Mining Skill and Obelisk Islands

Ifreann

Hello,

Since  I quit PK on the games, my head full of new ideas nowadays. (: I just wanted to share one of them with you here.

I think mining ability is only good for novices in the game. Actually we can make it useful for all users and users may gather comms with this ability. We can also increase rate of PK in the game. So I have a suggestion about that. We have obelisks islands which we visit once in a month. May be not?  Putting some underground mining areas on these islands will be awesome. Users will able to mine 3-4 certain mines from each obelisk islands.

Eg:

1   Lithi Island              : isan+ruby+emerald

2   Argain                    : sinn+diamond+sapphire

3   Auonab Island             : iron+steel+gemstone

4   Koakoa Island             : gold+platinum+obsidian

5   Ki'lathu Island           : silver+cuhpfehr+crystehl

6   Bodah Island              : coal+stone+quartz

Each mining (obelisk) islands will be always open to PK.  So mining won't be easy that much. There will be also fail and success rate of mining.  Of course there will be also a rate of mining comms. While you can mine an isan with high rate, mining a quartz will be a quite low rate. There will be refinery at each islands. Players will able to refine all unrefined comms they have mined by using only one blueshard.

I believe this will bring more action to game.

Mining can also be a general skill but since we have many general skills, didn't want to mention about it.

Dreacor

That, sir, is a wonderful idea! That encourages people to learn the skill to travel to the obelisk islands. Also, the use of shards there, nice thinking. And what I always love: Open PK. Would it be like you refine one commodity per one shard?

I believe the mining spots should have some kind of cooldowns. Let's say that you can mine 5 gold from one spot, and it will regenerate 1 gold in X amount of time. The cooldown could be quite slow, so there wouldn't be inflation of commodities.

Ifreann

Dreacor said:

That, sir, is a wonderful idea! That encourages people to learn the skill to travel to the obelisk islands. Also, the use of shards there, nice thinking. And what I always love: Open PK. Would it be like you refine one commodity per one shard?

I believe the mining spots should have some kind of cooldowns. Let's say that you can mine 5 gold from one spot, and it will regenerate 1 gold in X amount of time. The cooldown could be quite slow, so there wouldn't be inflation of commodities.

Yeah cooldown per a mine room can also be good. It will be also hard to mining. I mean there's a fail rate at mining. (You won't able to get comms in every mining attempts) Fail rate +  cooldown will make it more reasonable. 1 shard in every 5 comms or 10 comms will be good, since refinery will work with shard power.

Jules

Instead of making the island perpetual open/free PK, what about making it sort of like monoliths?  I say that because some of those islands are very important hunting destinations, and there are also a couple of quests people like to do.  Imperian is really really good about providing lots and lots of opportunities for us to PK on our own terms, and part of what I like about that is that other than cities, it's not so much that entire arease are perpetual no-go zones, but there are shard falls, and caravans, which turn a given area into a PK zone for a period of time, and in many cases the whole game knows it.  So if you go there, you know you're game on, and you're much more likely to run into people because the entire game does see that there is a shard fall.  Even so, there are unattended shard falls, and those are sure nice, especially when you're a level 50 newbie.  Mining, depending on how it's done... would be even more like that.  Just go alone or in a small group when the game is super quiet and sneakily mine your comms, so maybe not that much conflict really.

Not having the islands be perpetual Open/Free PK areas also avoids the problem of "well, it's one of the best hunting areas in the game for what I need, and I think I can get in and out alive" - aaaaand, dead.  Yep, that guy was in an Open/Free PK area, but that death really is going to feel different than a shard fall.  There you were, in bashing mode, and you get jumped by someone who actually knows what they're doing and smooshes you.  That's okay once in awhile, for bounties and such it can be exciting, but it would get real old real quick unless you really really like being jumped.  And lets's face it, the person who is sitting around on an island waiting for some hapless person to just show up (much less try to do any mining) so they can kill them is exactly the kind of person who is probably going to be a real dick about things.  At least you don't lose XP in Imperian, but you were probably hunting for the corpses, which you will promptly drop scads of.

EDIT:  could also make the mechanics like the essence statues, although as Septus mentioned on our ring, "would people fight as hard if it happened more often"?  He still wanted more statues anyway... :P so who knows.  But, some kind of "the mines are open guys, come on out and kill each other" thing every so often could be neat.  But then, another problem might be that comms seem to actually matter.  Caravans sort of matter as well, and there have been some bad feelings about that when AM was so far ahead.  One of the reasons essence was so much fun to fight over is that it's almost (but not quite) completely worthless.  It really is sort of like fighting over a stick of gum, which is great.  If essence mattered more, it starts to make sense to do things like take turns (boring, but efficient), or, to just make the fight about winning absolutely no matter what.  And, people are going to be more pissy when they lose, so I don't know.  Also, the worldwide message should rumble or something, since demonic cities are very skin cancer conscious and their entire city is apparently indoors?  Are both cities indoors?  Anyway.   

Luthyr

Open/Free PK implies 1v1 which is practically dead in Imperian.  Professions and afflictions have been balanced around group fights.  I wouldn't hold my breath for this type of area.

Ifreann

Jules said:

Jules said:

Instead of making the island perpetual open/free PK, what about making it sort of like monoliths?  I say that because some of those islands are very important hunting destinations, and there are also a couple of quests people like to do.  Imperian is really really good about providing lots and lots of opportunities for us to PK on our own terms, and part of what I like about that is that other than cities, it's not so much that entire arease are perpetual no-go zones, but there are shard falls, and caravans, which turn a given area into a PK zone for a period of time, and in many cases the whole game knows it.  So if you go there, you know you're game on, and you're much more likely to run into people because the entire game does see that there is a shard fall.  Even so, there are unattended shard falls, and those are sure nice, especially when you're a level 50 newbie.  Mining, depending on how it's done... would be even more like that.  Just go alone or in a small group when the game is super quiet and sneakily mine your comms, so maybe not that much conflict really.

