Goblinworks Blog: Dust Off the Moon and Let's Begin


Pathfinder Online

51 to 100 of 251 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | next > last >>
Scarab Sages Goblin Squad Member

Say I find an iron motherlode, and I set up a big mining operation there (leaving exact terms out because they're a separate topic). If someone comes to steal my ore, can I stop production to spite them? If the enemy kills me, does mining stop until I re-spawn and come back? Those are interesting questions, and I don't think the blog answers them.

I don't know about the first question, but for the second question, I assume that once started, the mining operation would continue to extract iron at a rate determined by my skill until the ore is gone, whether I'm standing nearby or not (unless I can and do give the order to stop harvesting). In-world, it's not me doing the digging; it's a bunch of invisible commoners. Once they're in place and digging, I can accept that they could be cowed by anyone carrying a sword into digging until the ore's gone.

One part of the goal is very clear: If you're not able and willing to protect (or arrange protection for) your stockpile until the caravan arrives, you stand to lose everything you can't carry.

Goblin Squad Member

Urman wrote:
Nihimon wrote:
From prior blogs, we know that you don't need to be present while the Gathering Kit is in operation.
Didn't the prior blogs suggest that spawned monsters would try to attack the resource site (now kit/camp)? So once it's activated, if it isn't guarded won't it eventually be destroyed and deactivated?

If it's unguarded, I imagine it would get destroyed.

However, if it's guarded, but the character who placed the kit is not present, I don't see any reason to believe it would stop working.

Goblin Squad Member

KarlBob wrote:
... I assume that once started, the mining operation would continue to extract iron at a rate determined by my skill until the ore is gone, whether I'm standing nearby or not...

That's the way I see it, too.

Dark Archive Goblin Squad Member

From previous blogs, the idea is that you act as the "manager" of the operation and that there are NPCs who are doing the actual work. For the sake of server resources, they roll that up into the 'gathering kit' rather than needlessly creating individual NPCs.

What interests me is how easy it would be for a trading company to forge into the wilderness and get to decent gathering spots. It sounds like a fun playstyle.

Goblin Squad Member

I haven't decided if I like the "You find it, you mine it" thing yet. There are pluses and minuses. I DO like the idea of EVERYONE being eligible to go explore the wilderness. I think exploration is great fun. I also think many of the achievements for exploration should be widespread and take a long time to complete. Numerous mountain peaks, deep valets, open fields, waterfalls, rivers and streams, bridges, ruins...the list goes on. Each subset would give some small bonus, with a larger bonus of some sort for the bigger achievements.

This gathering and harvesting system will reward the real adventurers. In some cases the monster spawn will be too large to defeat and the node will be lost. But many times the cavalry will arrive just in time and the group will come to the rescue to gain a great haul and save the loot in the nick of time.

Sounds like fun!

Goblin Squad Member

Andius wrote:
I think this blog focused on harvesting for a reason. Perhaps instead of digging as deep as we can for the PvP related elements and turning this into yet another PvP debate between the usual suspects, we can keep this topic centered around the gathering aspects, and drag the PvP debate to another topic.

Ooga Booga

Thats what I read there anyway... It is a discussion about Gathering and how it works.

Goblin Squad Member

Andius wrote:
I think this blog focused on harvesting for a reason. Perhaps instead of digging as deep as we can for the PvP related elements and turning this into yet another PvP debate between the usual suspects, we can keep this topic centered around the gathering aspects, and drag the PvP debate to another topic.

The issue with this is while I agree with you that this was about harvesting, there is still a PVP aspect to it. They put in there that you can be stolen from and attacked, both by NPC's and PCs, which in my book is PVP. Meaningful PVP because there is a reason, viable by mechanics and generally accepted actions, for the PVP attacks.

So with that said, Why not discuss the PVP viewpoint from this blog? After all, this is a PVP game right?

Goblin Squad Member

Nihimon wrote:
Andius wrote:
Perhaps instead of digging as deep as we can for the PvP related elements...
How else are they going to try to convince everyone that they're the "pro-PvP" faction?

What?

Maybe you hit your head on that ore deposit but,

WE ARE TALKING ABOUT HARVESTING AND WHAT IS INVOLVED

If you dont want to know what will be done to you, then I guess we can walk away and let it happen and laugh.

Goblin Squad Member

Nihimon wrote:
However, if it's guarded, but the character who placed the kit is not present, I don't see any reason to believe it would stop working.

Extracts from the blog:

- if you find the gathering spot, you are the primary character that must be involved in a gathering operation there.
- if you find the node, you get to be integral to the gathering process.
- The speed of the gathering operation is pegged to your own Profession rating...
- Your allies won't want to force you off your find, but you'll certainly want them to help stand guard.

Taking all of those together, I think there's a strong implication that the operator needs to remain close to the find for the duration of the gathering.

Goblin Squad Member

Rereading the blog a couple of times the "Gathering" and "Harvesting" descriptions are definitely reversed. Throughout history the earliest "gatherers" wandered around picking herbs, berries, nuts, fruits, seed grass...anything edible. It wasn't until much later formal farming came into play and the real "harvesting" began. These two words should be flipped.

Stephen Cheney wrote:

Bulk goods represent large quantities of food, wood more suitable to boards and beams than hafts and bows, low-quality metals for use in nails and other supports, any kind of stone for raising walls and building towers, and so on. They are very heavy and probably require a caravan to transport with any efficiency. (We'll get around to talking about caravans in one of these posts...)

