New meteor mechanic is now in the testing server, and with it comes a major change to the way Rough Oort Stone is farmed.
For the sake of readers coming to this thread from the future, at present Oort Stones are farmed off of level 4 and 5 Spitters and Cuttletrunks and Road Runners. These creatures spawn fairly frequently on some third tier planets (particularly on Munteen) and can be gathered from the creatures corpse by any player in the area when the creature is slain. These creatures typically droped 1-3 stones on death, more with a high āluckā attribute. At present, Bi-weekly hunts are arranged to hunt these creatures en masse to boost creature kill speeds and respawn rates.
The new mechanic is for meteors to fall from the sky, summoning a handful of random creatures to defend the impact crater. Once the creatures are defeated, Oort Stones can be mined from the meteor itself by all players in the area. However, the more players in the area, the more numerous and difficult the defending creatures are, and the better the yield of Oort Stones. At present, no organized shard farming events have taken place, so no concrete data currently exists to determine the effectiveness of such an approach.
The question being asked here though, is- Is the meteor approach better or worse than mob drops? Metrics in question include:
Average Oort stone yield per hour for a single player
Yield per hour for a group of players
ease of encounter for new players
ease of acquisition for players with limited or no access to higher tier worlds (IE after a server restart, or an isolated player)
Lets have a good, civil and thorough discussion, and if possible do some field tests to gather as much comparative data as possible! Your ideas and opinions here may have direct impact on future updates to the game, so be as honest and unbiased as possible!
I havenāt been participating in Oort Stone gathering events so far. However I like the idea of such an event. Even more I love the concept of meteors dropping into the world. Iām very curious to find out how an impact crater looks like and whether creatures spawn from it, or rather get attracted out of curiousity. If so, what might attract them? The noise of the impact? A vibe of the surfaced meteor, which might be subtle and not really perceptable to our cat race? Is it a possible glow, that emits from the meteor?
The meteor event could be very practicable for players to meet up in a lose formation, which is supposed to mean, rather unorganized, and random - whoever is in that particular area, and is out to risk their digital lives for their tribes in order to keep portals open.
A further idea, which ultimately is speculative and only an idea for a gameplay mechanics: Iād love to have an observation station which could give me detailed info about
more meteors which have crashed all over a planet. So I could aim for expeditions to all meteor locations out from one place. I like the idea rather because of a possible building which one could build somewhere high up in the mountains, for example. The effect it would have on the appeal of an Oort stone hunt could be a rather pragmatic path. If there was a dense and well organized guild, this guild could harvest all the portal āgoldā away from a planet by using such a meteor observatory.
As said before, unfortunately havenāt seen the new elements in game yet, and Iām excited to find out first.
On vulpto, when @TwistedFoot and I were running around, I would get 9-10 per meteor whilst he mostly got 1-2 (but once 7). This could either be due to luck, or due to me killing more creatures?
We were running around for a while on vulpto and only found 2ā¦ Not sure of the actual time, but this will probably be slower than the creature mechanic, unless we get large groups of people together like the hunts
UPDATE: I just got 10 oortstones from a solo meteor, so thatās nice. However usually I get below 5 on solo
maybe do organized hunt on testing wink @Xaldafax then its more ready for live
we could help the devs that way
i think tuesdays are good days to do this if we cant wait for next weekend
Skill hunter will now have to seek out roadrunners and occasionally fight through a meteor event. I believe the Oort count will be higher as people can now go get oort stones from a very specific source.
Even if oort stones became harder to find this might lead to people to come together to work on a portal hub instead of just a small group or one person to run this entire operation. I feel like portals should be a little more difficult to operate. This could also open the way for very organized guilds and the guild systems. These are just my thoughts.
Iām not sure if I am for making portals much more expensive. I think discovering and using the many portals, was a huge āwowā factor for me, and plays into my explorer mindset like you wouldnāt believe. If portals become more rare, thatās kind of lost, and they just become the way that āeveryone goesā to get from A->B. Learning the complex portal network as it is now is interesting, fun, and a wrong turn often leads to interesting locations and discoveries. All good IMHO.
Also, only large guilds running portal systems,ā¦ thaāts just a bit scary to me. The loner or small groups wouldnāt get much of any say in anything.
Plus some of the most interesting portal networks now, were/are just one, or a few people.
shrug, just my 2c
EDIT:
And at release, if there are say, 50 planets? The costs of running a portal network will have jumped astronomically right there anyhow.
I get your concern. But I am talking about huge portal hubs such as the fire caverns or prozee build. Those were/are massive and eventually disappear without the communities help. Your regular portal network in your home may not be effected but hubs like the ones I mentioned will. Smaller groups might be able to connect their server and collectively unite everyone but I donāt see one person running a hub. Note I am also speculating the live server where they probably donāt want one person to own everything and the game will eventually take that shape since its an MMO.
