Ryzom

This game has needed a harvester overhaul since I first saw it in beta 3. Despite that the role of a harvester has always really appealed to me since I like to be an explorer in games and usually get penalized in MMOs because its less time doing the "exp grind".

Things that don't work:

• Turning harvesting into a camping-game to get decent materials for crafters. Sitting at one spot for hours waiting for the moment when what you actually need/want becomes available.
• Gentle/Harmful harvesting represent the different philosophies of Kami/Karavan.
• You practically have to tank as your alternate role in order to survive common harvesting explosions.
• Harvesting (missions) being equal to hunting for gaining fame/dapper.
• Harvesters and Hunters being able to supply Crafters to keep up (without crafters being forced to seek materials as well) leveling pace.
• Conflict of interest between being able to supply Crafters (finding materials needed and getting the most quanitity) versus improving crafting (staying with available sources and maximizing focus/pull for exp by getting 1 mat of best quality).
• Harvesters filling a niche role with their skills (redundant to quartered materials).

Things that do work:

• Being able to level
• Getting quality materials

So I've got a number of suggestions for an overhaul.

Do not turn Ryzom into another powergamer-campfest. First eliminate the hourly portion of "at the moment" sources. Do not turn this into a game of camping for the uber player. Casual players must have a chance that doesn't require them to sit at one spot for hours doing nothing to get that "uber" item. Change hour into day/night. Time/weather settings should also change what material is available, and never determine if something is available at all. The best materials should challenge a harvester's skill, not their patience.

In regards to the "tankHP" problem, reduce the frequency of explosions and damage for lower grade (basic/fine) materials. Keep it high for choice and higher, and set wrath of the kami for excellent or higher materials.

To fix the supply problem, change the base amount of materials harvesters pull out to be competitive. 4 material pulls from the start of learning harvesting. Realistically there is a quantity vs quality issue when gathering raw materials. Make Ryzom reflect this by having each quality upgrade reduce the amount of material you can get with a pull. Then increasing speed and time will compensate to keep the quantity of materials instead.

Gentle and Harmful should be very different styles of harvester. Make them totally seperate and remove the harmful dependency for gentle harvesting. Harmful is like strip mining, you should get more quantity of lower quality and more dangerously. Gentle should be safer at pulling quality materials, but getting a lower quantity. Kami and Karavan mission should be setup to reflect this and have appropriate rewards. Perhaps even more ways of impacting Kami/Karavan fame with it?

A good part of the conflict of interest with crafting and harvesting could be fixed by changing the way harvesting exp works. Now its going to suck because this should have been done before release, but it needs to be done anyways for the sake of the economy. Making harvesting exp partially dependent on the amount of materials pulled. If my above suggestion is followed, say divide the current exp by 4 and then give a multiplier on exp by number of materials pulled out.

Hunters are in large part redundant to harvesters, they already could pull a lot of excellent/supreme materials off of named mobs and the prime roots changes are going to make this a lot worse. Hunters are also defenders, where as harvesters are only material gatherers and becoming more inferior about it at the moment. Keep them competitive, and give Harvesters an additional role to fill as well. Essential in preventing and healing the goo perhaps? spying and sneaking wilderness survival skills? Harvesters need a seperate role or the need to be better than hunters at gathering materials will remain fierce.

As for missions, please make the mission materials sellable again. Local suppliers still list lots of them.. but we're unable to sell them. While hunters gather mission materials in loads at the same time as craftable/sellable materials. There also need to be more locations for mission materials than 1 spot per zone. Perhaps even a use for these unusual materials in unusual custom crafter plans?

Please consider giving Harvesting the overhaul in needed in beta but never got due to excessive fighter/mage tinkering. Without something like this I don't see a good long-term future for the harvesting profession or game economy.

hm.. well thought out and seems like a bunch of nice ideas. i like it except for the exp part.

i don't see anything wrong with how the exp is handled. you only get 1000 xp material pulled at your level. that is the base of all xp in the game. and the lower the material is pulled the less xp or higher the level the more the xp. as in when you gain a new quality mark you gain xp pretty good if you luck out and get the full quality. and the first couple of levels are quick but it evens out in the long run. plus for extra amounts you pull you only gain 100 xp per extra material you pull.

so i don't see how it should be changed...

If I pull out one material, I get 3k exp.

If I burn up all my focus and pull out 2 materials, I get 3k exp.

