I see @TheVicious85 already pointed out some major hunt groups. Here’s a random quote grabbed from a hunt:
200 oort in 30 minutes is 9s per rough oortstone. Over the longer haul. it looks like @Hazel1558 averaged 12 seconds per stone across 180 minutes - but the hunt lead also isn’t always pulling the most oort.
If you fill up a small sovereign then as a group you’re doing 20x that; roughly. 20ss in 180 minutes or roughly 100 rough oort per minute. Again, as a group. 5760 per hour, or 250000 shards.
That’s enough oort shards to fuel a 1x2 portal for (roughly, heh) 28 years
The SS of rough stones (single player, 3 hours) is more like a year and a half - 1.42 years worth of fuel for someone that just wants a 1x2 to a network hub - in 3 hours of running around smashing stuff with a group.
I go on the Gizmo T4 Hunts every Sunday night at 5 p.m. CST. It runs for about 2 hours and we tend to pull in about 250-300 oort per hour. They have over 20 platforms set up, but we rarely make it past platform 10 because so many meteors drop.
If it is really that easy then we should ask the question… why force us to play content we don’t like once every 28 years? Why not skip that too and let us mine it? If I want my dailies I go play WoW
I don’t like to schedule my life around my play time, playing is for wasting time and when I feel like it. That’s also the reason I don’t like these organized raids in theme parks.
Impressive breakdown thanks for using my hunt as an example. Blimey 28years that’s a long time
I have stated this before in this post but will reiterate again. Oort amounts from meteors don’t need adjusting at this present time. We get more than enough. Also you don’t need to do group hunts to get these numbers. Solo or just a couple of you can still get decent numbers.
The size of the meteors don’t dictate the amount you get. It doesn’t matter. The bigger meteors only matter on T6 hunts for trophies but even then it still doesn’t really matter.
There are extreme disparities in the prices between the 3 main lines of resource gathering in the game. If people think the prices are fine and no drops need to be changed to account for this disparity, then ok. Do not be surprised when no one will gather or mine for you. Do not be surprised when forged goods cost astronomical prices. Do not be surprised when everyone does everything and there is no economy.
I see the same people who complain about the market not working and lack of specialization and high prices and blah blah blah shoot down every suggestion for tweaking the game to a point where changes could actually impact those things. If the game is perfect and nothing needs to change, then stop arguing that the market is important and specialization should be a thing and prices on forged goods should be lower. The status quo gets you what you have.
The prices for the mined and gathered things are lower because there is no social element to get these things quickly in mass, i don’t see how the solution to the price disparity should be “increase the drops from hunting”, by that same logic it could be “decrease the drops from mining and gathering” since they are “easier”…
The solution ultimately is “add new content that uses up resources we have too much of in the game” that drives prices up by increasing demand, without flooding the market with too many resources.
Honestly the prices for most things are “ok” but if we had a larger playerbase you’d see the gaps widen some, BUT the demand for perishables would also go up (tools, food, and brew), much of which are made with a combination of gathered and hunted goods. So those markets would remain strong, and mining (outside of metals, gems, and lucients) would get a little weaker, since you mostly only use the other mined things for blocks, and to grind into essence for forging mats. Some other consumable added to mined materials could help that though, so long as it doesn’t overshadow something else that people already use.
(Ideas for consumable for other mined things could be fist augments, new totems, or something like that)
It takes me about 4-5 hours of gathering to get a ss of spicy beans. It takes people 2 hours to get a ss of Oort. yet the price of Ort is 9.4 times higher. Spicy beans are used to make paste base, which is necessary for pretty much all forged items. People build with minable materials, there are plenty of sinks for it. The prices of hunt drops are higher because less people do it, either because they can’t or don’t want to. People will spend 3 days farming beans to get oort instead of just going hunting.
But everyone gathers/can gather spicy beans (also i get a ss of spicy beans in about 40min on storis II with max luck in it’s deserts by running around and whacking desert swords with a silver axe… Did it all the time since spicy beans sold well in my stores), But a limited number of people hunt, and only individually hunt once or twice a week (on average) but they gather or mine any amount of days since there isn’t a schedule to coordinate, or a social element that needs considered.
