Scout Archive

I was going to reply to a couple of other posts about my thoughts on shifting resources when I realized thatI'd have to reply to a lot of posts and then go over to the Artisan board and post there too, etc. So I just started a new thread. While this will have a "mineral theme" to it, this covers all resources including hide, meat and bone.

Anyway, here are my thoughts on shifting resources (with a dash of material priorities as well):

The act of shifting resources isn't a bad thing. It can represent IRL problems of over-mining an area and over-harvesting creatures (i.e. causing animal populations to shrink, etc.) without causing a huge headache of actually keeping track of populations, total mineral counts, etc. It also provides an even playing field for the expert as well as the novice since no one will be able to corner to market on overall quality 950 steel for too long.

The part that annoys me is the sudden disapperance of a particular type of resource. That part is beyond the realistic for me. If a planet has steel, it should always have steel. Quality, location and particular type can change, sure (and I won't go into the fact that steel isn't steel without iron being processed) but the basic material shouldn't.

I think this would be a particularly useful thing as many artisan items require specific materials: wooly hide (as opposed to any hide), carbonate ore (as opposed to any low-grade ore), etc. Since not all materials can necessarily be found on every planet, players would be forced to either goto the planet for those resources and thus increasae the potential of interacting with other players or wait for someone to drop off a load of that type of resource at the bazaar (or shop or whatever) and increasing the usefulness of a resource dealer.

Scouts aren't as affected by this since, for the most part, corellian wooly hide will always be corellian wooly hide -- just different types of each. However with a slightly higher increase in the need for specific type of MBH (meat, bone, hide) for crafters scouts could become much more useful to those people and thus we could get a slightly higher increase in revenue. I also think that they should increase the number of types of MBH you can get. Instead of Corellian Wooly Hide, there could be Corellian Corse Wooly Hide and Corellian Soft Wooly Hide. And reduce the number of types within each category (i.e. 850 750 650 550 quality wooly hides all from the same creature on the same day). While I admit that a person can certainly botch the job on gathering the resource and thus have a lower quality it seems to me that the type you get is somewhat random and not basedon skill. This might have changed in the recent past as I have been working on my marksman skills and not really paying attention to the types of hide i'm getting.