Roid Field Changes

[Gamedad]

This weekend some fields got a major adjustment.

Glenn, Fenris, and Varen's Girdle are confirmed to have these changes.

No longer will roids have a random chance of having a particular ore in them, based on level.

Some sectors, or all, will only spawn certain ores.

For example, I was told, and can confirm (at lest when i looked), that you can't find discordite in Glenn, any more.

Sounds like we have some real exploring to do.

Please feel free to post additional

info as it becomes available.

[seekeronos]

Observation about the recent roid field changes:

1. Cyrstalline asteroid field in BBW, approx. 40-50km NW from "Dragon's Watch" nav

-- a. This field is protected by a cluster of four L45 Manes, a roaming L57 Manes, and a L60 Manes.

-- b. The field has a very excessive Z-axis dispersion of roids (ranging from -15km down to +23km above the zero plane: this makes it very difficult to warp from roid to roid when the floor/ceilings of most zones is around -8km to +8km, AND you have to dodge some high-powered aggressive Manes.

-- c. The field has a fairly large X-Y axis dispersion, with a low density of roids. this really isn't problematic, and would actually be somewhat beneficial in playing "manes tag" (the ancient zen-like practice of mining one ore from a roid and warping to a roid out of reach of that mob that just started tracking you) IF the next roid wasn't way up or down the Z-axis.

-- d. Currently, most (not all) Manes and Bio-Rippers are conning "yellow" (non-aggro, will fire only if fired upon). While this is really awesome for mining, this is probably not an intended affect.

2. Default shapes:

-- a. Rings and Curvilinear Chains -- These seem to be a default for the newer and modified fields (especially Glenn and VG). These are nice in that everything is mostly on a level plane (unless the ring spawns vertically with roids high up and low down into the Z-axis warp boundaries)

-- b. Tight Clumps/Clouds -- Great for powermining/leveling, can be harsh on a weaker reactor.

-- c. Loose Moderately Dense Clusters -- Typical of the L4-L6 gasses near Inverness Nav 9, or the L6-L8 hydrocarbon/crystals spread near Warship Genesis and Path of Atonement in Aganju. Great leveling fodder, and enough room between roids to let the reactor charge up a bit between roids.

-- d. Loose, Sparse Clusters (the above mentioned cyrstal field in BBW is one example; others are the eastern fields in Freya and Nifleheim). These can be slightly annoying to mine in that there's often that z-axis issue and more time is spent warping to roids than mining.

3. Combat vs. Mining

-- a. Some miners may not really like the idea of having to spend more time fighting (or fleeing!) mobs than mining. The number of mobs vs. the power of mobs relative to the fields (and the value/rarity of the ores they contain) should be adjusted to the expected level of the player who will be mining there

-- b. By contrast, some "lower level" ores used in high level components (for example, Discordite and Raw Eyestone, or Apollonite and Raw Flawless Ruby) *should* be challenging to get too, as well as innately rare.

-- c. Some fields might have such an elite dispersion of coveted L8-L9 (and perhaps a few of weapons comps ores listed in 3b.) that they might warrant a full combat group or even a raid level excursion (such as "Byakhee's Field of Nightmares" in Lagarto near Pax Decima located eastin the grav well off the Deneb Path)

-- d. Explore/mining experience fodder fields: What Glenn and some other "low hanging fruit" places are about. Very little danger aside from the (dreadfully anticipated, but not yet implemented) pop-roids and occasional stray combat job mobs. Ores here should be very common, and intended to be vendor fodder.

4. Observations:

- The variety of shapes, densities, and distributions (fields of purely one type of ore class and level, to ranges of levels and types) may please different miners with different goals. (In other words, good job!)

- Excessive Z-Axis dispersion (above the warp-able ceiling or below the floor of the sector) IS NOT good, unless you are mining inside a grav well (in which case you'll be thrusting to all your roids anyway)

- Merlin's idea of banding the combat difficulty of ore guardians to the fields is a good start. Again though, especially for sub-level 100 hull miners... having six or more Manes that are 10-20 CL's higher than the miner looking to mine are going to be problematic at best.

Many miners prefer to solo, and most miners (especially sub-100 hulls) typically run their CLs a few to several levels behind their TL and EL. Really - we can be a bit of an anti-social lot (keeping knowledge of the best minefields to ourselves )

Therefore, I suggest working out a loose formula, perhaps along these lines:

* Raw Respawn timers on guardians: should be proportional to their combat level, i.e. L50 manes with a 360sec (10 minutes) respawn vs. L5 manes with 30sec. respawn... a L25 manes would be somewhere in between that at about 5 minutes.