I have max luck and a bean desert and topaz axes it still takes me 4-5 hours, so I guess you are better at it than me.
Limited people hunting is my point. You have one activity that people don’t want to or cannot do, and 2 others that people can and do do. The number of available resources is heavily skewed in one direction. It leads to the current player behavior. Then people complain about the current player behavior like ordering people to engage in a hobby in a different way is an effective way to change the game. It isn’t.
One thing we’ve got to understand and keep in mind as we discuss these kinds of topics is how much literally everything changes when active player base expands and contracts. I think we can all agree that the population is a small fraction of what it should be. When we consider supply and demand of anything in game, we have to look at it as it is now as well as in more ideal circumstances. There should be a threshold of ‘ideal min/max active players’ that we base our analyses on, with consideration to states more like the one we’re in now.
Oort, for one: There was a time when each stone cost under 200c. While demand was higher, I believe the difference in supply was greater. That means the more ideal prices and quantities DID exist, and that can be achieved again with more players.
Regarding time of oort: This is a tougher subject than how I see people treating it. Overall, we seem to want it to be simpler and less of a grind. But that grind is different for so many of us…
Allowing us to fuel portals for longer sounds great, but the servers can only handle so much. I think the idea is that we’re supposed to stay on top of them… but then of course it’s messed up to make us physically go to all our portals to fuel every one. You can say that if someone is actively using it then it’s easy to hit it along the way, but you need oort in your inventory and that can require special trips to fuel multiple portals. Maybe if we could let them die and reopen them without the extra oort cost, we’d be more willing to let a few close when not in use. Closed portals can be kind of a bad look though.
So as far as making a change to the game, I am absolutely not closed-mindedly against changing oort drop rates (or crafting output…), but I think other solutions could potentially make us all happier. Some possibilities:
Portal list somewhere in sanctum where we can fuel everything in our beacons. This seems tough to implement.
Allowing anyone to throw fuel in a portal. NO BRAINER! Massive improvement to the game.
New idea I just had: Allow us to store extra stacks of oort in portals. First stack runs out, portal closes as usual, however the portal can be opened with a click and doesn’t cost extra shards if there’s a backup stash. Combine that with the previous solution and we basically just have tolls for passage in lesser-used areas.
Allow multiple fuel slots but specifically to each fuel type. So we can throw a stack of shards in, then amalga on top for the extra time if the shards run out. That would make them a bonus rather than a weak alternative. Same goes for compact oort but for the servers’ sake there does need to be a time cap.
When the concurrent player number was 800+, raw oort stone was being bought/sold for around 99c (Ultima Finata Hub at the time). Players were also happy to spend more coin for hammers ($15k-20k) & trophies.
The game is like… 10 years old. Some player must have collected insane amounts of coins. I don’t think it would go down if the player base goes up because these players will just build… bigger networks.
As cool as portals are, maybe it’s time to rethink if we need a different solution that’s less taxing on the servers. Either as a replacement of portals or as a cheaper alternative.
Ah, the days when you could get on, look for a bunch of orange on the HUD, and probably jump into a hunt. With ‘only’ 50 planets (20ish huntable?) always hoping you weren’t right behind another group.
The days when public planets would be full and the forums were filled with the whines of people that the portal networks were broken because two or three important links were full and you couldn’t go through those planets… We had more oort back then for sure, so maybe just more players is the answer, not more from drops (bringing it back to topic )
Somehow scaling the oort rewards to the average number of players active/activated meteor events completed in a given week/month, would probably be something that could be automated. However, it would likely be a lot of work.
It would also keep working if the game suddenly surged in popularity, due to a free weekend or sale.
Maybe I’m just dreaming out loud about the feasibility of such, though.
Interesting enough, we actually are averaging 2 to 3 times the “oort per hour” as back then. Players (hunt leaders mostly) have optimized hunting now to get somewhere between an average of 200-270 oort per hour. Back then, we normally got an average of 80-120 oort per hour, only getting over 100 an hour when there wasn’t more than one hunt on that planet within the last 6 hours or something…
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