Bulk goods don't interact with the gear crafting system, but are instead used for settlement construction and upkeep. This is both for in-story reasons—for example, stone isn't useful for gear crafting but makes perfect sense as a key material needed for structures—and practical reasons of economy management. For example, we don't want the vast amount of wood that makes sense for making buildings to distort the materials available for the crafting of wooden weapon components.

The blog also mentions "bulk goods" as being different so as to not compete for the normal crafting supply. Hopefully this is changed, as "bulk goods" should still require the same skills and variety of skill sets needed for the individual crafted goods, except the crafted goods at the bulk level are for buildings, structures, settlement walls, etc... No one would mistake a 40 foot tall log for an arrow shaft, but the logs should need to be harvested by lumberjacks and transported to your settlement where they can be installed to create your motte and bailey. The wagon required to move 6-8 of these massive timbers would require a sturdy team of draft horses (tamed or bred by an animal husbander) pulling an extra large and very strong wagon (which takes a long time for skilled craftsmen from several trades to create, final assembly being done by a skilled wainwright)...and there would be guards at the harvest area and escorts for the wagon train back to the construction site.

Same goes for farms where loads of wheat could be harvested for the grist mill, orchards harvested for fruits and nuts....all these (to me) seem to be viable harvesting techniques perfectly suited to a farm Point of Interest. The "Outpost" mentioned generates goods out of this air, no skill involved? I get the "We need bulk goods to build structures" but not involving the player base to work together to bring those goods in for mutual defense seems like an unfortunate shortcut.

Goblin Squad Member

I think the idea of "bulk" vs normal crafting supply is more in how they are stored and traded. As for skills, I would suspect that they use the same skills, after all chopping wood is chopping wood, weather you it in logs for use in buildings, or chopping it down to size for woodworking tools and weapons. So basically, you would have "LUMBER" as the bulk wood, and then "Wood Planks" or something for the crafting bit. When lumber gets harvested/gathered and taken to a mill for refining, I would assume that it is a choice as to what it gets turned into, crafting or Bulk.

This is how I see it working and what makes the most sense.

Goblin Squad Member

Urman wrote:
Nihimon wrote:
However, if it's guarded, but the character who placed the kit is not present, I don't see any reason to believe it would stop working.

Extracts from the blog:

- if you find the gathering spot, you are the primary character that must be involved in a gathering operation there.
- if you find the node, you get to be integral to the gathering process.
- The speed of the gathering operation is pegged to your own Profession rating...
- Your allies won't want to force you off your find, but you'll certainly want them to help stand guard.

Taking all of those together, I think there's a strong implication that the operator needs to remain close to the find for the duration of the gathering.

Agreed, so yeah, his skills play in no matter what but he needs to be there no matter what.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Andius wrote:

The main reason I can think of for non-tradeable nodes is miner-newb finds a node and then miner-newb's company says, "Sure we'll protects it, but miner-vet needs to do the extraction since he will take less time and get a better yield." And miner-newb says "But I really wanted to do the extraction!" To which his company retorts "Fine, but don't expect us to stand around all day while you do! Protect your own node!"

The worst part of this scenario is I think both parties have valid points. Miner-newb should be able to extract it himself since he found it, but doing so is selfish when he's relying on a group for protection. GW solves this by forcing miner-newb to be the extractor.

Yeah, this is the intention. We don't really want, "Hey! Guys! I FOUND MY FIRST MOTHER LODE! I'm so excited! Will you come out here and protect it while I put down the kit?" "Well, yeah... but it won't be you that gets to put down the kit; Bob has a much higher Miner skill. And since you're low level, you can't even really protect it. So, move along, kid, we'll take it from here."

Any kind of ability to grant access to the node would seem to result in an inevitable result of "Company/Settlement sends out players to serve as peons to look for gathering nodes and then inevitably be cut out of the find." Getting the gathering node is the payoff to lots of harvesting, so we'd like to avoid a situation where you're constantly getting cut out of the process by your friends.

But we are aware of the counter desires, so please continue posting suggestions for how we might have our cake and eat it too :) .

deisum wrote:
I'm also of the mind that 'gathering' and 'harvesting' have the reverse connotations of those described by the blog and could use some renaming.

Honestly... I think what happened was that in the earliest design what's currently a Gathering Node was the only kind of node and "gather" was the verb used in relation to it the most, so when we decided there needed to be a more traditional MMO small node, that wound up becoming a Harvesting Node because we were already using Gathering Node for the big ones.

But nobody actually likes those terms in that arrangement, and I mostly just insist on keeping them consistent so we understand what we're talking about. So... crowdforge us some new terms! :)

Qualifications:

  • Must be immediately clear what's going on just based on the name (i.e., no really obscure words).
  • Must make sense in the context of a(n) X Tool, X Kit, and X Node.

Goblin Squad Member

"The Goodfellow" wrote:

When lumber gets harvested/gathered and taken to a mill for refining, I would assume that it is a choice as to what it gets turned into, crafting or Bulk.

This is how I see it working and what makes the most sense.

If the collected wood is pine and fur timbers for construction, it's collected as bulk wood by commoners supervised by PCs operating from an outpost.

Those same PCs might choose to venture into the forest instead, and bring back carefully selected yew and rowan for bows from gathering and harvesting.

