Animal quality node randomization

[Kaios]

Do you see this as a realistic short-term development goal though?

I can see how some people prefer a form of static system, because it gives you the chance to reap the reward of finding a high quality node for a limited time at least. But I'd advocate for a quick fix by giving animals a random quality for the coming world to give the devs time to come up with a more suitable long term sollution (if needed). And to give everyone a chance to see if a more random node system is actually better than the current system.

You're right, I am not too sure how difficult it would be to implement that. Essentially it's just the quality nodes themselves that would be alternating position, given how nodes already have a gradual increase/decrease over a particular distance I don't think it would be too difficult to have those alternate their positions. I guess the greater difficulty would be dealing with how the quality node alternates to the appropriate terrain/biome in which the animal related to the node can actually spawn on, or will it simply be moving in a particular direction ignoring all unrelated states such as water until it reaches a point where the animal can spawn.

They did have similar implementations in the past however such as with creature levels, in which civilizations determined the creature levels in a sort of circular radius around the civilization or something like that. Animals closer to Brodgar or a village were lower in level and animals further away were higher in level.

[AriZona]

+1
This idea was floated several times in past but was not getting traction.

[Zampfeo]

Do you see this as a realistic short-term development goal though?

I can see how some people prefer a form of static system, because it gives you the chance to reap the reward of finding a high quality node for a limited time at least. But I'd advocate for a quick fix by giving animals a random quality for the coming world to give the devs time to come up with a more suitable long term sollution (if needed). And to give everyone a chance to see if a more random node system is actually better than the current system.

+1 for realism.

I hope someday there can be a system that rewards human scouting and power projection but without rewarding/necessitating bot use like the other node-based resources. I don't think such a system can be implemented by W16, though. Randomization would be an easy low-hanging-fruit fix.

The problem with a lot of these suggestions (other than complete randomness) is it wouldn't eliminate scouting bots. It would just make them a bigger PITA to set up.

I still think the problem lies with spawn mechanics. Some naked scout bot that only ever traverses a handful of tiles shouldn't be able to initiate the spawning of randomized resource(including candleberries, glimmers, and edelweiss too). Loftar doesn't have a good track record adjusting these mechanics, though (fate and global pools).