Concept: Resource Quality and Value

[zdoofop]

Hello again everyone.
So, resource gathering. Obviously thumping gathers minerals, but one thing I liked about resource gathering in late Firefall, for all its flaws, was that you got minerals from thumping, biological components from npcs, and tech from salvaging. That makes sense, I can imagine we could also "loot" tech resources from npcs like tsi-hu, but the general idea remains.

Also on minerals: could we combine resources to create new resources? like if we had pizzazzium and infine, could we combine them to form pizzazzium infinionite? How about a different process that cnverts them into pizzazzium infinionate or pizzazzium infinionide? (this is just an example of names) Will there be different quality of minerals? Could e combine 2 different qualities of the same mineral to get a quality somewhere in between? For instance, if we had 50 Pizzazzium(240) and 100 Pizzazzium(80), could we combine them to get 150 Pizzazzium(160)? What about combining biological components? tech components? how would that work, what would it look like? So many questions and Ideas, do you guys have any?

 

[Aisman_]

I like the idea of gathering resources from the Tsi-Hu. I mean the have biomass and some others have alien tech on them. Maybe when a big monster is killed, you could gather the tech and biomass for further upgradability of your frame.

 

[Thorp]

iirc it was confirmed long ago that Em8er will not have mineral "quality" levels. Putting mineral qualities on the map will create the same environment in Firefall; people will build bots to alert them when the best quality is available and mine it dry within minutes then log out. Furthermore it made all the imperfect nodes sit around un-mined for hours because nobody wanted them. Nobody wants to mine sub-par quality minerals let alone log in to never find their desired quality for days/weeks/months.

For Em8er minerals should be a flat value just like it was in beta 1.5.
Azurite
Quartzite
Bismuth
Coralite

These minerals all had their own flat rate properties. When used in crafting they 100% predictably would increase damage, healing, reload speed, ect. If Em8er is to have fully customizable crafting it needs to absolutely avoid mineral quality and instead use output sliders. These sliders would increase/decrease mineral quantity costs and 100% give you exactly what you want without the math and extreme luck required to get the exact mineral quality you need to get exactly what you want.

Players need to have the capability of logging in on the fly and finding exactly what they want with a bit of searching. I'm not saying the lands need to be lucrative but I recall the frustration of wanting Coralite 1000 but never, ever, had a chance of getting it due to bot alerts and therefore my gear would always and ever be sub-par.

I am all for gathering bio-mass parts or whatever creativity comes around but do not make it quality restrictive.

 

[Markolis]

I can imagine a similiar resource collecting methods to what FF had - at least in part, for the 'late' beta version you had to gather a mixed bag of resources to make upgrades to battle frames/weapons/new thumpers/utility stuff (flares, tools etc.) et ectera - (my memory of this, is about 60 -70% so im hoping someone knows more than me - not difficult tbh!)
Grades of different resources also depended on activity/methods vs. difficulty level, eg. Thumping with small thumper (Scanned/hammered area), solo-ing trash mobs, mission rewards? - This Dropped (not sure of %) grey (real trashy/broken items), White (common/default mats for low quality uprades) and Green quality (+1 to quality level) and some times- Rare blues !! (Oooer! I hear you say) But they were the real quality start of much improved equipment upgrades! eg. Played 'Thunder bird' Engineer alot, and having an extra pod/bot (cannon) ability from blue upgrades, made life alot easier soloing small/medium thump mining.
** Another thing you had to remember was the larger the thumper used, the more tougher the encounter became - Sometimes, this was intentional as some resources only dropped from the Boss mobs that turned up !! --- those were so much fun. **
Gold (yellow) ? - Purple quality was a massive step up in quality - A real game changer!! These mats came from personal/ +3 ppl Medium thumper encounters - Large Thumper and usually took a Group+ to successfully get the 100%+bonus resources. Also you got them from Big Boss Mobs (Giant nautilus, Massive Bugs, Area encounters (Choosen Raids, Raids) - - - Then you started to craft upgrades that rivalled the power of Thors hammer (Well, almost! ) or sell for profits that Midas would sworn from envy (FF version of him ofc ).
TBH - I've only scratced the multi-faceted surface of what you could do with Resources...But lets just say ALOT !!

 

[zdoofop]

Putting mineral qualities on the map will create the same environment in Firefall; people will build bots to alert them when the best quality is available and mine it dry within minutes then log out

what if you didn't put the quality on the map? or if the quality was dependent on something other than what is available?

 

[Mahdi]

S3 night thumping by the melding wall for the win. Get that 990 copper in northern shores!

 

[Drakin5]

U jelly bro?