The yew wood is useless for major construction. Likewise, the bulk pine timbers are useless for bows.

Goblin Squad Member

Isn't it possible to "discover" these node, but not harvest them, and just wait for them to disappear for the purpose of denying a near by settlement of having access to node close to its own borders?

I could then see settlements realizing that this activity is directly impacting (negatively) their economy, and then shifting to NBSI policies in wilderness or monster hexes close to their own borders.

Goblin Squad Member

Okay. Crowdforging verbs meaning “the collection of resources”…here are some possibilities:

Gathering

Harvesting

Collecting

Farming

Reaping

Accumulating

Stockpiling

Aggregating

Massing

Picking

Extracting

There are more in the thesaurus but they become increasingly obscure.

My mind still goes to “gathering” for the small jobs, normally undertaken by a single person, maybe two or three:

Gathering kit, gathering tool (sickle), gathering node (berry bush, honey bee nest, silkworm nest).

Larger jobs that consolidate large amounts of a resource still lead me to “harvesting”, where four, five, or twenty people could participate in the same goal on a larger scale:

Harvesting kit, harvesting tool (scythe), harvesting site…node seems too small for a harvest (orchard, farm, vineyard).

I added "extracting" for underground sites...mines in particular, which would also include the process of gathering an impure raw material and making it more pure through another process (smelting metals from ore, rare plant creature organ or part processing for alchemists, getting juice or fibers from flora, finding gaseous cloud and collecting vapor)

Extracting kit, extracting tool (press or tweezers), extracting site...bigger than berry bush but smaller than a farm (foggy cloud, swarm of stirges, gooey zombie kidney)

Goblin Squad Member

1 person marked this as a favorite.

@Bludd, they say in the Harvesting section that "Each harvest node is only good for a very few items before it gets used up and you have to move on." This means that every node is going to disappear at some point, whether they spawn a Gathering node or not. Also, "These harvest nodes appear procedurally throughout a hex, so they won't be in totally predictable spots." I take this to mean that the nodes pop back up somewhere else in the hex after you use them. After all, having them in predictable spots or not makes little difference if they're in the same procedurally generated location every time. If you and your buds keep using nodes over and over in a hex, "harvest nodes will be fewer for that resource, and may output more impure (heavier and less efficient) variants of the resource."

So basically, you Harvest a node, it gives a few items then disappears. Another one pops up in the same hex, or doesn't, depending on how much harvesting has been going on. Occasionally one of these turns into a Gathering node, and you can do the Gathering event; however, leaving the Gathering node alone would probably not affect the current level of resource saturation (that's speculation from me, but I think it makes sense). Once it despawns through use or through leaving it there, another one pops up or doesn't, exactly as if you had used up a harvesting node.

Maybe the exact details will be modified from this (for example, have the nodes pop up on timers, increasing time between nodes with overharvesting), but I believe this is the basis of the system they were trying to convey.

Goblin Squad Member

Stephen Cheney wrote:
So... crowdforge us some new terms! :)

Thread specifically for crowdforging harvesting terms here.

Goblinworks Executive Founder

Stephen Cheney wrote:

Yeah, this is the intention. We don't really want, "Hey! Guys! I FOUND MY FIRST MOTHER LODE! I'm so excited! Will you come out here and protect it while I put down the kit?" "Well, yeah... but it won't be you that gets to put down the kit; Bob has a much higher Miner skill. And since you're low level, you can't even really protect it. So, move along, kid, we'll take it from here."

Any kind of ability to grant access to the node would seem to result in an inevitable result of "Company/Settlement sends out players to serve as peons to look for gathering nodes and then inevitably be cut out of the find." Getting the gathering node is the payoff to lots of harvesting, so we'd like to avoid a situation where you're constantly getting cut out of the process by your friends.

But we are aware of the counter desires, so please continue posting suggestions for how we might have our cake and eat it too :)

My first thought would be to tie production levels/rates/quality to the quality of the kit, with the character who installs it being irrelevant provided they meet the minimum requirements. My next thought would be to allow multiple characters to oversee the operation, perhaps with up to one each contributing to extraction speed, quality, amount of impurities, and total volume.

Both of those are compatible with requiring the character who first found the node to be the one to set up the kit.

Goblin Squad Member

Perhaps finding a "mother-lode" type harvesting node would generate a "Claim" item in your inventory. This Exclusive Rights document could only be transfered to another player via a fixed-amount currency exchange. This would give your discovery real coin value, providing you with an option: harvest it yourself or sell your claim for profit. Either way, you get something out of it.

Goblin Squad Member

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Does anyone else see a possible problem in allowing the person who finds the "claim" the right to transfer it to someone with higher skill at the quality of extracted goods?

What would be the results of a mechanic like that?

Goblin Squad Member

I like the "level of the kit, not player skill level" idea. It would mean a company just brings a bunch of kits and distributes them as 'gathering' nodes are found; the original finder is still involved in setting up the kit, and maybe involved beyond that (not sure if he has to stay nearby or not). His skill is still relevant, because you can't find a 'gathering' node without being able to harvest nodes, but it's not a big deal for setting up the kit itself, so he isn't going to be bringing the group down with his lower level. This would mean that finding a node isn't so much a special thing for the individual as it is for the group, but why is that a bad thing?

