Scout Archive

i'm a bh on bria and armorsmith on eclipse...

With my armorsmiththis issue has hurt severely, scaley hides which were once 5-10 credits each are now 20-30 credits each and some even higher for good quality. Also, now i can't feasibly hunt for my own hides, because it would take me all day long to get 1 chitin suit worth of hides.

However, on my bounty hunter, this issue has actually helped, because my guild frequently does endor hunting parties with 15-20 people and we'll kill mereks etc for about 2-4 hours, and i'll get 1000 hides or so plus a lot of expereience. And since i can now charge 20-30 per hide that makes me 20-30k which is nice.

I think what needs to be addressed, is two part. If this change is intentional, then let's take a look at all of the classes that require harvested resources and possibly reduce the amount that they need. If this change isn't intentional, then quickly fix things before the economy gets out of wack (if it's not too late already)

Holo: the answer here is to make ALL group bonuses/penalties check and see what you are grouped with. Currently players receive grouping xp bonuses and harvesting penalties no matter what they are grouped with, which led to the annoying tendency of players to group with non-combat mouse droids while solo to get group bonuses. That has stopped now that everyone has a 4000+ HAM creature pet to group with instead, but it is just as annoying. Games tend to use grouping xp bonuses to encourage players to group with each other, if that is your intent here then it is being exploited due to the lack of a check to see what or who they are grouped with.

Holo, it appears that the previous base-amount of harvesting was reduced. Let's look at my (Master Ranger) harvesting numbers pre-patch and post-patch, and post-patch while grouped:

Giant Dalyrake
Pre-patch: 62 Scaley hide
Post-patch: 34 Scaley hide
Post-patch while grouped: 18 Scaley hide

As you can see, something is very wrong here ... it's DEFINITELY NOT just a 60% reduction while soloing -- there has been a base reduction with another reduction on top of that while grouping.

The question everyone wants answered: Is the base-amount reduction a bug or intentional?

The reduction is also while hunting solo - I haven't been grouped since the patch so I only know the solo experience:

Meat from large spiders pre-patch:around 14

Meat from large spiders post-patch: around 7

Then, when and if you're grouped it goes even down more.

Please look into this again, thanks.

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UttiniDaKilrJawa wrote:

This needs to be changed along with the group experience bonus. You get group experience bonus if you are with a pet. This does give CHs an upper hand in PvM.

(Also, im getting full experience as opposed to the faction im supposed to be getting)

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Absolutely not. We do not get XP for the damage that a pet does, so they are in effect stealing xp from us. We get no faction points either from the pets.

I think the change is fine.

Last night we hunted pickets for about 2 hours. Group of 5 people, all with at least novice scout, I think we missed at least 10% of the harvests because the battles got a little intense at times, and we still came out with two types of meat: 3500 of one and 2500 of the other. 6000 meat for a couple hours isn't bad, and is certainly better than we would have got under the old system.

Scarey thing is when people realize how it works and do pickets with a group of 20. You could flood the market with herbivore meat overnight.

"I think the change is fine.

Last night we hunted pickets for about 2 hours. Group of 5 people, all with at least novice scout, I think we missed at least 10% of the harvests because the battles got a little intense at times, and we still came out with two types of meat: 3500 of one and 2500 of the other. 6000 meat for a couple hours isn't bad, and is certainly better than we would have got under the old system.

Scarey thing is when people realize how it works and do pickets with a group of 20. You could flood the market with herbivore meat overnight."

- you just described how this system is seriously flawed. Solo hunting is no longer viable, small group hunting (which seems is what SOE intended) is perfectly fine, but BIG group hunting is totally overflawed. This makes two out of three possible hunt situations totally imbalanced, while the third less used is the one that is made to fit. It's utterly stupid.

Its appreciative that the team is trying to work out alternatives to the hotkey harvest/loot click fest that is synonomous with grouping. BUT...

This institution isn't well implemented. If this is soley based on harvest permissions, why can't this feature be turned on/off? Sorry, but as an armorsmith its difficult enough finding organic materials that I need (hide and bone) in sufficient quantities. Now, these quantities have been reduced, and solo hunters penalized if they use pets.

Holo, its difficult enough acquiring wooly hide. Now acquiring wooly hide for armor (in sufficient quantitites) is ever becoming a chore.