 

[zdoofop]

now imagine such a scan report, but without the cy-134. If you don't know the quality of the material until after it is mined especially if you want to craft omniframe/parts asap, you have to chance it the moment you see the mats you need, you don't know whether or not it's high quality or when it will pop up again. This will ensure that all mats are mined regardless of quality.

 

[zdoofop]

another way you could o it is that the ore has no quality, but depending on certain factors the refined metals have a certain quality.

 

[Pandagnome]

what if you didn't put the quality on the map? or if the quality was dependent on something other than what is available?

now imagine such a scan report, but without the cy-134. If you don't know the quality of the material until after it is mined especially if you want to craft omniframe/parts asap, you have to chance it the moment you see the mats you need, you don't know whether or not it's high quality or when it will pop up again. This will ensure that all mats are mined regardless of quality.

another way you could o it is that the ore has no quality, but depending on certain factors the refined metals have a certain quality.

Usually quality is determined by the area/location of difficulty and the bosses. What if this was random so that predicting such materials won't be just farming the same spot all the time to encourage the players to explore and locate things in the process.

So lets say we have no quality indicated for the resource on the map and we search for the materials using our scans. We know where to mine the specific resources. Would the analysis of the quality be known once we have completed the mining process and its analysis sent to the systems at hub center for you to refine and that information is received on your hud too?

Only then we know the quality, and sometimes could find a good spot but how long does the spot with the higher quality remain before the resource location changes again?

What causes the quality shift on the resources is it because the mining disruption followed by the collassal kaiju's deforming areas of the land, is it perhaps how the planet is and contents ebbs and flows under the surface since the planet is living and reconstructs and shifts for self preservation!

Players need to have the capability of logging in on the fly and finding exactly what they want with a bit of searching. I'm not saying the lands need to be lucrative but I recall the frustration of wanting Coralite 1000 but never, ever, had a chance of getting it due to bot alerts and therefore my gear would always and ever be sub-par.

This is something i got annoyed with too it becomes a race to find stuff and by the time some of us get there, just scraps! I am sure this won't be the case in Em8er and i hope everyone has an even footing to get the good resources as Thorp pointed out.

 

[Thorp]

now imagine such a scan report, but without the cy-134. If you don't know the quality of the material until after it is mined [...] This will ensure that all mats are mined regardless of quality.

Yes this will cause people to mine a location but what will stop people from mining a small sample to test it, learn it's junk and leave? Certainly you can require the players to mine X% before they can test the sample however at this point you're playing against a strong human emotion, frustration.

Humans hate, hate, hate, feeling like they wasted their time. Humans are easily frustrated about wasted time; if you want people to never show up to any event have them feel like they could be wasting their time. Humans want a guarantee and that's why certain video games, twitch streams, esports, fitness gyms, churches, are so popular. They all have at least a single something that their followers are nearly guaranteed to experience and will return for. ....What happened when FF resources had Quality numbers? People stopped thumping. Now hide the quality number; they are now exposed to discovering they wasted their time when the quality results return and are not guaranteed a beneficial outcome.

I found FF's scan hammer to be the "happy medium" between wasting time and not wasting time. Running around the terrain scanning for resources consumed time but it did not particularly feel like I was wasting time (there was some adventure and immersion). When my party found a node we mined it every time. We succeeded, made progress, were happy. And yes there were times we did not find the resource we wanted but we would mine the next best thing without a second thought because no matter what we mined it was always going to be the best quality, the only quality.

Rather than having resource quality to make nodes more delectable to mine, make them like they were in FF. FF nodes were of different sizes, mixtures and combinations of other minerals. Make it so finding a node with 100% Coralite a rarity whereas a node 20% Coralite, 10% Azurite, 70% dirt more common. At least then it's not a choice if the quality is worth mining, it becomes a choice of my invested time only.

 

[EvilKitten]

Just Say NO to resource quality.

 

[Mahdi]

Hard to say though. First thought is to have exactly what firefall was but then I double check wondering if it is only because of familiarity. I would like to see quality difference (not 1-1000 though) with terraforming and tech tiers. Have that rare pocket with a small quantity still show up on a low terraforming biome. Spreading players out in the world based on that alone is a good concept. Meaningful also to keep thumping going and not just mad dashes to terraforming. Incorporates more casuals without hindering the hardcore. That way you can still avoid the plain old color rating system based on terraforming levels or having to create that many more resources to match higher tech tiers. Will be much more on the programming side but worth it.

 

[Pandagnome]

Yes this will cause people to mine a location but what will stop people from mining a small sample to test it, learn it's junk and leave? Certainly you can require the players to mine X% before they can test the sample however at this point you're playing against a strong human emotion, frustration.