I think involving more characters for more reward on a 'gathering' node would be way cooler than just setting it up and having the guards deal with things that show up. How you would involve the other harvesters in a way that doesn't just involve standing around is something that I don't know.

Goblin Squad Member

@Bringslite, the devs do. They didn't want someone who discovers a gathering node to be crowded out of the gathering by allies with higher skills, which is why their current system is to restrict gathering to the person who discovered it.

Goblin Squad Member

1 person marked this as a favorite.

One obvious result would be that he could be threatened with death if he didn't sell it for a fraction of its value. Or like Stephen Cheney suggests, junior miners would be forced to pass it over to the senior miners, so they never get to do the gathering mini game or whatever.

I think it's not a huge issue. I expect that a gathering-focused company will go into the wilderness, spread out and harvest until someone finds a special node, then converge to protect it through exploitation, then disperse to gather solo again. Sometimes Character A operates the kit, sometimes Character C finds the special node. The most serious miners will mine a lot and find lots of special nodes.

Goblin Squad Member

"The Goodfellow" wrote:

I think the idea of "bulk" vs normal crafting supply is more in how they are stored and traded. As for skills, I would suspect that they use the same skills, after all chopping wood is chopping wood, weather you it in logs for use in buildings, or chopping it down to size for woodworking tools and weapons. So basically, you would have "LUMBER" as the bulk wood, and then "Wood Planks" or something for the crafting bit. When lumber gets harvested/gathered and taken to a mill for refining, I would assume that it is a choice as to what it gets turned into, crafting or Bulk.

This is how I see it working and what makes the most sense.

You can't choose to take lumber and make it bulk or use it for crafting. The type of node you got the wood from determines which it can be refined into.

Goblin Squad Member

Besides the problem that you mentioned Urman, I am not sure that it would be good for scarcity if the highest quality resource possible were almost always extracted when a "mother node" is discovered.

Zillions of low skilled searchers seek them out and the absolute top skilled harvesters come in each time and extract the maximum potential.

This could be fixed by making the good stuff super rare. If that is the plan already, then it might be a non issue. But if the "mother nodes" all have at least one rank higher possible material, well it could be a funny result.

Goblin Squad Member

@Bringslight, I wonder about this bit: A central process in the hex controls how many harvest nodes appear, based on an overall supply of each potential resource in that hex.

I'd think that means that for each potential resource in the hex, there's a separate counter. So for iron the count might be 12050 ore at a given moment in time. Rowan wood might have a count of 1040 sticks at the same moment.

If I'm mining nodes and I find an iron node, a basic node yields very few (like 1-5?). If it is actually a special node, then it yields a lot more (but won't exceed the current iron item counter).

The gatherer's skill affects whether he can gather from a given node - if he can't gather from a mithril node he can't determine if it's a lode node. It also affects the speed of the gathering operations - does it affect anything else?

Goblin Squad Member

@Urman

I think we will have to wait to see what they reveal.

With the proposed system, the finder's skill lvl basically sets the max potential lvl of the extractable resource. It can not be transferred and you can't extract above your skill lvl. Therefore, the potential could be lost from that node if "Miner 29er" finds it before "Miner 49er". The potential pool is still there though to be discovered and extracted later.

Do you see it like that too?


Hardin Steele wrote:
The blog also mentions "bulk goods" as being different so as to not compete for the normal crafting supply. Hopefully this is changed, as "bulk goods" should still require the same skills and variety of skill sets needed for the individual crafted goods, except the crafted goods at the bulk level are for buildings, structures, settlement walls, etc...
The Goodfellow wrote:
As for skills, I would suspect that they use the same skills, after all chopping wood is chopping wood, weather you it in logs for use in buildings, or chopping it down to size for woodworking tools and weapons. So basically, you would have "LUMBER" as the bulk wood, and then "Wood Planks" or something for the crafting bit. When lumber gets harvested/gathered and taken to a mill for refining, I would assume that it is a choice as to what it gets turned into, crafting or Bulk.

I understand the urge here to link it with non-bulk harvesting/crafting, but the reasons for not doing so have already been stated by Goblinworks. Incidentally, the skills DON'T seem likely to be the same either, "bulk goods" are destined for Settlement and other Buildings which have their own group of skills: Construction skills, which AFAIK are distinct from the Crafting skills for character-level goods.


Stephen Cheney wrote:

We don't really want, "Hey! Guys! I FOUND MY FIRST MOTHER LODE! I'm so excited! Will you come out here and protect it while I put down the kit?" "Well, yeah... but it won't be you that gets to put down the kit; Bob has a much higher Miner skill. And since you're low level, you can't even really protect it. So, move along, kid, we'll take it from here."

Any kind of ability to grant access to the node would seem to result in an inevitable result of "Company/Settlement sends out players to serve as peons to look for gathering nodes and then inevitably be cut out of the find." Getting the gathering node is the payoff to lots of harvesting, so we'd like to avoid a situation where you're constantly getting cut out of the process by your friends.

I honestly don't think the approach you're describing is needed or optimal... Similar issues between 'top rank' characters and 'lower rank' characters are replicated countless times thru-out this game, yet there are other mechanisms to address the issue, largely thru stratifying the space for competition.