One last thought. Currently, portals have render totem and warps sorta useless. For what I understand things were a lot harder back when only warps were available but it kept communities closer together as they made every trip to other planets worth it.
To be clear I am not against massive undertakings and community builds, just the opposite - I am all for it. I just have concerns about it being guild-based/owned. I donāt think that exclusivity would be an issue now, but at launch it very well could be.
Not to mention some people prefer the loner role, and some smaller groups of well known friends. They shouldnāt be excluded from having a few portals or a portal to larger portal hub.
I think the only real point weāre seeing things differently here, is that I love the idea of a countless number of planets connected by an intricate web of portals, its something to explore and understand, and can take you anywhere. Think of Stargate!
Just because individuals and smaller groups have easy-ish access to making portals doesnt detract from the game to me, I mean they will have access to portals anyhow through main cities they could just build near. To me, its the little hidden portals off of other portal systems that lead somewhere that I have never been, to discovering something new and often times beautiful. I donāt want to lose that because its too expensive for someone to have their own portal, and they go undiscovered.
Oh, I think that a lone player or a small group of friends would be able to maintain a hub, or a few small portals, any one can go collect oort, it is just the scale of the amount of portals they have that will be affected.
e.g. Small groups of friends will have a small hub or a few portal connections to various locations, while large groups of friends or a guild will have large hubs or lots of portal connections to various locations.
The patch notes said amimuls wonāt drop oort besides roadrunners. So you can go chasing roadrunners in munteen, at the same time hit every meteor you run across.
HOME WORLD
2 meteorites, which were 2 minutes of easy fight each, gave me 7 oort stones. Between 10 and 15 minutes have passed between entering the world (my beacon) to finishing the second meteorite. I traveled around 200-300 blocks away and back.
I would need some 10 minutes of running around my Munteen base and fighting lvl3-5 mobs to get that. So, time-wise kinda same, but meteorites were easier and I only used copper sling, while normal oort hunt will make me use silver/titanium/gem ones.
MOON WORLD
1 meteorite 2-3 minutes after entering my portal to Septerfon. I only moved some 100 blocks away.
Had to go through 5 minutes of intense fight (going down to around 1/4 of my health and needed to eat cooked meat).
Got 4 oort stones. Had to use silver sling.
Looks like more difficult than home world meteorites for kinda same reward. Although it would be better to go through 10 and more events to see more accurate data on how much oort one can get on average.
All solo hunt with 30+ level hunter with 4000+ HP and max health regen (100 per 5 sec).
Yikes!!! Seems as of this update Oort stones are gonna be more scarce.
Alright devy devs, olā Buddy olā palsā¦can you tell us the thought process behind this decision? Maybe itāll help us accept and navigate towards the kind of gameplay you guys would like.
Well, I just pointed out that meteorites are happening often and are easy enough to make it up for no oort on 3-4 level mobs (5th level got it back I think I remember an update by James saying that).
FIRST: meteorites are exciting and provide an intense fighting experience without need of running around waiting for mobs to spawn.
SECOND: they seem to give enough drops to replace 3 and 4 level mobs if it comes to oort stone source.
Yeah but as a lone player such as myself who usually isnt available to hunt with groups Iām not looking forward to having to go out on lone meteor hunts, having to fight a bunch of mobs, just so I can get 10 or so Oort. I think that either the mobs should still drop Oort or the meteor payout should be higher. Correct me if Iām wrong but as of right now the only way to get Oort is to fight off mobs which will be frustrating to those not skilled for battle, an then break the meteor. I know that roadrunners still give Oort but cmonā¦those things are so annoying to chase down just for 1 or 2 Oort. Iām just saying that if the most Iām gonna get after a big battle is 10 Oort then I would most likely stick to using other players portals and donating the little Oort I do come across. And actually thatās not a bad thing. This style of Oort gathering might make portals more valuable which in turn would make hunting meteors a new fun thing to do. I however donāt get to play very often and when I do play Iād rather build then hunt. Either way Iām totally willing and excited to adapt to whatever gameplay changes come our way. Itās not gonna change my mind on the awesomesauce that is boundless.
I can very much relate to this statement. 99% of my shards and stones come from donations. i will have to do some meteor chasing after work to get a good feel for how it will work but building is my first love in this game.
I gave it a whirl today and walked away with 29 stones. I felt it was was a decent enough payout for an hour of good fun! I did spec. a little into resist after all that though, hoping to take on some tougher mobs later.