* Respawn timer adjustment factors:

-- High value loot should increase the timer (Manes typically drop crappy loot, Bio-Rippers less so, and factioned mobs even less so)

-- Clusters of mob guardians: The more mobs in a given cluster of guardians, the longer their individual respawn timers should be. Miners really do not kill things that fast, with the possible exception of the PS)

* Cluster Mobs: These should vary only a little in range of combat levels, and the sum of their power should be reasonable to the field they guard (i.e. a single very powerful mob guarding about 1000km³ (that's 10km by 10km by 10km) of space, or two moderately powerful mobs, or a few "evenly-matched-to-expected-player" mobs.

-- Case 1: The hidden field of L6-L8 with more than a few L9 roids in Shepard guarded by one L50 bio ripper, and one/two L43 bio-extractors ... could be equivalent to one L60 or by three or four L35 mobs

-- Case 2: The number of mobs in the BBW field mentioned at the beginning of this post could well be served by the one roaming L60 Manes, OR three of the four L45's.

-- Bear in mind that a typical decently-equipped miner working either of these fields with her prospect level at 7 or 8 will likely have a CL of around 20-25.

Uber Mining (Forced Grouping/Raid Level mining)

-- Explore XP gained for non-miners grouped with miners is rather underwhelming at present, and it can be difficult to persuade a fighter or two to fly cover for you while you and/or another miner drill along: my PW got most of his explore XP from jobs and doing tours, with cover done either for guildies, or when it was mutually convenient (I was hunting for stackable loot near a mine field with active miners).

This should be addressed, if a goal is to make grouped XP mining a desirable thing to do.

For what I call "uber mining", this would be exclusive to massive, dense L8-L9 fields that are more than 35% L9 roids of one or two types filled with numerous dangerous mobs or named bosses a well-rounded full group of L150 miners, or a group 2-3 miners plus 3-4 healer/DPS players could survive in.

Byakhee's Field of Nightmares in Lagarto looked like a good start to that idea, but could use some toning down if applied to other future, high level mining content.

Edited May 31, 2010 by -Seeker-

[Lars[IS]]

This weekend some fields got a major adjustment.

Glenn, Fenris, and Varen's Girdle are confirmed to have these changes.

No longer will roids have a random chance of having a particular ore in them, based on level.

Some sectors, or all, will only spawn certain ores.

For example, I was told, and can confirm (at lest when i looked), that you can't find discordite in Glenn, any more.

Sounds like we have some real exploring to do.

Please feel free to post additional

info as it becomes available.

Hello,

I will make this a short reply since it is very late and if I don't go to bed very soon my better half will cut off you know what! :-(

As to your Discordite problem I just have 2 letters to say: VG

I will be posting a complete list of all the ores and which sectors they are in (Not just where they are in the sector) after I am about 50% done with the sectors which should be in about a month to 2. It is a big job to do all the sectors with the right ores & mobs in them as I am sure you can all figure out by now. Our pressing problem right now is keeping that damm lvl 2 gass out of the ore fields where it doesn't belong.

I know I am shaking things up a bit (well more then a bit), but change is good and I am sure when I am all done 90% of you will like what I have done or atleast I hope you guys like the changes. In the meen time and until things get all figured out if you can not find something feel free to ask and I will do my best to point you in the right direction. Now off to bed to work on my wife faction! <Evil grin>

Merlin

[garblesoup]

Thank you for your effort, it's appreciated. It's great to see mining getting some love.

[Gamedad]

My intention of this post was not to say where a specific ore might be, but to tell folks that there are changes to the roid fields, and more are to be expected. Also, I hope to learn of other sectors that change, so i can go explore them.

[enrgy]

Hopefully Arudine Plant will be brought back to it's live status, plenty of gas, mobs immune to plasma, constant aggro, the warder. There was some factioned ships flying around down there, maybe Earthcorp?