If I have a harvesting team to help, and pull out 3 materials. I get 2250 exp (due to care plans used).

Your 1k exp is fine. What I'm suggesting is that first exp get divided by say a factor of 4. So 250 exp for each material of that quality pulled. Then the new basis would be that by pulling the default 4 materials you'd still get 1k exp. Its an incentive not to stop at 1 material so you can power level faster.

If the material amounts pulled didn't change. Then say I would currently get 1500 exp for my one material pull right now. Then with pulling 2 materials I'd again get 3k exp. This puts the emphasis back on to really pulling a quantity of mats to supply harvesters rather than just throwing one's hands around in the dirt for a little bit at a time.

A lot of good ideas. I was really surprised they incrased the mats to 50 on the vendors so quickly. Materials seemed to be just starting to enter the economy. I thougth this was kinda hasty thing to do. No doubt it will make crafters happy, but it may cheapen most mats except choice and above up to 50. Not sure if this is good or bad.

For the record, lvl 152 harvester, lvl 60 offensive mage.

If anything harvesting needs an exp reduction, it is the fastest lvling skill (exept crafting, but that only if you have financial backing).

Also, harvesters are anything but not inferior to hunters. More like the complete opposite. Sure, hunters can find excellent/supreme mats on mobs - but only a very limited amount of variety. Each area as 2 named mobs...
A supreme mat which has a bonus on lightness and malus on damage isn't of much use - a harvested choice with the right boni is better there. Also, in order to get those mats you have to camp - *exactly* what you didn't liked for harvest mats. But for hunters thats ok, right?
Nevermind that one lvl 60 harvester can get supreme lvl 148 mats. In order to kill a lvl 150 boss you need a big party of lvl 150 chars.


I completely agree that harmful & gentle harvesting should be more different as they are now. Perhaps making harmful having a chance of decreasing the mat quality (aka having a chance of reducing a mat from choice to fine or basic when getting it with harmful). Also, there harvesting missions are not really very time-effective.

When dealing with supreme materials they're not THAT different. Besides, there no longer are ANY supreme harvester materials, let alone the quantities needed. Go down to the prime roots, try it.

Currently the only purpose of harvesting is to get materials, for hunters it was a side bonus. Not anymore.

Yes harvesting levels too fast. They didn't fix it before beta either so we have to live with it now. However its like fighters leveling 4x faster than currently.. but still not being able to defend against rampaging yubos. How much does level matter when you can't play your role? This isn't just a leveling game and there is more to it than levels.

I pull q148 mats.. but so what? Crafters right now aren't using over q100. I'd much rather have 2xq75... only I'd get essentially no exp for it. So I have to choose leveling the skill to be a more effective harvester OR playing the role I'm supposed to and trying to supply crafters. Isn't that a silly dilemma? why would someone support that?

shrike wrote:For the record, lvl 152 harvester, lvl 60 offensive mage.

If anything harvesting needs an exp reduction, it is the fastest lvling skill (exept crafting, but that only if you have financial backing).

Also, harvesters are anything but not inferior to hunters. More like the complete opposite. Sure, hunters can find excellent/supreme mats on mobs - but only a very limited amount of variety. Each area as 2 named mobs...
A supreme mat which has a bonus on lightness and malus on damage isn't of much use - a harvested choice with the right boni is better there. Also, in order to get those mats you have to camp - *exactly* what you didn't liked for harvest mats. But for hunters thats ok, right?
Nevermind that one lvl 60 harvester can get supreme lvl 148 mats. In order to kill a lvl 150 boss you need a big party of lvl 150 chars.


I completely agree that harmful & gentle harvesting should be more different as they are now. Perhaps making harmful having a chance of decreasing the mat quality (aka having a chance of reducing a mat from choice to fine or basic when getting it with harmful). Also, there harvesting missions are not really very time-effective.

lv 105 harvester .. 70 fighter ... 70 multiple crafter ...

i must admit that harvesting is once you know how easiest still to powerlevel, after i build my fighter skills to have some hit points there is issue with pulling out 233 ql materials BUT one thing is that WHAT THE hack one 100 lv harvester have to do with 233 ql materials??? that is problem as ONLY thing that really metter is ql of materials for experience and i'm 100% suporting this option to relate it to quantity of materials pulled and lower overall quality that you are geting out.

