Ranger Archive
Thread: Harvesting Then, now and future?
WHERE WE WERE
Ninja harvesters. This was really bad. Some people in groups would run and harvest everything before everyone else, hoarding the xp and the resources.
WHERE WE ARE
Overall reductions in amount harvested (not sure how much), plus a 40% reduction when grouped, offset by the number of people in your group who are harvesting. Resource costs of things like traps and camps have been increased. Camo kits now in which require a large amount of resources.
The latest changes may actually reduce the amount of hide in the economy too much, at least in the short term. Now, the only way to get good resources is to be in a good group, on a high level planet. Otherwise you cannot compete. The solo Ranger/Scout is at a big disadvantage.
This also has the effect of lowering the value of the "harvesting" skill mod, as it does not seem to have any real impact at higher levels, other than maybe 1 or 2 hides a harvest.
WHERE WE NEED TO BE
We need what most Rangers and Scouts have been saying since the beginning. We need an "autosplit" of both scouting xp and the resources gathered. This makes no negative impact to the amount of resources in the world, harvesting skill mods still matter, and keeps higher level harvesting skill mods valuable.
The only hard thing about this solution is the whole "opt in/opt out" mechanism so that people who don't really want/need hides or scouting xp don't get any.
To me, the simplest method would be to make it rely on titles. If you have a Scout/Ranger based title displayed while in a PC group, you get a share of the proceeds. If not, you will only get a piece if you physically harvest the creature yourself. No new unwieldly mechanism needs to be introduced into the code to support some sort of list, all it would add is a title check.
For example, if a BH doesn't need/want any of the hides and resources, he just has his "Bounty Hunter" or a "Marksman" title up, and doesn't get any.
As far as xp splitting, everyone "opted in" gets a share of the scouting xp that the harvester would receive if he did it solo. Make sure that Novice Scouts get their share capped at what they would maximum get on a solo effort if there is any issue of them getting more xp than they should.
To me, this is much simpler than mucking around with the amount of resources coming into the world. The current solution makes it very hard to balance and requires ongoing tweaking.
Just one man's opinion.