Doctor Archive

Iwould like to see PCs able to place Survey Missions on terminals. This would get Surveyors paid, would keep docs from having to get their hands dirty with Survey skills, and would work within the existing system of missions and terminals.

Works like this:

1. Doctor needs material X.

2. Doctor goes to Survey terminal, chooses PLACE MISSION ORDER

3. Doctor specifies material from list found in appropriate survey tool list for whenever the mission is placed.

4. Doctor specifies concentration needed, with a sliding scale for cost -- 50% is cheap, 90% expensive.

5. Doctor loads X credits into machine, closes terminal, walks away.

6. Surveyor approaches terminal, chooses a mission, runs around with his 256m survey tool until he finds X at specified concetration.

7. Surveyor is paid.

8. Mission terminal sends Email to Mission-placing Doctor, including WP.

9. Doctor returns to Survey Terminal, picks up Ticket allowing him to place a harvester (one-time usage).

10. Doctor goes to WP, places Harvester as close to WP as possible, Ticket is consumed.

11. Doctor fires up harvester, collects materials, checks harvester until empty.

12. /ui action suggestionSlot 00

Low-level surveyors could make some money this way, it would give them cash and experience. Doctors can save 15 points (7% of skill point total) and still place harvesters, etc. From a coding standpoint, it uses some pre-existing parts (terminal interface, etc.), the difference would be that the Harvester Placing Ticket would need to be coded, which may be more trouble than I assume.

Drawback would be that the stats on the material in question may not be so stellar, including a description (stats) of the material and an option to get a harvester ticket may be a good idea if the dolovite, for instance, turns out to be garbage. If missions pay 1k, the harvester ticket would be some small percentage of that, say 10%. This way, rather than buying the ability with skill points, you rent it as you go.

nice idea

Unique Idea.

But how many do survey missions? Those that need survey XP which are not that many because it is so easy to get

Who does survey missions? Same People

When you need a resource, you need it. Not need it and I hope somebody selectsyour mission. Lets face it when an artisan has all the survey xp they require do they do the missions. Will your mission get selected 2 days later? Will the resource have shifted by the time it is selected?

Does not sound practical to me.

Only thing that I see is we need survey, because you cannit seem to find any artisans that will survey for cash directly so what makes you think they will survet for cash from a mission term. You cant communicaye things like "must be a buildable area that I can place 3 heavy extractors"

I love it. I would allow the person putting in the mission to specify payout - in that way, it could become competitive. People would do survey missions, if it was worth their time (and with vehicles, it's actually pretty fast to find a good spot). Once would still have to potentially use a resource lke www.swgcraft.com to determine what is worth harvesting, but at least you could hire someone in game to find the spot.

This is a great idea...

I was a master artisan a long time ago and I did surveying for a small group of people. This worked out great and I was very happy to do about an 1 hours worth of running around for 10K. The way the system worked for me, was that I recieved in game email, what the type of resource they wanted. Then it was up to me which planet to find it on and the stats. I would find a high contentration of what ever the resource was and I then reported in email back with my findings. The higher the stats, the more I got paid and the higher the concentration the more I got paid.

I found one spot, with great stats and high contentration. I recieved 50K for one spot alone, this job only took about 1 to 2 hours a day. I would have to saw that this was the easiest way of making money. I would have continued to survey for people, but I had to give it up.

Payment Scale:

50% Consentration = 3K

Each 10% higher then 50% would be anadditional 1.5 to 2K. (The range is becuase of % it self) 64 or 69is a factor in calucating the finer amount for thebonus.

The stats werebased on OQ, unlessrequested in the email.A 500OQ would be 3K and 1K for each additional50.

So if you start to look at this from a artisan stand point.. I am surethe person would be more then willing tosurvey for you.

Sorry....just Babbling.....

I believe this is a great idea and I for one wouldbe a surveyor if Istill had the skills to do it.

My fellow Master Doc and business partner has Survey IV, she pays for her travel with survey missions.

Low-level Artisans are limited by the crappy nature of what they produce, it's delivery or survey missions for them to make money. Nobody wants the best CDEF anything anymore, so it's grind grind grind survey.

The main reason I like it is that it seems like much of the code is probably already there, the mission terminal, the resource printout you would get as a result is part of the database already, the interface could simply be a modified bazaar interface where you place a mission instead of an item. The tricky part is the one-time override to allow you to place one (and only one) harvester.

It's a minor change (I think, not a coder by profession) that fits within the established order of the game and within the economy and the milleu.