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Japhy_Chilastra wrote:

The 60% rule was poorly, poorly planned and is just wrong. Why not have 100% of the material divided evenly between the people eligible to harvest? Anything but this.. the market has completely dried up of available resources on the bazaar. Please, I beg you.. check the numbers.

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I can see the reason for the reduction though. How can you split the resource evenly when you don't know how many people are going to be harvesting and how many are going to get what. If there's 5 scouts in the group, each of those scouts could take a different resource or all 3 could take the same. Since it doesn't happen at the same time, there would be no way to split it evenly. If each scout could only harvest 1 resource, then there would be 2 left out.

I think the current system works, just needs to be fixed so you don't get a reduction solo.

Has anyone noticed less xp for harvesting? If the xp is the same, then it would sound like there is a bug in the amount harvested rather than them purposely reducing solo harvests.

This is what i have noticed as of last night.

On talus hunting the big turtles (forgive me not quite got all the names)

I have a pet and I have only mast scout harvesting skills even though i have ranger skills just no +'s to harvesting yet.

I tested the group with a pet and without the pet.

I was getting 30 Hides when i was not grouped with my pet

I was getting 16 hides when i was grouped with my pet

I tested this several times it a was always around the same percentage.

I don't remember what it was for pre patch.. I want to say in the 40-45 range but i honestly can't say that's what it was... but i do remember what it was for drayk's... I used to get 45 hides but i couldn;t find any to test it on last night (limited time to play) when i get a chance later today i will report back.

I am drawing to this conclusion it looks like a DOUBLE REDUCTION went into effect. not sure if it was intention or not. but it looks to be a reduction from pre to post and then another one when you are grouped.

in another think that it hurts on is if your have a pet or droid you get a bonus in xp (more so weapon/combat...not sure if it effect harvesting have not tested)but you lose out on the harvesting ... so as of right now you need to make a choice between xp or harvesting. Not sure if it's intended to be that way or not.

would be nice to not have to make that choice but if that's the decision then just let us know please.

I hope this is a simple bug and glad your looking into it.

Thanks for your time and patience,

Hord

It would be relatively simple to have the amount harvested reduced based on the number of scouts in the party. Take the number of scouts who end up with loot permission on the corpse. (the system knows who has loot permission. It can check each of these players for novice scouting skill) Use some formula to reduce the amount harvested based on the number of scouts.

1 scout = 100%

2 scouts = 60% (120% total)

3 scouts = 50% (150% total)

4 scouts = 40% (160% total)

5 scouts = 35% (175% total)

6 scouts = 30% (180% total)

7 scouts = 26% (182% total)

8 scouts = 24% (192% total)

More scouts = 200% / number of scouts = 200% total.

If everyone doesn't harvest, then that's their loss. But if you have a bunch of non-scouts in the group it doesn't hurt the harvest. Grouping is encouraged, yet no matter how many scouts join the group you can never exploit it to get massive resources off of a single creature.

-Ariror
-Wookiee Ranger - Tempest

There is a problem with this. When soloing, I am forced to not group with my pets in order to get the full harvest benefit. This should be changed so that the reduction is calculated based on the number of other scouts in the group. 1 scout gets 100%, 2 scouts 50%, all the way down to 20% for 5+ scouts in the group.

Now, I would no object to leaving the pets out of the group so much except the damned stop-following bugs are still in there for all pet types. I depend on the group window to show me how far away my pets are.

You all are making things WAY too complicated! Here is my proposal:

1) Solo harvest amounts needs to be restored to what it was pre-patch.

2) Each creature hasa "base amount" of hide/bone/meat that can be extracted. When a group member attempts to harvest a creature, a "profession check" should done to see how many harvestable-professions there are in the group. For this example, let's say there are 10 people in the group and 3 have the ability to harvest. The equation looks like this:

CreatureBaseAmount / HarvestableProfessionsInGroup
62 / 3 = 21 (20.66)

Each Scout/Ranger could harvest 21 unit of their choice ... hide/bone/meat from any creature. Additionally, skill bonuses would be applied AFTER the previous calculation. So, a Master Ranger might get 30 hides whereas a Master Scout would only get 24 or so.

By doing it this way, there is no more or less resources in the enconomy and EVERY gets an equal share of the resources.

Keep it simple.