As already described by the Blog, skill-level determines which nodes you can discover and work on. There will almost always be many more low-level characters than high-level characters, and consequently there will need to be more low-level Harvest Nodes than high-level. The low-level characters simply can't work on higher-level Nodes (e.g. Adamantine). The high-level characters COULD work on low-level nodes, and they could "dry up" the Hex's resources faster with their higher skill, but doing so just isn't really a good use of their time, they're just being an even more efficient harvester of lower-grade mass-market resources, rather than spending their time extracting what they 'exclusively' (or more exclusively) can apply their higher-level skill to.

So it seems baffling for some group to routinely prevent a lower-level harvester from tapping the Node they discovered, in order to wait for a high level harvester to drop what they are doing (don't they already have harvesting to do?) and come to the site and harvest the lower-grade mass-market resource... instead of seeking out high-grade resources (the issue of many more low-rank harvesters compared to high-rank harvesters also creates a practical impediment to low-rank harvesters being put out of business). A good organized harvesting strategy would seem to be roaming the wilderness in a relatively large group, and being able to "split off" a small group to harvest whatever Nodes you come across, the high-level harvester continuing until they find high-level Nodes, but meanwhile the group is productive because they aren't wasting/ignoring any nodes. It simply is to any group's advantage to have all their members working productively up to their capacity, so having hi-level harvesters NOT work on hi-level gear, but displace low-level harvesters isn't really any sort of gain in the bigger picture.

Now of course there could be "some situations" where it makes sense to put THE highest ranking harvester on a lesser Node (e.g. in the middle of a war, with urgent need for max resources in shortest time... or with tight manpower constraints, where one small group being able to harvest a larger region of Hexes saves labor...), but as an issue of over-all game balance and structure it just doesn't seem like this sort of "solution" is needed.

Stephen Cheney wrote:

Honestly... nobody actually likes those terms in that arrangement, and I mostly just insist on keeping them consistent so we understand what we're talking about. So... crowdforge us some new terms! :)

Qualifications:

Must be immediately clear what's going on just based on the name (i.e., no really obscure words).
Must make sense in the context of a(n) X Tool, X Kit, and X Node.

Following up on that X Tool/Kit aspect, AFAIK both of the types of nodes will be the result of the same activity (one is just a "critical hit" so to speak) and will use the same skill... So the Tool should be the same, and same for the Kit. Thus why I said the "Bonanza" version should just be a special quality of the same type of Node, otherwise "belonging" to the same "category" of Node, and able to be referenced as part of the general category... Since AFAIK there is nothing similar to confuse it with, they could end up being referenced as "Gathering Node"->"Bonanza Node" (as sub-type of Gathering Node without overtly repeating the phrase "Gathering").

I think "Gathering" is a good name for this scale of activity (both normal and 'bonanza' Nodes), and could apply to the Tool/Kit/generic Node name. Harvesting may be appropriate for a subtype of Outpost, e.g. for Agriculture like Straw, Grain, etc, along with Milling, Quarrying, etc.

For the "Bonanza" signifier of Gathering Nodes, besides "Bonanza Node" itself:
Windfall Node, Critical Node (as in Critical Hit), Motherlode, Lucky Strike, Fortune Node, [Nature's] Bounty Node, Miracle Node, Blessed Node...?

Goblin Squad Member

I think the term 'foraging' as a replacement for 'harvesting' is much more evocative of the behavior described. It doesn't quite work when discussing resources like metal or stone, but I think it's close enough overall. Then, replacing 'gathering' with 'harvesting' creates an intuitive, to me, pair. 'Foraging' and 'harvesting' contrast nicely and aren't likely to be confused with other jargon in the game (unless food is a thing our characters will actually have to manage, but that's unlikely).

The concern about newbies not getting to deploy the harvesting kit is, I think, misplaced. First, the novelty of pushing the big red button on the magic harvesting machine isn't, I suspect, going to be a lasting draw. Furthermore, while this blog only indicates the speed of harvesting is dependant on character skill, the blog it updates indicates the quality of the resources harvested is also potentially limited by character skill. Most folks, newbie or not, will want to maximize the returns on their investment of time and would likely be more than willing to allow someone else to oversee the actual harvesting.

Drawing on some personal experience, when I played EVE, I spent a significant portion of time exploring (mostly looking for advantageous wormhole routes). While I wasn't actively collecting direct resources with this activity (more like resource potential), it was sort of analogous to foraging in that it involved scouring an area for valuables (of a sort) and reporting my findings back to my corp mates so we could collectively take action. In this 'profession', I was more than happy to hand-off my discoveries of nodes that would require a more serious undertaking to harvest the available resources, often with the agreement of a small finder's fee, but usually just to help line the coffers of my corporation, which was then better able to supply me with new toys.

I still like the idea of a harvesting node only being 'known' to the character that discovers it until they point it out to others within a close proximity. This still gives the discoverer leverage to negotiate while not limiting the potential gains. In fact, the system as described either discourages specialization of skills (because you'll want to spread them among all the resources you might encounter) or discourages harvesting resources a character isn't specialized in (which seems like an arbitrary damper on player behavior and enjoyment).

Goblin Squad Member

Maybe a mentor & assistant system could be worked out. While it's possible for the finder to work a node in whatever capacity they're able, they'd get more out of working with someone else. The lower-skilled collector benefits from the mentor's greater knowledge, and the higher-skilled collector benefits from having an assistant who can handle the less complex or sensitive tasks. Both get credit towards skill-completion deeds (formerly 'merit badges') when applicable, and the production of the node is greater than what either of them could have produced alone. By making these teams greater than the sum of their parts, settlements & companies will want to advance their apprentices rather than cutting them out, since the more competent collectors they have, the more quickly and frequently they can form these teams.