/bump

I can also make money as a "surveyor" if I can find a resource in the mission terminal I know I have a harvester on. Speeder to harvester, survey, cha-ching. Buffers maintenence costs, a little anyway.

Then answer this. You may love the idea but does it solve this

When you need a resource, you need it. Not need it and I hope somebody selectsyour mission. Lets face it when an artisan has all the survey xp they require do they do the missions. Will your mission get selected 2 days later? Will the resource have shifted by the time it is selected?

Does not sound practical to me.

Only thing that I see is we need survey, because you cannot seem to find any artisans that will survey for cash directly so what makes you think they will survet for cash from a mission term. You cant communicate things like "must be a buildable area that I can place 3 heavy extractors"

Although unique it does not seem to me to be a practical solution to a fundamental balance issue that gives one set of crafters a set of base skills and not other crafters

When you need a resource, dump 15 skill points into Novice Artisan and find it your own self. It's what the artisan profession is for. CMs have exactly the same problem, except their tree requires 169 points, not "just" the 140 ours does, meaning that while they can kill insects they can't harvest them or combine their harvest with radioactives they find themselves to make a disease pack without going to 199 points. With all that, survey only makes #3 on the top 5 of their list, and there is nary a mention of it on the first page of their forums.

In essence, the Devs will not move on this. My option does give you a waypoint and a concentration and the ability to run a harvester without burning the skill points you seem to guard so jealously. There is essentially no way you will get your wish if the Dev position stays the same, so there needs to be a way to make Artisans involved in this, and one way that probably would be acceptable is to allow players to place missions. This has application beyond survey... like players putting BH missions on other players, putting a contract out on that wrix lair outside your house, etc.

And from another perspective, how come there is no stimpack usable by non-medics. Not everyone crafts, but almost everyone gets injured. How is this not a game balance issue? Why not farm StimA use out to anyone, a Mexican pharmacy approach? An answer is that there is a class to do this -- medic/doctor/CM, just like there is a class to survey -- Artisan. We aren't crafters though we do a lot of crafting, we are medics. DIfferent base class, different function.

Well, to be fair, the universal "Stim A" issue is on the Medics list and not doing too bad in the way of support from the medic community. (If you do or don;t like that issue, then get over to the medic forum and VOTE! The more votes it gets the higher it goes, the more votes other things get the lower it goes.)

Besides, in many ways our basic healing skills already have been farmed out to everyone else in the game in several forms. The first being Pet Stims, which allow anyone to heal the primary Tank in amost groups without having to resort to the use of a Medic if they don't want to (although we are still mroe efficient at it.) The next methods are Chef food and drinks and Smuggler spices, which, in effect, provide a temporary heal. Then we can include that there may be some Chef foods in their revamp that may perform some healing fuctions, if I read their proposal correctly. Finally we have the autohealing in Hosptials, Player City Cantinas and from Camps. Our most basic skill exists everywhere in the game, yet we hardly say a peep about it. Even the whole Pet Stim issue is sitting down in the no-mans-land region on the list of issues.

Yet somehow we end up being the bad guys for just wanting the same basic level of sufficiency that every other profession has? Even though our profession is even more focused on SP costs than most of them? Ugh.

At any rate, the idea has some merit to it, I think. Is it enough, though, or would it just be another /medicalforage skill for us? Several folks have mentioned some fairly valid concerns, I think, about how it may not be as useful as we could hope for. Of course the other question is, would this only be for Medics to contract on? If not, then what is to stop the current situation where Armor and Weaponsiths (and Architects) will simply, and easily, outbid us for a surveyor's services to fulfill their orders intead of ours anyway. Which means we'd just be in the same boat we are in now.

(BTW, I've long since added this thread to the links for this issue on the Medic list, just so you know. I like to make sure the ideas are consolidated with those links if I can.)

Thanks, Zarlor, for the cross-link, and for all the work you do on these forums.

Heh, AS/WS/Architechts are already able to survey, but I see your point. I probably wouldn't put a bid system in, for exactly the reason you state -- gazillion bids for plumbum iron and irolunn gas will drown the medic requests, and who wants a newbie Artisan pulling 10k credits for a survey mission?

Just add ours into the mix so that there are people who can do it looking for dolovite, really good berry stashes, and the next Lok wheat shift. Price it fixed by concentration, and be done with it.

The one breaker I can see is an Artisan taking multiple missions for the same resource and reporting the same spot over and over. Of course, they have to go 1024m for it to work, but with speeders that's only about a minute and a half flying time. Then again, given what crafters can make, 2k in 3 minutes over and over sounds like a waste of their valuable time.