Scout Archive

This may be a dead horse, but can I please flail at it a few times? Thanks.

I genuinely enjoy being a scout. Sits with me just fine. And one of the areas that I thought could use some attention is the /forage ability.

Does it need to give xp?
On this issue, I personally don't care because it doesn't give it now, and I still use the skill frequently.

What we find...
Bait and small food buff items. Excellent. Both used by our profession and not meshing with others; it is a skill unique to us.

For normal items, why not a few florals retreived? Medical foraging already covers that, but wouldn't a forager still have a chance at finding some of the same things?

I would like to be able to possibly find something else...all those people running from storm troopers through the woods have GOT to drop pocket change and other juicy items once in awhile...I just don't want to have to carry around my metal-detector-survey-tool to find it...

Also, perhaps some small items such as rarer onions or some such that could be used by other professions as a component in medicines (Medics/BE/Doctors/CM) or foods (Chefs), a lubricating oil (DE/WS/AS), etc (ideas are endless) though not in quantity and NOT required - not common and not needed, but nice when you can get them (Think single hand-made items, not factory runs). This will stand with the current systems of items being obtained by one profession for the benefit of others.

Those items or something similar could also be used by our own profession...I'm not sure we craft anything that outstanding anyways that could be made markedly better by some foraged component, but that option definitely needs some attention...in traps, I suppose.

And something everyone loves: decorations. Just some neat items that can only be obtained by foraging that would look good in a house...plants, shrubs, decorative items, etc. Let your art team go ape**edit**.

Current buff size/filling...
I think I am in league with the devs in that I don't think this should be tampered with. It simply should NEVER be as powerful as a crafted item. Period. It would be like the chef eating his raw corn and expect to get the same effect as in a finished product. These are foraged items, after all...an "Oh, crap, I need dinner tonight - I need to go find some" kind of action, not a SIMS catering table in the woods...

But the concern here is to keep the skill useful and USED by its own class. So some delicate attention here as well.

Interface...
I did like the previous poster's comments on a pop-up to possibly be notified on what was found so you can cancel and search for something else (prevents macros, and needless item creations/destructions).

I would like to have a sort of 'tracking' for foraged items (maybe with a wp like on actual resource surveys)...like animals & people, but more to the tune of, "Hey! There's an onion patch about 200m thataway!" and know that when I forage at that spot I will get the onions I'm after...not some fungus with lizard poop on it...The display wouldn't need to show %s, but maybe colored to designate different items...green patch for onions, red blob for berries, etc.


That's my ponderings thus far...

Message Edited by Mondoshawan on 02-15-2004 01:04 AM

Delta,

If you are going to post dev responces, you should cut and paste what the devs say instead of paraphrasing them. You run the risk of the classic "Telephone" game (one person tells a story to someone who retells the story to someone else, who retells the story to someone else and so on... To the point where the message changes completely by the end of the chain) whenever you re-word something. One of the problems with paraphrasing is that sometimes the message isn't as importaint as how it is said.

for example a dev might say something like...

"We are very appricative of your feedback and are actively looking into this issue..."

... from which we could paraphrase the responces as "The devs are concerned about our problem."

However, what we miss is the overall context of the message. Is this the same responce they gave to every concern we have had in the past or is this responce somehow different from the others? If it is the same responce, could we not then conclude that the responce is just a "canned" responce with very little real meaning? Or how about the fact that the example responce doesn't actually commit to fixing anything, or establish any kind of timeline for completion? Does the responce give any real indication of how many resources they are commiting to solving the problem (how many people are spending their sleepless nights dedicated to resolving the issue) , or did they just add it to the bottom of a to-do list? What is the priority of this issue in comparison to other issues?

I could probably go on and on about the problems of paraphrasing, but I won't. The key is simple: Don't paraphrase. Context may not answer all of the questions that we have, but it does give us more information than we currently have. Simply cut and paste the actual responces. If you get your responces through chat, tell them specificaly to respond through email so you can cut and paste. If that is not possible, then cut and paste the actual chat logs.

Many thanks in advance...

zebraone.

Zebra,

I can't do that because what is given to us is an undistilled version of what they want posted. Each of these posts was personally okayed by Thunderheart, so it is as close to having a Dev come here and post as we're going to get on this issue.

There are 35 correspondents, and TH posted replies to every single one of us. That took a long time. So in order for us to get this up in a timely fashion (and it wasstill a month late) he asked us to help him out, and we did. There's 35 of us, and one of him, so if he had that ability to do something along those lines, they would have just posted here themselves.

This is how the correspondent system has worked.

In general, Scouting is a low priority because 90% of our stuff works. However, the camping issue is bumping up to the top tier and I think we can get some attention on that shortly.

I'm sorry you didn't find this very enlightening.

B