There could even be skill-completion deeds which require working X number of jobs with an apprentice, adding extra incentive for the masters to include rather than ignore the padawans. Besides the advantage in promoting interaction, such a deed requirement also adds verisimilitude. Even with real-world skills there are often points at which, in order to continue learning, one must teach.


'Gathering'/'Harvesting' (per Blog terms) are the results of the same activity using the same skill, the only difference being the richness of the node. i don't see why to have two verbs for the same activity/skill.

I do like 'Forage' although it has problems with non-plant based resource extraction...
"Gather" has an easy association with "Hunter/Gatherer" while also sufficing for minerals, etc.
I think Gather may end up being the best generic name, along with "Resource Node" as the general category,
but each Resource type can be smoothly referenced with an appropriate "unique" Skill/Kit/Verb,
so "Gather" will not need to be repeated ad nauseum when playing/discussing the game,
each specific Gathering Skill can have it's own appropriate terminology without confusing the underlying universal mechanic.

Goblin Squad Member

I don't think it is the same activity. In the one you are swinging a pick/axe/whatever; in the other you are setting up a station of NPC collectors. I think it helps to facilitate ease of talking about the latter to give it a unique name. We don't want to call them "gathering" and "gathering with a kit", after all.

I could see the current 'gathering' simply being referred to as "kitting" (even though that already means something completely unrelated to gathering resources with a kit). To accompany this verbage, "X kit, X kitting node". Such as 'ore kitting node', 'wood kit', etc.

"Man, you wouldn't believe the amount of kitting we did yesterday! Got three kitting nodes like it was nothing!"

I dunno, it's an idea. Now the word "kitting" has been repeated too many times in my head and sounds weird. :P

Goblin Squad Member

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Urman wrote:
Stephen Cheney wrote:
So... crowdforge us some new terms! :)
Thread specifically for crowdforging harvesting terms here.

You and I may try to discuss nomenclature over there and mechanics over here, but as you can see in both threads, some are apparently unable to resist mixing the chocolate & peanut butter.


Blog wrote:

"When you find a harvest node, your ranks in the related Profession skill determine if you can access it at all. For example, you only need one rank in Miner to harvest iron, but you need fourteen ranks to harvest adamantine. The speed at which you harvest the resource is based on your skill total; you won't ever spend more than a few seconds per item at a harvest node, but reducing that time might still be a big help if you're worried about attacks."

"Gathering nodes are... something you find in the course of harvesting. Once you've activated the gathering kit, all bets are off. The speed of the gathering operation is pegged to your own Profession rating, but the output goes into a nearby storage object."

I.e. the difference is speed and the storage object to handle the increased quantity.

I seriously don't think they are creating separate skills that you have to train separately in order to handle when some Nodes turn out to be "gushers", so it will be the exact same trained Profession skill determining both. To create two different terminologies to cover the verb and tool or kit for "gusher" and "non-gusher" Nodes just seems an un-necessary burden for understanding what will be an enormously complicated game anyways, there just isn't enough reason to justify a different verb when some adjective/modifier/kit vs. tool can convey all that is needed.

Goblin Squad Member

Shane Gifford wrote:
I like the "level of the kit, not player skill level" idea.

This idea would eliminate incentive to train in gathering.

Goblin Squad Member

Maybe it's just me, but the developers seem to be spending an awful lot of time crafting a system that rewards ganking other players far more than exploration and adventure. This seems a bit odd when the basis of Pathfinder has always been "players v. Environment" rather than fostering intra-party squabbles. Granted, the move to MMO seems to require a degree of PVP, but that seems to be the emphasis here. The last RPG that I recall doing this was Ultima Online, and they tanked harder than that "teach a goblin to read" program I tried to set up.

And I don't think I fall into the "carebear" set - it's just that some of us have jobs and can't sit online for 47 straight hours leveling up to the point we won't be immediately assassinated on our first ore run.

Goblin Squad Member

So the use case I've arrived at has a settlement surrounded by resource hexes. Prospecting is time consuming and there are only so many highly skilled gatherers available to the settlement but many basic gatherers who have focused on combat skills. The skilled gatherers can survey faster, and that should result in increased productivity in this process but they are too few to do it all. The settlement has to decide whether to have everyone out prospecting or only the few. This means that they have to choose between attracting low skilled players who will be afforded opportunity or limiting access to skilled prospectors whose return will be more efficient. That will be a challenge for a settlement's leadership to balance. So when a prospector finds a rich resource node he notifies the settlement which then contracts guards for the site. The guards arrive with the right kit and the prospector sets it up, the resource then appearing at the storage site, ideally the nearest appropriate holding, but probably the nearest holding with a storage facility, which would necessitate transport (caravan) to wherever that resource can be worked.

We do not yet know, from what I have read, whether the prospector can move on to prospect more, leaving the guard detail at the rich node, but that would be my guess because it would increase the incentives for skilling up prospecting in the first place. Since experience does not accrue from the specific act of prospecting, but instead from time elapsed, the lowbies should be willing to perform as guards once a rich node is being harvested while the skilled prospector moves on to keep finding nodes.

Does this use-case seem accurate and complete?