Oh yes time is precious!

we would mine the next best thing without a second thought because no matter what we mined it was always going to be the best quality, the only quality.

Even the best dirt \o/

Rather than having resource quality to make nodes more delectable to mine, make them like they were in FF. FF nodes were of different sizes, mixtures and combinations of other minerals. Make it so finding a node with 100% Coralite a rarity whereas a node 20% Coralite, 10% Azurite, 70% dirt more common. At least then it's not a choice if the quality is worth mining, it becomes a choice of my invested time only.

Hard to say though. First thought is to have exactly what firefall was but then I double check wondering if it is only because of familiarity. I would like to see quality difference (not 1-1000 though) with terraforming and tech tiers. Have that rare pocket with a small quantity still show up on a low terraforming biome. Spreading players out in the world based on that alone is a good concept. Meaningful also to keep thumping going and not just mad dashes to terraforming. Incorporates more casuals without hindering the hardcore. That way you can still avoid the plain old color rating system based on terraforming levels or having to create that many more resources to match higher tech tiers. Will be much more on the programming side but worth it.

Yes!

Just Say NO to resource quality.

YES TO CHROMA resouces!!!

 

[Zednel]

The 1-1000 colored resource system was the main part why I got hooked to FF.
Also the fact that every quality was useful:

1-499 was for leveling mass/power/cpu, 500-799 was for everyday crafting, 800+ for gear.

Also, having this system gives players in the late/end-game content a few things to do, since a simple gear item required multiple resources, and each resource affected some part of the completed gear, so getting the "best gear" was out of reach for almost everyone, since getting 4-5 different resources each with a perfect 1000 quality was near impossible. Even after playing a moderate 200 hours in the beta, the highest quality resource I found was ~870 aluminium near the melding wall in Antarctica.

Instead of getting the best X type weapon from crafting or from the Y raids Z boss, the limit was the sky. The specs of each crafted gear item/weapon was almost completely unique to you.

The thought, the idea of crafting a better gun by getting just a little bit better quality resource.... now that was addicting

 

[Wyntyr]

I believe 1-10 quality with 20 or so initial mats would be ok. I know there will be compounds per the Vision book...maybe those could be created by using the initial mats instead of mined (either no quality or quality based on mixed mats)?

 

[RaZoR]

I believe 1-10 quality with 20 or so initial mats would be ok. I know there will be compounds per the Vision book...maybe those could be created by using the initial mats instead of mined (either no quality or quality based on mixed mats)?

I agree with Wyntyr. The crux of the game is thumping for quality resouces. 1 - 100 quality would be ideal.
Mixing the same resource with different qualities gives a better quality. This will push the competition and eagerness to go out and thump. And to also mention what it does for the marketplace.
For me, it was one of the best times playing FF, when there was 1000 quality to chase, and sell your hard labour getting it.

 

[EvilKitten]

I wish to point out that really what we are talking about is not quality, but purity. There is no quality to aluminum in RL, it's aluminum. An aluminum atom is the same as any other aluminum atom sans isotopes.

I wholeheartedly feel we should have different purity levels in the game, with a 0-100% (though we would never actually see 100% in the ground)

100% purity would come through refining. Players could choose how pure they want their resources in the refining process. The purer the metal the more that is lost in the process. So you might come in with a pile of 40% pure ore x 100kg and end up with 35kg of 98% pure, or only 30kg of 99.5% pure.

Then those refined elements can go into making compounds where the purity can play a factor in the final product. For example steel is a very precise material where the quality and amount of iron and carbon can dramatically alter its properties. Using impure iron or carbon would produce a weaker steel.

This could translate back into FF 0.5 mechanics where compounds can have specific property ranges when used in crafting, based on the purity of the elements used in creating them.

 

[Myumyuh]

-snipping dem purity explanation-

Gotta agree with you on this one. I don't like another unexpected RNG to determine the purity of the minerals I get, I want to be the one that determine the purity of the minerals albeit with a loss that can be expected. Maybe I thought that way just because RNGesus hates me these days.

 

[Wyntyr]

For control reasons I believe there will have to be RNG someplace in the resource gathering/crafting system(s) due to those players whose sole purpose is to game any outcome(s) they possibly can. So if players can determine what quality, amount, and/or specific resource gathered PLUS how the system works for putting those resources together to craft gear, then I think all heck would break loose within the community itself. So I believe the question that would need to be answered is "Where will the RNG be?" in Em.8ER. Will it be on the resource gathering side, the gear crafting side, a mixture of both, etc.?