[Lars[IS]]

Hello,

Well we just might have the lvl 2 Hel gass problem figured out. In a nut shell it was a case of the left hand not know what was in the right hand! I will try to explain the best way I can. I put together a database of my own of all the ores in the game and put them into 5 areas: Asteroids, Crystals, Gasses, Glowing Rocks & Hydrocarbons. I did this according to different websites and what the icons showed as far as the type of ore it was. Then I put them or most of them into 2 sub groups so to split up the ores into the different sectors. Now the problem is that the websites and the server database do not have the ores listed quite the same, so when it was looking for one type of ore and found the wrong type according to it's own database it's would use a default ore which in this case just happen to be lvl 2 Hel gas.

Ok, I just spent the day redoing my database according to the server database and now have the correct ores typed & sub-typed. This was no small job, but got it done. I am now re-going thru the sectors I have already done on the dev server and got VG redone and all looks good now. I will start working on Glenn, Fenris, Carp & Freya tommorrow, but all the changes I am now doing will not show up until after David does a push from the dev server to the play server. So for now you will still be pulling lvl 2 Hel out of some of the ores. I am hopeing when David does do the server push that I will have Aragoth, Beta Hydri & Smugglers Run finished. Also, with each server push I will post what I call my Ore list which will list which ores are in which sector, but will not list just where in that sector they are. Don't want to spoil all the fun of hide & seek! :-)

Merlin

[bondct]

/me hands wings and a halo to Mr Merlin (oh and also a new set of eyes)...

great job... you must be totally wiped after going through the db line by line... but for all us miners out there... thank you!

[Gamedad]

Awesome job!

/cheer

[Lars[IS]]

Hello,

Just a quick update. Ok, I am now done with VG, Glenn, Fenris & Carpenter! I am starting on Freya now and after done with that sector will be all caught up and can start on new sectors. Now remember, you will not see any of these changes until David does the push to the play server.

TTYL :-)

Merlin

[Lars[IS]]

Hello,

Ok, time for my nightly update. I finished sectors Freya, BBW & Jotunheim tonight. So the sector finished are:

VG, Glenn, Fenris, Carpenter, Freya, BBW & Jot.

I spent a bit of time on Jot and I think you all will like it. There is 2 nice hidden lvl 9 fields there and I put 3 large rings of Asteroids around the center planet that blends in with the rings that are there now. Tien showed me how to throw big rocks at players so I think I will spend the next hour before crashing running around in my dev toon and throwing rocks at players! Hey, us dev's have to have some fun don't we! TTYL :-)

Merlin

[Lars[IS]]

Hello,

Ok, it is time for my nightly player update as to what I got done today. I finished sectors VT, Odin Rex & Shepard today. So that brings the total sectors done to 10. They are:

VG, Glenn, Fenris, Carpenter, Freya, BBW, Jotunheim, VT, Odin Rex & Shepard

I do want to keep all of you updated as much as I can as to how the ore fields are coming along. I feel it is importain to stay in touch with each other as after all it is all our game right? I am hopeing to be finish with Beta Hydri, Aragoth & Smugglers Run by the end of the weekend. I have 10 more sectors to do and then will either start on the Terran or Jen sectors next week after I touch basis with the team leaders. I will be leaving the Progen sectors for last since Mr By is still doing his missions and I want to wait for him to finish before invading his space. I have been having fun doing the ore fields and I have been trying to make each sector different from the one before. An example of this is Jot. Without letting the cat out of the bag I did something to Jot alittle different and want to see how you all respond to the change. I am trying to make each sector a good place to mine with new places to find and make the game interesting for those of you that might be stuck on auto-pilot. Also, one of my plans is that once all the sectors are done, lets say once a month or 2 is to move some of the fields around to make things interesting again. Ofcourse the main fields will stay put, but you never know that field you know so well may just get sucked into a wormhole and come out on the other side of the sector! <Evil Grin> lol TTYL :-)

Merlin

[Choco]

I for one cant wait for these changes to get pushed to play server, mining was like a drug addiction on Live lol. One question I have for Merlin though: what is the status on getting ruined hulks back up to Live standards? They were always like flipping a coin and I cant tell you how many times I almost threw my keyboard out the window when they blew up with lvl 9 goodies in em So far it seems you are really doing a bang up job Merlin and I tip my hat to you. On a sort of related note, do I dare mention AA's...

[Lars[IS]]

I for one cant wait for these changes to get pushed to play server, mining was like a drug addiction on Live lol. One question I have for Merlin though: what is the status on getting ruined hulks back up to Live standards? They were always like flipping a coin and I cant tell you how many times I almost threw my keyboard out the window when they blew up with lvl 9 goodies in em So far it seems you are really doing a bang up job Merlin and I tip my hat to you. On a sort of related note, do I dare mention AA's...