Goblin Squad Member

2 people marked this as a favorite.
Cloakofwinter wrote:
... some of us have jobs and can't sit online for 47 straight hours leveling up to the point we won't be immediately assassinated on our first ore run.

You seem to be forgetting that it isn't how much time you spend actively racking up experience but time elapsed that 'levels' your character. You do not have to be grinding experience. The game is player-life friendly.

Goblin Squad Member

We're not sure if the gatherer has to stay "on site"? I think there would be CCs that specialize in gathering/collecting and Outposting possibly? When volume of demand increases then you'll see such specialists at work in ernest I can imagine! Then supplement with other players dabbling as they also guard/patrol/escort during down-times maybe?

Goblin Squad Member

Being wrote:
The settlement has to decide whether to have everyone out prospecting or only the few. This means that they have to choose between attracting low skilled players who will be afforded opportunity or limiting access to skilled prospectors whose return will be more efficient. That will be a challenge for a settlement's leadership to balance.

I don't see why not having everyone with time available out gathering would be good for the settlement. If we are discussing large-scale organized farming here then the more people involved the better. Once a motherlode node is found players can converge on it to defend and spread back out when it's been depleted. Mule alts to do the deposits to the bank and deliver fresh tools and kits.

Goblin Squad Member

Quandary wrote:


There will almost always be many more low-level characters than high-level characters, and consequently there will need to be more low-level Harvest Nodes than high-level. The low-level characters simply can't work on higher-level Nodes (e.g. Adamantine). The high-level characters COULD work on low-level nodes, and they could "dry up" the Hex's resources faster with their higher skill, but doing so just isn't really a good use of their time, they're just being an even more efficient harvester of lower-grade mass-market resources, rather than spending their time extracting what they 'exclusively' (or more exclusively) can apply their higher-level skill to.

Based on what we have seen in other player economies, this is pretty unsupported by facts. First, name an MMO that, within 1 year of opening, has fewer low-levels than high. Just thinking of Guild Wars 2, a fairly young MMO, and World of Warcraft, an older MMO, venturing through lower-level areas is much like walking through a ghost town.

Second, what resources end up being the most expensive? The basic ones. Anyone notice how in MMOs, copper ore ends up 10x more expensive than gold or mithral or whatever the high-level ore of the day is? Why is this? Because your second character will always be better off than your first, and savvy marketers know that you'll drop more gold on character number two.

I'm not sure there's a work around for an artificial economy. None have ever worked. All are stilted on some way, and that makes sense because you just don't have leveled areas in real economies.

Goblin Squad Member

Wurner wrote:
I don't see why not having everyone with time available out gathering would be good for the settlement.

It would be good for a settlement... but it might also be good for advanced prospectors to do the discovering and harvesting to improve the quality of the resource gathered. This makes it a decision point for a settlement or company attempting to control the hex. They would need to decide their strategy depending on their needs. Highly skilled prospectors get better results with greater efficiency, but are limited in how much they can do in the time they are in-game.

Goblin Squad Member

Being wrote:
Cloakofwinter wrote:
... some of us have jobs and can't sit online for 47 straight hours leveling up to the point we won't be immediately assassinated on our first ore run.
You seem to be forgetting that it isn't how much time you spend actively racking up experience but time elapsed that 'levels' your character. You do not have to be grinding experience. The game is player-life friendly.

I really hope that's the case. I haven't found that to be the cas in many PVP-heavy environments. Perhaps I just remember the days where you could spend hours gathering or gaining experience only to lose it all through (gear and goodies, not the Xp, unless you count EQ) a single attack or action.

Goblin Squad Member

Cloakofwinter wrote:


Based on what we have seen in other player economies, this is pretty unsupported by facts. First, name an MMO that, within 1 year of opening, has fewer low-levels than high. Just thinking of Guild Wars 2, a fairly young MMO, and World of Warcraft, an older MMO, venturing through lower-level areas is much like walking through a ghost town.

Second, what resources end up being the most expensive? The basic ones. Anyone notice how in MMOs, copper ore ends up 10x more expensive than gold or mithral or whatever the high-level ore of the day is? Why is this? Because your second character will always be better off than your first, and savvy marketers know that you'll drop more gold on character number two.

I'm not sure there's a work around for an artificial economy. None have ever worked. All are stilted on some way, and that makes sense because you just don't have leveled areas in real economies.

1: In PFO you can't grind to max level in a week. Actually, there is really no such thing as max level.

2: If you have to craft 1000 lvl 10 items before you are able to start on the lvl 20 tier, the demand for low level mats will be enormous. Since progression to the "next tier" in PFO is time based, the issue is circumvented.
Also, the best gear is not "buy once, keep forever". There is item loss and durability loss on death, thus there will always be demand for high quality items.

3: Although there will apparently be some sort of starter area, I don't think the majority of the world will be "leveled".

Goblin Squad Member

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Cloakofwinter wrote:

Maybe it's just me, but the developers seem to be spending an awful lot of time crafting a system that rewards ganking other players far more than exploration and adventure. This seems a bit odd when the basis of Pathfinder has always been "players v. Environment" rather than fostering intra-party squabbles. Granted, the move to MMO seems to require a degree of PVP, but that seems to be the emphasis here. The last RPG that I recall doing this was Ultima Online, and they tanked harder than that "teach a goblin to read" program I tried to set up.

