Mining!

[Ezie3205]

So I see a couple of issues with tradeskills and I will touch on them but my main focus here is mining.

The rate at which the higher skill ores drop is abysmal. Over the past two weeks I have been tracking attempts to ore and with Warp/Ghostmetal I am hovering around 60 per 1000 attempts, which takes me about 1.5 - 2 hours depending on how quickly I mash that button. Having a 6% dig rate is just painful. Outside of augs there is very little market for tradeskill items. On top of it, gathering the mats to skill up has become one hell of a chore with a diminished population. When there were 500+ on and elds was practically farmed 24 hours, mining could be a good way for new players to get some scratch. With the current population you basically have to do all the mining yourself.

Mining isn't fun, it isn't engaging and the output is so low that its barely worth it (and by barely I mean I have a sickness). I have been steadily raising my prices in the hopes that someone kind/foolish enough to take my money would come around. No such luck so far. At 70p, warp/ghostmetal is valuable to me and makes for about 2.1k per hour which is still higher than the average pre T6 character can make on their own. I haven't even gotten a nibble yet and at 100p each if I did get a seller, I will be splitting my time between mining and cash farming.

If you consider what you could be doing instead, value drops to practically nothing. Considering DN can come up with 1k+ per hour depending on how lucky you are with named and get xp and QPs for one of the more powerful buffs in the game it is hard for mining to look like a good way to make money. I am not a big tradeskill seller. Most of my efforts go to my guild or the occasional person looking for one or two augs. I didn't get into tradeskills to make money, mostly to be useful.

I don't think the skill up process should be dumbed down or made easier, unless were talking about auto-combine because fuck carpel tunnel. But something needs to be done about the ore drop rate.

I have maxed tailoring, brewing, fishing x3, mining x2 and now I am at about 212 in blacksmithing. Not counting the combines, mining does not seem to be on par compared to the other tradeskills.

For brewing I had to clear paw enough for 4 newport amulets. There was a few mobs that still gave terrible xp, some vendor garbage and the occasionally rare human skin mask. Giant blood and other mats still dropped of mildly valuable targets (giant island still blue to 65 and dropped cash)

For Tailoring there were a lot of locations that gave ok xp for a 65 along with money (scales from dragons, vendor trash, etc) and still seemed to drop at a more consistent rate.

Mining gets you rocks, 1.5p per stack and after skill ups you get no additional exp. I just feel like with the drop rate mining is lagging pretty behind.

Mining could use a boost. Up the dig rate, make it so you can also get gems. Hell, in UO they had a cool system where you could get special mining picks that doubled your ore rate but had a chance to summon a mean elemental that would drop a decent amount of ore when killed.

Make it so there is a very rare chance (even 1 in 1000) to drop a no drop turn in that can be used to get a 25 charge mining pick that had a 20% chance of getting the ore but like a 10% chance to create an elemental that had 2-5 ore on it when killed. That way if you wanted to take the risk you could.

Iron - silver could drop malachite through topaz. Dalium/mithril could drop fire opals, fire emeralds, and star rubies/regular rubies. Ghostmetal/Warpmetal could drop sapphire - star sapphires. Deepmetal could produce diamonds. It would at least give a little monetary boost to the effort that you can get when farming for other tradeskill materials.

 

[Gargate]

The gems thing has been suggested in the past, it would be neat and a good idea since there's no real money in tradeskills. A better ore production rate would definitely be a very welcome change again there's no real tradeskill market and nothing that would be unbalanced about it, that could be said about a lot of things tradeskill related though.

 

[AngryCow]

Another real benefit for adding gems to mining is that it would allow mining to have some synergy with jewel crafting. The last 50ish levels of jewel crafting require you to to farm gems from the 'rare gems' drop table. This table is off many many mobs in the game but is also large, making finding the specific gem(s) you need somewhat tedious to get in the quantities required. Playing the RNG game isn't all that fun, so having gems drop in specific mining areas paired with ores, you could help out two trades at once. Also ditto on the rate of ore being pretty ridiculous, a couple of points higher drop rate really wouldn't hurt.

 

[Ezie3205]

I wanted to toss an update/clarification out here. After writing this post Admin reached out to me for constructive debate and I appreciate it. It gave me a chance to focus my thoughts and also gave me insight into how they may be thinking about this situation.

This is a game of inches, I've said it before and I will beat that drum till my last breath. It is one of the things that I love most about the server but also one of the more frustrating parts. It has become more frustrating as my play time has been reduced due to IRL responsibilities. When I had 20+ hours a week to devote to this game in college it seemed like the game was right on target. With the 4-8 hours a week the progress is still there and still fun but I have to be very selective and focused to accomplish what I want. The harder you have to work for something the better the pay off.

