Gathering quality shifts/fluctuation? -- (Dev) Replied

Having tried/played several MMO:s and similar this whole millennia - there is one thing that a game had that I truly miss in all current games.

It?s the gathering quality fluctuation that was present in the first releases of SWG (Star Wars Galaxy).

It truly made the profession "gatherer/harvester" interesting and also created a true market for quality resources for crafting. Especially consumables.

For those not aware of how this worked, I?ll try and explain it.

1. As a gatherer/harvester - you became specialized in on or a few resource types. i.e. mining and grains.

2. You ran around the countryside with "survey-tools" to sample the area and locating rich and/or high quality resources.

3. Once located - you placed an harvester-machine like contraption that harvested available resources over time. Higher quality harvesters collected more units/min and kept the quality of the resource, low quality could damage the quality. The harvester needed to be attended/emptied and maintained.

4. Depending on the fluctuation - the spot could be emptied in half an hour, while other could go on for a whole day (even days).

5. These areas/spots of resources would eventually drain and you would have to pack up and move. Most often a high quality resources were smaller (read: much harder to locate) and did not contain as much in volume either.

This generated the need for high quality resources and just as in real life - the result of the crafted item would depend of the quality of the resource, the quality of the tools/workbench and of course the skill of the crafter. For example this could make a "health potion" having a healing capacity that i.e. varied from batch to batch. A moderate crafter with a normal workbench with high quality resources would still get moderate values of the health potion - with the exceptional batch of "lucky shots". An expert crafter with high quality resources, workbench would be able to create higher value batches - and sometimes even get a "super-high" batch of potions.

Thus, creating the fun even for the crafters to find the right ingredients from the serious gatherer/harvester - creating more of a vivid way of playing your character.

Being my guilds top combat medic (later called doctor) - I of course joined on raids to help healing people. BUT, for a long time I focused on created the finest and most valued healing potions and buffs on my server (Chimaera) by being an expert in medicine and buying (or gather myself) the top notch quality resources and processing plants I needed. Sometimes "competing" with the two others on which ones had the highest healing-values available in the vendor-stores or common auction house.

I would suggest that this kind of harvesting would only be available online and "standard" resources available in at vendors offline.

How about adding something like that into SotA? Please Dev?s - think about it!


Cheers and thank you for your time in reading about this.

PS More about the SWG resources can be read here: http://swg.wikia.com/wiki/Resource

 

+1 to this suggestion!

I too think it would be an excellent addition to gathering.

 

I could see ways of making this work,

Replace the gatherer/harvesters with NPCs or something,

Lumberjacks Fishermen Farmers Foragers Miners etc, all as "hireable" NPCs that work for you. Maybe this could be something you unlock at the highest levels of the profession? Like the NPC is an apprentice or something...

 

@Grimkor - Sounds like a really nice adaptation that would work.

Although I agree that it might not be available from the start in a profession, me personally think it might be available after the first major "step" in the character progress?

 

""Lumberjacks Fishermen Farmers Foragers Miners etc, all as ?hireable? NPCs that work for you. Maybe this could be something you unlock at the highest levels of the profession? Like the NPC is an apprentice or something?""

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I'm not sure, but I believe we will have companion NPCs? If that's so, they could just have our companions "learn" the skill when we qualify for it, then we could just set our companions to doing whatever it is, whether its chopping wood, fishing etc.. Would that work?

 

@Valandur - I?m not sure that the companion would work if it became an adoptation from SWG. I could have 20-30 harvesters/gatherers out at the same time - sometimes for several days.

An adaptation could be that you buy a "worker contract" that contain a special kind of workers - that needs maintenance paid in relation to time they are used, getting degenerated in efficiency if below 50% maintenance (as in poorly fed/motivated).

When you "activate" a worker contract on a selected spot - a carriage comes and unload a bunch of NPC:s that start to do what they do. Have it mining with pick-axe, dig in the earth or how you emote it. IF a resource runs out, they just sit down and do idle stuff.

One thing in SWG was to just travel around and look for other harvesters or simular and then go and see if there was something in the outskirts of that area or maybe something nearby to find. The same thing would be if you see a number of NPC:s farming in a valley or a part of a rock/mountain where there are loads of miners.

