as Chef, Droid Engineers, Armorsmiths, etc. For some, success in MMORPG's is measured in by the number of credits they have available to them, so what sort of message are the DEV's sending when it becomes clear that it is more profitable to NOT follow a recognised profession if you want to earn credits..??Someone in this thread has already said that they do not take missions as it does not pay as well as mining resources. I fully believe that this is not only undermining the player economy but also the game mechanics...
As an experiment, I craeted a toon on a European server less than 3 days ago, and with very little effort have 10's of thousands of credits, multiple harvester and energy generators. I have more credits and assetswith this toon in 3 days than I had with my main toon after a month....!!
It is also unrealistic that I can open up any of mysurvey tools and see every single resource on the planet..?? This is especially dumb when you consider that the tool has a maximum range of 320m, and I have to get experience points in surveying to be able to get that max range...!! If survey tools were restricted to only show resources within its range, not only would this be more realistic, but it would probably engender a class of player that spent time finding waypoints for credits. Ultimately, the ability to locate more and more resources from a wider area could be a skill progression for the MINING Profession.
I figured I would ask regarding the interior lighting:
Streetlamps placed in houses function as lamps at night. They light right up and look great for a big area. There does not appear to be any trouble with ambient lighting from them. And as someone already pointed out, torches are working great.
As a side note, there is an NPC house in Bestine (across from the museum?) that has fully functional interior lighting. The lamps in THAT house work and are identical to the ones we can make/use.
Why is it that a new feature (streetlamps) can be coded and placed into the game, but items which have been around since launch cannot be fixed? If lamps are problematic, why not eliminate them and have the team who created the streetlights create new housing lighting? A better question is why are NPC lamps working and not ours?
As interior decorators we would prefer the option of placing lighting where we want it, not just a generic dimmer switch. In some of the current houseslighting is already awkwardly placed. Simply making it brighter is not going to help.
Weappreciate your efforts to improve our game. Please understand that we want it to be as great as it possibly can be given the limits of current technology.
-Snoozie Twinkles-
Not all players want a mining profession.
Thunderheart wrote:
Actually Im a big fan of the miner profession. I wrote several monster posts during beta and fought hard to keep it in the game way back when. Its something that players and devs want alike, but there is a really difficult balance issue to consider at this point.