And I don't think I fall into the "carebear" set - it's just that some of us have jobs and can't sit online for 47 straight hours leveling up to the point we won't be immediately assassinated on our first ore run.

1) The Four Pillars of PFO are:

  • Exploration
  • Adventure
  • Development
  • Domination

So using that as a framework to drill-down into the systems and features and how they are supposed to interact/integrate I think puts things into context?

2) At the core of all these Pillars is an Economic Engine that turns the world so to speak.

All this runs off the economic incentive of reward vs risk of attack by other players or find other means to minimize direct competition eg alliances and so forth.

3) So doing the above productive activities is balanced with the destructive activities at the higher levels of competition for finite resources. This in turn creates the backdrop and economic change in market forces for adventurers (eg player made contracts) or the cost for exploreres to go safe or go for the gamble and strike it big.

4) This is a good piece on where UO was doing great things but why eg WOW did more successful things: Do you want your game to do everything or do one thing very well? PFO is trying to broaden the ROLES that players can take on.

5) PvP is fun and actiony compared to slow resource grinding. So I think it's a suitable counter-balance of "coming on! Almost there... and I can clear out of dodge with my stash!".

6) In terms of exploration we know there's some skills like tracking and prospecting so we just have to learn more about these and how much gameplay can be yielded from them. In terms of adventure: Taking risks to gain stuff and finding dungeons or dodging roving enemy player parties or even spying/scouting on them these are already adventures (no doubt with one eye on suitable remuneration for expenses and risks undertaken! I'm also counting on PvE creatures posing very different sorts of threats to PvP players eg an Ogre imo would be the equivalent of a dozen players to be able to boss? So try to avoid upsetting it and hope the other players upset it first then attack them. :)

Goblin Squad Member

4 people marked this as a favorite.

With regard to the concern that more experienced gatherers would tell the less experienced gatherer to 'shove off, we'll take it from here', I really don't see that happening too often. I've been a miner for pretty much my entire EVE career (with forays into piracy, suicide ganking, production, PVP roaming, low, null, wormhole, pretty much everything) and can say with a certainty that the single most difficult thing to do when mining in dangerous space is to organize a guard. Nobody wants to do it, regardless of how fast or slow the gathering cycle is or whether the enemies are players or NPCs. Consequently, as a miner, I fly paranoid. My ships are as heavily tanked as I can make them, I'm always aligned, and with an eye on dscan or local. In 7 years I've never lost a mining ship.

The big thing is you want to have people want to guard your camp, regardless of how fast or efficiently you extract. Having a camp be self-operating is a huge step forward, the gatherer himself becomes a guard. In order to attract others to want to guard with you, there needs to be incentive. A portion of the haul, or an agreed upon payment, combined with guaranteed, worthwhile NPC assaults to get scrap from is a start. Make the camp escalations on par with regular monster escalations and maybe those who search for escalations to put down can be enticed to guard your camp with you. The guards need to want to be there because they will make more than just doing an escalation. They won't usually care about the material being extracted. They don't want to haul it. They just want the coin and scrap, let the gatherer worry about the logistics.

Limiting the ownership of the node to a single person severely hinders another style of gameplay. Prospecting is going to be a nominally solo activity. There will be people who just want to prospect. They don't care about camp nodes. They will rarely, if ever, work those themselves. Giving people the option to transfer claims to more organized groups who WANT to raise the camp and do the escalations would be an incredible boon. Everybody wins then.

The actual extraction at the camp should be based on the gatherer's skill and the quality of the kit used. Make some heinous kits that use undead, some evil kits that use slave labor, etc. There's a lot of possibilities there. Add in the mini-game, and make it so that the guards can play the mini-game as well, giving a diminishing returns bonus to the extraction, but more importantly it gives the guards something to do between escalation waves.

Goblin Squad Member

Sintaqx wrote:

The big thing is you want to have people want to guard your camp, regardless of how fast or efficiently you extract. ...

Add in the mini-game, and make it so that the guards can play the mini-game as well, giving a diminishing returns bonus to the extraction, but more importantly it gives the guards something to do between escalation waves.

Great post with some good points. I just had one idea, if there is a lack of things to do between waves, how about adding the ability to "dial up" the tempo; increase the mining speed but also the frequency and number of spawned mobs?

That way the more players that help, the faster it will go and the more mobs there will be to fight. That way you don't need to add an extra minigame. The players can adjust the rate so that the guards are kept busy the whole time and everyone wins (especially if the mobs drop coin and salvageable materials).

Goblin Squad Member

Bluddwolf wrote:
Isn't it possible to "discover" these node, but not harvest them, and just wait for them to disappear for the purpose of denying a near by settlement of having access to node close to its own borders?

I don't think the behavior you describe would result in the effect you desire.

If you let that major node go fallow, all you're doing is making it more likely that the next major node that someone else finds will be high quality (fewer impurities, greater productivity).

If your desire is to reduce the ability of a nearby Settlement to collect the resources in a particular hex, then your best course of action would be to farm the hell out of those resources in that hex.

Quote:
If you've been over-harvesting a resource in a hex, harvest nodes will be fewer for that resource, and may output more impure (heavier and less efficient) variants of the resource.

51 to 100 of 251 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | next > last >>
Community / Forums / Paizo / Licensed Products / Digital Games / Pathfinder Online / Goblinworks Blog: Dust Off the Moon and Let's Begin All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.