 

Even if you're not directly fighting another player, I'd look at this from a PvP prospective:

At a macro level:
1) Someone owns the land I'm gathering from. And they are friendly to me. So I'm paying the nearby lord for the right to gather resources on his land as some kind of tax. A serf on his farm, or whatever. Maybe I just need a fishing / hunting license and accept some rules that go along with this. In return for this, I have accesses to the resources and can assume some level of safety while I gather them. I probably get to stake some kind of claim.
2) The land is neutral. In this case I'm in the wild west of anything goes. I should either expect PvP or NPC bandits to harass me. Maybe some "nice" people will seek "protection" money from me. These act as a tax, in effect.
3) I'm in hostile territory. I'm stealing from some other lord. People are actively hunting me at every step so I take what I can.

Your ideas are fine. But I suspect all gathering in this game to deal with varying levels of hostility and risk vs reward.

 

I don't think there is a need for unattended harvesting (npcs). But this idea could be implemented by quality of resource node + quality of tools + skill level of player, for attended harvesting.

Everything that differentiates players is a good thing.

I like the survey aspect too. Rather than just stumbling upon a resource, require the player to actively search for the resource. This brings in another skill. The end result is that it allows rare resources to be rare, and some control is given to the devs (how fast skills increase, quality of nodes).

I would encourage the devs to have skills increase slowly. There is no harm in making us take several months of playtime before we are able to get the better resources. Having one quality level always out of reach would be good too.

 

I fully support a range of qualities of gathered resources. I LOVED that aspect of Star Wars Galaxies, especially because the quality of gathered materials had a direct effect on the quality of goods crafted from that materials. This, in addition to Crafters being a primary character class themselves AND crafters having advanced control over the stats of the crafted equipment via experimentation points, made player created goods quite different from one another.

Take an example of World of Warcraft: a crafted sword is a crafted sword is a crafted sword. That same sword would appear on the auction house 20-100-1000 times, each one identical, each one attempting to undercut the previous. Not fun.

Now take Star Wars Galaxies (i played it in its first year, so some of this example may not be accurate): their auction house would have 20-100 listings of the same Blaster, but that was then broken up into "this blaster has better range, this one has better damage, this one has a blue blast, this one has more energy, this one has more durability, this one is more well rounded, and this one is REALLY good because a master crafter made it and got lucky with his experimenting". Same blaster, different variants. This segments each item into different qualities, giving players far more choice.


While I also "kind of" like the idea of NPC gatherers that you hire, it may be a bit stressful on the server side of things. My thought has always been make players the Gatherers, but also make Crafters a primary profession, rather than an Adventurer + Gatherer + Crafter. Not every crafter is an adventurer, and not every adventurer is a crafter. However, Adventurers tend to "gather" things much more than a lone Crafter (how often would most Blacksmiths go out and mine on their own? they usually hire other people to do it, as the smith himself is too busy crafting gear). Adventurers supply the crafters, and crafters supply the adventurers.

Back to World of Warcraft for a second, since you could create a bunch of characters per server, most players (including myself) would just make a bunch of alts, set each one up with different crafting professions, and have their main set up as a gatherer, collecting all of the goods needed for the Alts. Once the Alts maxed out their profession, they would level up that Alt just enough to open up the next tier of crafting, then go thru the process of grinding their crafting skills to the max again, and on and on it went. This was bad for crafting because you didnt craft for others, but rather for yourself and possible "end game" gear (that wasn't as good as raid or pvp gear in many cases). Most of the time you didnt even make the gear for yourself, but rather just for the sake of skill points. You would then toss all of your greens, blues and purples to your Enchanter to disenchant them into good to grind up enchanting.

Basically, having the option to make a lot of characters per server + all "adventurers" being able to be master crafters made it so no one really had to craft for others and ruined the whole thing.

Crafters need to be their own people, with possibly some limited crafting skills available to Adventurer type players for things like repairs and such. If I have someone make me a shield and it gets damaged (not enough to be useless) I should be able to repair it with the right tools, but if it is damaged beyond my limited skills, i will need to find a Blacksmith/Armorsmith to do a real repair job on it.

 

Actually many WoW items have a with different stats. And a green craft can proc into a blue item with much better stats.

Aion's crafting system was all proc based, so a really good item would requite several procs on sub-components to get a top tier craft.

In guildwars2 you would "discover" recs by mixing stuff together. So mixing in bones, vs blood, vs scales would give you different stats on the finished item.

 

@macharborguy: As to some of what you write - I also miss the scope of actually being a more or less professional "gatherer/crafter" where experimentation gives you different results. The thought of having "NPC/harvesting gathering" for me is that you have to travel and maintenance the areas where you have placed your harvesting nodes - creating a aspect of a somewhat realistic need to travel around to manage how your minions are doing/collecting the result and not just run between the workbench and auction house.