That being said, there is a difference between hard and punishing. I do not think mining is "punishing" but its somewhere between difficult and punishing, maybe arduous?

A point brought up to me by Admin was that mining is no-risk for solid reward and at 6% (theoretical) drop rate its actually pretty good compared to many other drops in the game. In addition, I may not be correct about drop rates for hides which actually seems to be a little more than half the drop rate for ore. After thinking about this I would say that Mining is low to No-Risk. The miner I use is a retired friends rogue and his gear is pretty much old Adept gear upto lvl 30, one or two ok BoEs and I think a bracer and dagger from Cmal. I tossed a Writ on him so he didn't get bothered by Gemthanians while mining for Dalium/Mithril but with out it the few Gemthanians that will aggro on him have a small chance to spank him, the named will cream him (learned that the hard way). That is completely fixable, both with putting even a small amount of effort into their gear and with the Writ. Looking at Deepmetal that isn't really the case at all. I either have to clear Cmal3 or swear to Siv/Tar to be left alone and I hear that drop rate is low enough that you could spend 2 hours and barely get any ore. (I have no data on that, I haven't tried it yet this is just conjecture from other miners I have talked to.)

The second point is that they do not want to give out free money for what is essentially just an RNG time sink with no risk. This was one of the reasons the gem idea wouldn't work. If you can just sit in Sadri and collect gems you're risking nothing for free money. However, that is exactly what Fishing is. Low to No Risk for the potential for big rewards, especially after the map change. If you made a fisher specifically for fishing (like I did) you can go to the PoAir and get fish that sells for really good money, one of the 2 types of fish you get there is basically like pulling a Fire Emerald from the water. Even without swearing to Shiriti you can still fish for maps and be unmolested by your surroundings. The chance for pulling a map is very low and pulling and ED map even lower but you are still getting some money, like one or two fish used in baking/brewing and a chance to pull maps that you will need to complete your Vah. You can write off the time as character progress and money farming. Unless you are selling augs (because there isn't really a market for anything else) mining can not be considered either of those things.

Aside from Baking (which is pretty much for Halloween Quest and Jayla) gathering resources for other tradeskills comes with a secondary effect. You might get Xp, some money, or progression on your character, OR you might get resources from seeking any of the previous. This does obviously play into the Risk VS Reward scenario but in that same breath there is not a system of increase risk to increase yield for Mining. A new player in the course of leveling up and progressing is likely to run across these materials and seeing a market for them might sell them. You don't accidentally come across ore.

I do not think that moving the higher level ores up a little will really unbalance the game. It's not like Warp/Ghost metal armors and weapons are amazing or in demand (especially when compared to Adept gear). Deepmetal is nice for filling in a weak spot but it is hardly the item it used to be with the comparable BoEs you can get and the price at which you would have to sell it makes the effort kinda worthless. The Commander's Gilded Tunic is pretty comparable to a Deepmetal BP once leveled and you dont need to farm 15 Deepmetal for it and you can get it at 52 (and it doesn't weigh a ton).

I admit that leveling a tradeskill takes significantly more resources to complete than what your "usual" consumption is going to be once maxed but gathering even 80 every two hours might encourage more tradeskillers to make Augs more available to the public which would just be good for the server.

I am certainly not advocating doubling the mining rate, I wont complain if you do either. A small boost, even 2% would be significant enough to feel useful. Creating a means for players to increase their risk (via my enchanted mining pick idea or some other means) would be amazing. Creating some method to turn in ore for gems would help Jewelcrafters and create more demand for mining. More items with +Mining to increase success rate, something to make Mining feel like a more valuable use of time.

If the big pay off for tradeskilling is making your own augs then something needs to be added or amended to make up for the effort to farm the resources or the hand cramps from combines.

 

[AngryCow]

Another addendum from me about synergy. Tinkering is a new and growing tradeskill but it also requires a bit of mining for a number of it's combines. Currently there are 13 recipes that require ore, and an additional 10 if you count some crossover combines with blacksmithing. There are probably more recipes requiring ore in tinkering's future as well.

As for gem drops, I would say that they should scale. Mining iron shouldn't net you diamonds, it should net you malachite, which is close in price to what rock lumps already sell for. Also you wouldn't want to remove rock lumps either, as they do have a combine of their own to make, and gems being always the fail reward would stack cash pretty fast. It should go something like: roll for ore, if fail on ore roll for gem, if fail on gem grats rock lump, with at most a 50% chance for gem on fail roll on ore (probably much less than 50%). Really only warpmetal, ghostmetal, and deepmetal should have gem drops of any real value.

The drop rate for ghostmetal and warpmetal sucks but is manageable with effort. Deepmetal though, along with it's increased demand in tinkering and elsewhere, could use some TLC on that drop chance.