Not having the islands be perpetual Open/Free PK areas also avoids the problem of "well, it's one of the best hunting areas in the game for what I need, and I think I can get in and out alive" - aaaaand, dead.  Yep, that guy was in an Open/Free PK area, but that death really is going to feel different than a shard fall.  There you were, in bashing mode, and you get jumped by someone who actually knows what they're doing and smooshes you.  That's okay once in awhile, for bounties and such it can be exciting, but it would get real old real quick unless you really really like being jumped.  And lets's face it, the person who is sitting around on an island waiting for some hapless person to just show up on the island (much less try to do any mining) so they can kill them is exactly the kind of person who is probably going to be a real dick about things.  At least you don't lose XP in Imperian, but you were probably hunting for the corpses, which you will promptly drop scads of.

My point is not only for PK. Comms are important for many players on the game and mining will bring more realistic stuffs to the game. Many people are done with shardfalls and caravans at the moment. Cities made all researches. No one is participating in shardfalls-quartzfall and when I login to game, I always harvesting more than 100-150 shards, since shardfall hadn't any participants in whole time. People are only going one island for bashing (ebonmarrows). May be two but not others and I don't think that they very important hunting areas at the moment..  

However we will always need comms for many stuff. Besides we will need shards to refine all these comms.It's not something like shardfall or quartzfall that will decay by time. It will also give more action to shardfalls too. 

Jules

Yeah, I'm not for or against the main idea (although I think you're right that shard falls might be dying down somewhat).  I'm just not crazy about perpetual Open/Free PK areas.  I like the time-window model Imperian usually uses, which not only gets people who want to play to the right area at the right time, but actually seems to help them be nicer/better players (as they are reaving each other to death).  

Ifreann

Jules said:

Instead of making the island perpetual open/free PK, what about making it sort of like monoliths?    

Sorry I missed your point here, it's very reasonable.

Ultrix

I like the idea of opening up how refining can be done without requiring going through city trade, given what the base refining costs are currently. I do not know what the long term impact of that would be on the overall economy though, since I could see people just bulk refining in the off hours to avoid the pk aspect.  Maybe you could only refine special island-materials at the island-refinery? 

Mathiaus

My only take on it is that I hated failed mining/harvesting on Oblivion. Irked me more than flipboots.

Dreacor

Oblivion is a whole different game. And I love mining idea.

Ifreann

Well, it seems this thing may cut off city economics a little bit. I don't think that it will be much but still... I got good suggestions from Ristani about that. 

People can use both refeneries in island or cities for refine to materials. Island refinery will get shards, city refeneries will get golds from people."A tax associated on a per material basis that the city collects that's lesser than buying from the store in city refeneries. Makes for an interesting mix and balance. If you're short on gold, you could sacrifice some shards to refine, or you could help your city by using the refinery."

Ultrix

Ifreann said:

Well, it seems this thing may cut off city economics a little bit. I don't think that it will be much but still... I got good suggestions from Ristani about that. 

People can use both refeneries in island or cities for refine to materials. Island refinery will get shards, city refeneries will get golds from people."A tax associated on a per material basis that the city collects that's lesser than buying from the store in city refeneries. Makes for an interesting mix and balance. If you're short on gold, you could sacrifice some shards to refine, or you could help your city by using the refinery."

That's not entirely correct. It costs the city money to refine materials (i.e., the money is used up directly from the trade budget). The expectation is that after you refine the materials, you will purchase from the city, and that's how the city makes up the refining costs. Once you make refining materials available outside a city (and eliminate the gold cost for refining, because shards are -really really- easy to get), where is the incentive to refine and/or buy from a city at all?  It would just be cheaper to take the materials you mined from the island (or purchased from a towne or plundered from a caravan) and use shards to refine for the comms you want (or want to sell). 

The concern I have is that if you make this mechanic available for all types of refining, there are a handful of people that will do this in bulk and undercut/undersell the cities by selling in Caanae.  Maybe this is an effect we are okay with? I don't know.  But that is why I was suggesting that this new refinery mechanic be made only available to island-found materials so you would have to elect to enter into the "open pk" system for some benefit, rather than just going around and buying up raw materials in townes and then refining for the cost of a few shards in the off hours when no one else is around. 

Ifreann

Ultrix said:

Ifreann said:

Well, it seems this thing may cut off city economics a little bit. I don't think that it will be much but still... I got good suggestions from Ristani about that. 

People can use both refeneries in island or cities for refine to materials. Island refinery will get shards, city refeneries will get golds from people."A tax associated on a per material basis that the city collects that's lesser than buying from the store in city refeneries. Makes for an interesting mix and balance. If you're short on gold, you could sacrifice some shards to refine, or you could help your city by using the refinery."

That's not entirely correct. It costs the city money to refine materials (i.e., the money is used up directly from the trade budget). The expectation is that after you refine the materials, you will purchase from the city, and that's how the city makes up the refining costs. Once you make refining materials available outside a city (and eliminate the gold cost for refining, because shards are -really really- easy to get), where is the incentive to refine and/or buy from a city at all?  It would just be cheaper to take the materials you mined from the island (or purchased from a towne or plundered from a caravan) and use shards to refine for the comms you want (or want to sell).

Well, I don't have much knowledge about city refineries really. If it's like you told, it doesn't make sense. Yeah.  So ignore the suggestion.