I also think it will be harder for (unethical?) bots to harvest if you need to survay, maintain and manage spots like this. In addition, since "a bundle" of iron ore might go for different prices depending on the different stats (just as the crafted results) - it creates another dimension in trading that I believe makes it harder for sweatshop-accounts to just sell what a specific resource or item normally goes for.

@PrimeRib: I agree that there are aspects where you could add "taxing" on a PvP server and have friend or foe areas to harvest. I can see that it would be an interesting aspect for some - even if I do not share it. Mostly because I am not much for PvP and if you add too much hostile aspects to it, the gathering/crafting-idea (as in SWG) could be way to hard to actually maintain - especially to attract people to make a competitive trade without creating "resource-barons" who control most marketshares.

True, a "green" or "blue" stat could be different in WoW. But a green "Sword of berserkers flower" (if there is such a sword) do always have the same stats and I can understand that for people that want to be curled for - this is right up their alley. Because then you can just look up on the net what such a sword goes for. Alas, if the five stats of a "Berserker broadsword" varies quite a lot in aspect to what you favor - you have to make the decision yourself and that will put off articles on the exact gear one should get to be a good healer, tank etc. Sure, one can read that if you have lots of currency - you can get a weapon that does more damage that most often degrades more as well. But it creates a range of characters where none is like the other (even if some gear look the same) - which in my book is a good thing and a thing I miss in todays game - even though I can admit that I never crafted during my brief time playing Aion (before I had my account hacked twice in a month and swore never to return).

In the end, I would just like gathering/harvesting to be a trade that I can do when not questing or with friends that is more than just going to the regular spawningpoints of visual ore in rocks or skinning beasts and make the gathering/harvesting a trade in itself.

 

Gathering could be an area where characters further differentiate themselves. Combinations of skills and equipment could influence the product of the gathering. Having the skills be mutually exclusive would prevent a character from being able to acquire everything on their own (forcing interaction between characters)

 

@Jonathon.Doran Absolutely! If made comprehensive enough (as in SWG) - it can also appeal to those that might not prioritize battle in the first place. More of a full time merchant/gatherer.

 

Great summary and comments on gathering. I'm not sure that the harvester mechanics fit into the gathering system but I do like many of the details described in this thread.

 

@B, Anything a harvester could do offline, a character could do at the resource node. It is just a time-shift. If you later allow companion gathering, then it would be closer to the harvester, but that is not a requirement to have survey/tool/ability or anything else associated with harvesters be applicable.

 

I was more referring the fact that our resource nodes will often be in wilderness areas that are instanced. It does not fit in the game to have a persistent harvester/resource collector on our instanced wilderness scene.

I do like the idea of companions that gather but this is more akin to an appointment mechanic where they leave for a time and return with some amount of gathered resources.

 

I would like to see the possibility of companions going off and doing gathering of common and maybe sometimes uncommon resources. It would remove the time sink of having to continually farm materials for commonly used items and allow for more interesting things to do in game.

 

I don't think a harvester would work but it could be translated to used tools of course which are used to harvest the resource. Different quality if mining picks for example. Harvesting should be done manually imho. Let me sweat for my work to gather rare resources. Not some NPC which is turned on and does things when I'm at work. At least, thats how I see it.

I like the different quality of resources very much! And variaties of the same item because of the different resources and experiments.

And I agree with the first post of Jonathon.Doran: make it slow. Let it take months to reach certain levels. That way the game doesn't get boring fast because you have targets which gain a lot of time to reach.

 

I was very hip on SWG's Resource "Quality". For me, it set the great crafters apart from average crafter. The resources we spent painstaking amounts of time gathering paid off in the final product. It might have only been .5% more "to hit", but is *was* better.

This was one of my first questions to Chris, having resources with "stats" but unfortunately it seemed the SotA model was build around the end of crafting using a refining method to tweek the item quality with a risk of breaking.

I *do* hope you guys will reconsider having a stat system on resources. Since no "vein" is forever, neither is the resource that came from it. You had to be there that day, and work THAT node to gain as much as you could. the next day, it could be gone. You could make a "run" of quality swords, but then you need to be back at it, checking the quality of the resource to make that "perfect" base material.

I still think it could work hand in hand with a refining finish, with the quality of the resource base working towards the % of success for refining.

 

B - not sure I'm understanding. With just about any crafting system you need a consistent source of raw materials. If there are no persistent fields where/how does one gather?