Harvesting have to be related about FINDING and Protecting sources from expiration, like in magic or fighting it have to split in more branches like

CARING split in
- longer mining time
- healing source health
- preventing explosions

PROSPECTING split on

- Item prospecting
-- Armour parts
-- weapon parts
-- .... etc

- Material prospecting
-- Amber prospecting
--- zun amber
--- hash amber
--- .... etc.

MININg split in

- Agresive branch ...
-- extraction
-- rate
-- quality

- Gentle branch ...
-- .... etc.


If there is steps of 10 levels in crafting AND in fighting skills then there have to be SAME steps in harvesting... lv 100 harvester have to supply materials for lv 100 crafter OR get much less materials for 120 lv crafting. as it is now lv 100 crafter can supply materials for lv 148 (cheer to math formula for round down) or little bit slower for 233 ql materials !!!

This quality steps ruin economy of game as any ql levels materials are all time disponible.

Some ideas to improve prime roots

in this my post is some related ideas how to make harvesting dinamic better..

i think that combining some ideas from this thread we can get one new and much better harvesting and that such a skill have to get priority over some fancy hairand tatoo makeup skill in developer time and resources ! !

NOTE: please, please FIX english translation of Quality Level in LEVEL and Qality word keep using ONLY for basic, fine, choice, excelent, supreme etc... there is so much confusion to explain what ql and quality mean to people that is really easier to chancge to more comon terms that people will understand on fly

well thought out

I hope these ideas will be put to good use, as the current situation is far from optimal.
At the current state it needs more than one harvester to support one crafter in a decent manner and keep him on par with the leveling speed of Melees/Mages which need his equipment.

on a sidenote:

please change the resource tracking and prospecting. If I use the Supreme Tracking I obviously have no interest in beeing sent of to the next choice spot. (which happens if there is no sup mat spot).
Just give us a note that there is no Material in the wanted quality available..

Same goes for the actual prospecting. If there is no fine/choice/excellent/supreme then jsut give us a note ... If I prospect for Supreme Mats im not really fund of choice spot opening up. If there is only choice, tell me in the sys window, I can always go for it by prospecting for lower quality mats.

THis was not so much of an issue before, but the new "size" of higher Quality Spots (namely supreme) makes it extremely hard to find them.

Example: I prospected for Supreme Quality yesterday on a known Fibre spot.
I did neither move my charecter in any direction, nor turn in any.
from 5 supreme prospectings I got 3 Excellent spots and 2 supreme. Prospecting was done without angle and range, knowing where the Mat actually is.

I see lots of new harvesting threads pop-up, but not a lot of response to this one.

On the skill split, yes something is up there. Forage splits at level 50 into different areas, but now we're informed that we're not supposed to be able to access those areas till level 200+ or something.

EXCUSE ME? Fight, Magic, Craft all split and they're expected to be able to use their skill split. Harvesters either need decent access to Lake, Forest, Desert, Roots to use their split skill or the tree needs redesigning. I'm seeing people with 200 in jungle forage, yet they still can't supply crafters worth squat and get less SP because they can't diverge. Is Harvesting really supposed to be a skill where we're priviledged to get to 250 before everyone else and then sit there and be worthless for it?

If you don't want people harvesting in prime roots at lower levels.. why do we have the ability at level 30 to harvest supreme materials? Perhaps it should be moved up to level 60, 90, 120, etc?

Personally I think tracking works okay. But resources are scattered too randomly and new to go back to the old system where they were deliberately placed. Everybody has to learn the names anyways. There also need to be a lot more resource locations. Too much empty ground.

I do agree that prospecting should give better feedback. Especially when it doesn't give us what we were prospecting for (choice, amber, etc).

Another overhaul discussion that has come up a number of times talking to other foragers or crafters.

Return the foraging mats back to the types they were. Shells for Tryker, Amber for Zorai, etc. The choice race mats no longer make any sense, and it is breaking down the story and realism of the world. Crafters have to learn between all the different quartered mats, etc what does what anyways. The dumbing down of materials didn't make the game much easier, just dumber.

It would restore a lot of sense to the different craft item material prospections vs purpose prospections. It restricts some of the previously essential material extraction specialties (assuming they become useful again at some point), making fewer necessary and foraging plans desired. Like the changes to Magic SP in focus beta, I really don't think this change was a good idea to begin with and should be reverted back to what it was.