No pearls

[wonder-ass]

Considering how global pools work, saying you got one doesn't weaken Shubla's argument. Of course some people will get some because someone must remove them from the global pool when it regains some.

this^^
these people have no clue how half the mechanics work in this game lol.

[MooCow]

The issues with having a global pool, and a fixed rate are nearly identical. In one scenario bots will get 1000x more pearls than real people, and pearls will have an extremely high trade value due to scarcity. In the other scenario bots will get 1000x more pearls than real people, and pearls will have a low trade value due to abundance. It seems like a bad system that was only made worse to me.

@shubla: Assuming that people study the pearls, bots run 24/7 finding pearls, and bots don't study pearls. The best time to boil your muscles would be right before peak users are online, when the rate of people logging in its highest, and the worst time would be when the population is all asleep with studies still full of pearls

[Sevenless]

tbh, the point of the global pool in my mind is to control item tuning. It allows you to make the items really good without breaking the economy in other ways.

Flotsam are a good example. Back in the day when forage bots really got started, factions had cupboards upon cupboards of flotsam and it completely wonked out their LP gains compared to non-botters. Like the % LP gain more than a non botter could get was pretty high. Under this system, yes the botters still have the curios. But the botters can't produce infinite curios anymore, so their ability to completely break LP is more limited.

I guess you could say it's a way to keep botters a bit more in line with world progression? Kinda pointless since the hardcore botters are going to be faction boys who are already going to be so much higher than anyone else it's a little fubar already.

[boshaw]

so their ability to completely break LP is more limited.

Too bad quests exist. They could have also just more fine tuned the study times on botted curios so that the advantage isn't so heavily in favor of someone who botted dozens of them a day to keep them in their study 24/7 while a normal player may not have the supply to keep them in the study due to the low study times.

[Sevenless]

so their ability to completely break LP is more limited.

Too bad quests exist. They could have also just more fine tuned the study times on botted curios so that the advantage isn't so heavily in favor of someone who botted dozens of them a day to keep them in their study 24/7 while a normal player may not have the supply to keep them in the study due to the low study times.

I mean, the general consensus is that quests "aren't really bottable" to my knowledge. In good theory (hah) everyone has equal access to their benefits and botting doesn't really impact it.

I'm not sure fine tuning the study time would preserve them as what they are. Right now they're a "wow that's awesome!" But if we made it so everyone can run them realistically by giving them like 1 week long study times, people wouldn't be excited. They'd just be part of the humdrum.

[Granger]

tbh, the point of the global pool in my mind is to control item tuning. It allows you to make the items really good without breaking the economy in other ways.

Flotsam are a good example. Back in the day when forage bots really got started, factions had cupboards upon cupboards of flotsam and it completely wonked out their LP gains compared to non-botters. Like the % LP gain more than a non botter could get was pretty high. Under this system, yes the botters still have the curios. But the botters can't produce infinite curios anymore, so their ability to completely break LP is more limited.

And 'the rest' will have even less (or none) of them as the pool gets emptied by the automatons.

It would make more sense to tie this to per-character, the more often you find something the less your chance will get to see it. Mechanic wise it could be a simple counter that ticks down over time but is increased by a per-item value (the rarer the item should be the higher the increase) each time the character triggers spawning of one, the higher the counter for something the less the chance to see it. Result would be that automatons that aim for these items (through map reload spamming and whatnot) wouldn't be more efficient than a character strolling through a random area. Add a per-area scale to this (that works in parallel) to disable bruteforcing a high quality area with multiple characters. Make sure to persist these counters through server restarts (for obvious reasons) and enjoy having nerfd forage bots down to the level of normal characters.

[pppp]

per-character

More alts, yay.

Better option is to make it per area.
Finding a pearl would create a local field prohibiting finding more pearls. The field would have values 0 to 1 and would be bell-shaped, with 0,5 level within 200-300 tiles away. The filed would decay over time, 24 hours for complete decay seems fair. Mine levels should be considered too. Field effects from various findings would stack, so it is fully possible to have more than 1 in some places. The value must be capped at 1 for further calculations. The chance for finding a pearl would be <normal chance>*(1-<capped field value>).

The effect would be it makes no point to continue boiling mussels after finding one pearl because probability falls down to 0. Finding 10 pearls would take 10 days in one place or 1 day in 10 places, provided these places are some 500 tiles apart from each other. People living in less populated areas would have better chance for finding pearls because there will be less players competing for 1-in-a-day chance of pearl.

[Aceb]

I would be fine with more RNG as it is indeed pure luck to get a pearl instead of literally fucking over all neighbours in the area.

[pppp]

I would be fine with more RNG as it is indeed pure luck to get a pearl instead of literally fucking over all neighbours in the area.

It is not as bad as you think. 200-300 tiles is a quite normal distance between bases. It is also a race about who will boil his mussels first. Consider following cases:

1. Two people 2-3 minimaps apart, one finds a pearl, the other is left with 0,5 chance, still better than current 0 due to global pool.
2. Two people in the same base boil pearls at the same time, yeah, the slow one is screwed, but as buddies they could coordinate FFS.
3. Two people in the same base boil mussels 12 hours one after another, periodically, both boil until finding. In that case both run at 0,5 nominal chance.

Finally, unless two or three of your neighbours suddenly decide their business in Haven is grinding pearls forever, you still have better chances then under current global pool.

Edit:
To put it in more general terms:
If <x> is valuable and <x> is sought after and is botted to maximize harvests and as a result <x> is throttled to reduce inflow then throttling boils down to deciding who does not get <x>. Most of systems tend to favor bots over newbs because from game perspective it is difficult to differentiate. The attempt with area debuff aims to put tedium on managing multiple bots, tedium which is already in place and taken care of in case of newbs so basically it increases costs on bots side while adding much less costs on newbs side.
There is also an option to make players solve capcha every time they pick a mussel but today is not the Prima Aprilis day.

[Itanu]

area based

Oh just got a pearl here, lets pick up the cauldron and move to the next spot... rinse and repeat.