Hello,

At the moment there is no way to put anything in the hulks (David needs to program the tool to do it). Ok, I have to ask, what is AA? TTYL :-)

Merlin

[Terrell [BT]]

Hello,

At the moment there is no way to put anything in the hulks (David needs to program the tool to do it). Ok, I have to ask, what is AA? TTYL :-)

Merlin

AA are ancient artifacts. Extremely rare items to be used as ship equipment.

[Lars[IS]]

AA are ancient artifacts. Extremely rare items to be used as ship equipment.

Hello,

Oh ok, I remember those now. I know they will be going back into the game at some point, but not anytime soon. I think the V'rix need to be put in first if I rember right, but could be wrong. TTYL :-)

Merlin

[Choco]

I always thought that the stuff inside hulks was randomly generated just like normal roids. Ah well, keep up the great work!

[Lars[IS]]

I always thought that the stuff inside hulks was randomly generated just like normal roids. Ah well, keep up the great work!

Hello,

Well in a way it is, but it would come off a list. You see for each field I do I put in an ore list of minerals for the server to use. So you could say it is a controled random! The way it will work for hulks is to give it a certin % chance that it will put something into a hulk other than that exciding debree. What I would like to see is that it pulls from the whole item database and it would depend on the hulk lvl. Lets say it is a lvl 5 hulk and the % was say 5%, there would be a 5% chance of being any lvl 5 device, weapon, shield, reactor, engine in the game. I know there has also been talk about making it race depend it, but I like the idea of using all the items in the game. TTYL :-)

Merlin

[Terrell [BT]]

Hello,

Well in a way it is, but it would come off a list. You see for each field I do I put in an ore list of minerals for the server to use. So you could say it is a controled random! The way it will work for hulks is to give it a certin % chance that it will put something into a hulk other than that exciding debree. What I would like to see is that it pulls from the whole item database and it would depend on the hulk lvl. Lets say it is a lvl 5 hulk and the % was say 5%, there would be a 5% chance of being any lvl 5 device, weapon, shield, reactor, engine in the game. I know there has also been talk about making it race depend it, but I like the idea of using all the items in the game. TTYL :-)

Merlin

Love that idea. Hulks should tend ot have debris and sometimes ores in them. Adding the occaisional piece of equipment is great. Can there also be some things that only appear in Hulks?

Of course those items that are intended to be fairly rare would have to be adjusted, so they wouldnt' show up in hulks often compared to items of similar level.

Any possibility of a few well hidden "graveyards of ships" where hulks are more common, but they're either better guarded, or more out of the way?

[Lars[IS]]

Love that idea. Hulks should tend ot have debris and sometimes ores in them. Adding the occaisional piece of equipment is great. Can there also be some things that only appear in Hulks?

Of course those items that are intended to be fairly rare would have to be adjusted, so they wouldnt' show up in hulks often compared to items of similar level.

Any possibility of a few well hidden "graveyards of ships" where hulks are more common, but they're either better guarded, or more out of the way?

From what I remember you only got the prototype items out of ores/hulks. Not sure about the ores in hulks but debree was the most common item in a hulk.

Each item can be given a % value just like the loot drops and it should be possible to say make a lvl 4 Briton eng at 25% and say a Cygnes express eng at 1%

As to the graveyard idea my lips are sealed! Lets just say there will be very lucky exployers out there! I want to make it worth while to do some exployering in the game once you have gotten all the navs. One idea I am toying with is to have so called graveyards that once found and pulled they are gone. Then other graveyards will pop up from time to time. Kind of like an Easter Egg hunt so to speak. TTYL :-)

Merlin

[Lars[IS]]

Hello,

Ok all you lucky players it is time for another installment of "What did Merlin do today"!

I got 3 more sectors finished and they are: Nifleheim Cloud, Slayton & Grissom Planet.

All is going well and Tienbau got some stuff fix that was messing up, so, now each field will have 3 lvl's of rocks/clouds in them. Each rock will have that lvl in which it is and 1 lvl lower. This applys to all the fields except for the fields that are classified as lvl 9 which for some reason drop 2 lvl's below, but I am happy with that. I did have to go back thru all the sectors and add in lvl 6 stuff to them, but it wasn't that big of a deal.

Anyway, I think I will log on the play server and throw yellow Asteroids at the players before I go to bed. TTYL :-)

Merlin