Panning for metals

[Reynolds]

Jorb said he would like something like this when he was playtesting the market. Here is how I think it should go down. (This is not meant to replace mining, you would get minuscule amounts of metal.) You would have a metal or clay pan, which takes 1 bar of metal or 3 clay. This would all require the panning skill. You would go to shallow water and use the new command under adventure, dig for sand. This would yield "sand and rocks" 90% of the time, but may yield "black sand." Black sand will give you a higher quantity of metal particles. You would place 5 sands in the pan, and then put some water in. You would right click it and select "pan for metals."

I have 2 ideas how panning would work.

Idea 1 is like a small minigame. You see a yellow circle in the middle of your screen, and you have to move your mouse around it like you are sifting the pan. If you stray outside the circle you will have less metal in the end, and if you go inside the circle that revolution will not count. Once 30 revolutions are made, the minigame is done. The longer it took for you to do it, the more metal you get. The quality is governed by dexterity. There is "copper dust", "gold dust", "iron dust", and so forth. With 10 of any of them you get one nugget when they are placed in an ore smelter.

Idea 2 is just that little progress bar and everything is random. I like idea 1 better.

The metals you get is decided by chance, but if there is a mine in the same region as you, that metal has a better chance. Just an idea. And yes, I have panned for metals before, and succeeded at finding gold. I am educated in this manner.

[jorb]

Minigames like that are, sadly, fairly easy to hack in the sense of building a game client that feeds "perfect result" information back to the server.

[Delamore]

Only issue is the minigame, I prefer the minigames like cheese and fishing currently are.
I'd have a macro for your minigame done in 20 minutes.

[Reynolds]

Well, like I said, just an idea. But then just use the progress bar thingy. I wanted patience to have some effect how much metal you get though.

[jorb]

Not a bad idea necessarily. We had a fairly well thought out music system using a guitar hero-like interface. (Stolen from a Blizzard April 1st joke). It really sucks that we can't do stuff like that.

[Delamore]

Not a bad idea necessarily. We had a fairly well thought out music system using a guitar hero-like interface. (Stolen from a Blizzard April 1st joke). It really sucks that we can't do stuff like that.

It doesn't mean you can't have minigames, cheese and fishing are minigames I'd like to see more of that are more indepth.

[kimya]

uh, i dont like minigames, really. lets just pan for metals, thats fine...

[Seizure]

I agree... Minigames are fail, and rarely fun. Never more than the first few times... After a few hundred times you will want to strangle the Devs.

[golgepapaz]

Yeah minigames are almost always a fail. the only one i liked was that minigame called acromage in one of M&M series. also button mashing and finger twitching is an absolute no-no in a H&H kind of game.

[kimya]

what actually would be fun is if you had to puzle your maps together. as in, if you map an area, it will be added to your map, but not necessarily at the right place. you would have to find out where it fits. that would be some kind of "mini-game" that would be cool. it can be argued if its a minigame, though...
anyways, before that, mapping should get more useful. for example with being able to zoom into a regional map (without the need to carry each regional map with you all the time.

alright back to topic