Im curious if a name in red can explain why skinning was left off the treasure change years ago. It makes sense to me to encourage people to hunt things they can learn from(and thus die from) to earn the loot. Im not really sure why skins are any different though. Is there systems connected to it that would make it more complicated? Its a giant loophole in the system that someone capped can hunt level 40 critter and just skin farm them over and over with no risk. I know they implemented a bandaid where they start to sell for slightly less if overdone but why can someone who is over 10 levels higher than the critter skin farm but not loot farm them?

Yeah, an easy solution to stop capped players from raiding low level skins might be to make capped loot better than everywhere else. Selfish of me, I know. But risk vs. reward is supposed to be a principle of game design as well. Can you honestly say Nelemar strikes an appropriate balance? We all know it doesn't!

~Taverkin

I don't have an official response to your question right now, but I just wanted to say that I think that it's a good question, and also that this is a delightfully creepy topic name.

Ixix

I think applying the same penalty to skinning things you can't learn from that is applying to looting things you can't learn from is rational, fair, and would better balance the treasure system.

-E

>>Then you would have capped players farming both skins and boxes to make up for the loss. Gosh, how about a more radical solution ... just upgrade the treasure drops in the capped hunting areas! Sheeesh; it doesn't take a genius to come up with that one.

While I completely agree that this is the solution, I bet its not that easy due to how the current system works. Part of the treasure system is hunting pressure and capped hunting is pretty full. The release of two capped hunting grounds would do more for hunting pressure then doing a rework of the system.

as someone who does/did alchemy, the fact that the skin prices aren't lowered were a saving grace in terms of covering the costs while I had to spend hours getting skins and other materials. lowering the value of the skins would deeply penalize those who bother to train in FA/survival and who might offer their services to less skilled Adventurer's Guild members and the aforementioned alchemists.

I'm fully capable of skin farming, maybe twice a year I'll even go out an do it to see how much I can get in a certain amount of time. but generally I can make more money on the gems that drop in nelemar, and I have a much better time doing that. skin farming is boring, those who are doing it regularly are likely fully automating hunting, which I personally think should not be allowed, but know it is, so I think it should be monitored and heavily script checked, rather than punishing the rest of us who do it honestly or for other reasons such as advancing in the guilds.

>if theres no risk, why should there be such a massive reward?

as I said, there are systems in game that are very expensive to complete that force you into lower hunting grounds. the skins of the other animals beyond the ones that you need are very important to offset the cost of these systems. 4 professions would potentially be severely penalized

I'm going to go back to the suggestion that easy answer is to fix capped treasure. Make it so that capped players get equal or even better treasure than a character in their 20s and this problem would largely go away. Until then you what you are suggesting would remove one of the ways in which a capped character can make up the lack they see during their normal hunts.

It's not just capped skins that are the problem with Capped treasure. Not all characters are skinners, but all capped characters feel the pain of getting less treasure per hunt than folks 70 or 80 levels younger. The Cross into Shadows storyline recently drew me back into prime for a bit, and I was astonished by how much more treasure I was getting with my 20-something level characters than my capped bard earns in Shattered. Personally, I'd rather see treasure fixed for the capped folks before messing with skin prices, although I'd be perfectly willing to see them tweaked after a fix.

>>Then you would have capped players farming both skins and boxes to make up for the loss.<<

I don't think that makes sense. When a player hunts creatures he can't learn from, the coins / gems / boxes are hugely penalized to compensate for the lack of risk. I think we're all saying that doing the same for skins would be fair and rational, and better balance the treasure system. The only change in behavior you could extrapolate from this change is people hunting their own level, with no easy source of risk-free coin for people who are trained to skin.

>>as someone who does/did alchemy, the fact that the skin prices aren't lowered were a saving grace in terms of covering the costs while I had to spend hours getting skins and other materials.<<

I don't think propping up the downsides of alchemy should be a consideration with balancing the treasure system… and this comes from someone who sunk around 20 mil into mastering it.

>>lowering the value of the skins would deeply penalize those who bother to train in FA/survival and who might offer their services to less skilled Adventurer's Guild members and the aforementioned alchemists. <<

When the treasure system was tweaked so loot from underhunting was greatly diminished, I still hunted for loot, I just shifted to things I could learn from; no more trips to shan for a quick buck. I think people will still skin and still think it is worth it if the same balance is brought to that aspect of the treasure system.

-E

>>Granted, sometimes if you want better loot you'll have to travel and be willing to move with the loot to different hunting grounds.

You can not do this at cap, there are only 3 hunting grounds and they stay constantly pushed down because of hunting pressure. That's the who problem right there. If it weren't for the hunting pressure mechanic, capped treasure would likely be fine, and the best in the game. However, because there are only 3 options there is no way to avoid it, therefore you end up with people under-hunting skins. And we circle right back to the beginning....

You can't count Warcamps since that is only accessible to 1/3 of the population, and the GMs have always maintained that you don't NEED to be in a society to succeed in the game. Also, the warcamps do not exist on the hunting pressure system the way other hunting grounds do.

>You can not do this at cap, there are only 3 hunting grounds and they stay constantly pushed down because of hunting pressure.

Thats not how pressure works. Equal pressure means none are down (and none are up). Treasure only shifts when pressure is unequal.

I am with mad. My understanding is its the pressure of that specific area. Not that area compare to like areas elsewhere.

The pressure system is based on individual critter types first and foremost. It measures how fast critters of type A are being killed compared to other like-levelled critters, and applies either a penalty to treasure or a bonus if it's getting slaughtered like cattle or living a long, fulfilling life. If some critter type is getting a penalty, the system tries to offset that penalty with a bonus to something else that's being killed considerably slower than the average for that level group. What seems to happen is that it tries to offset the penalty first within the same hunting area as critter A, then the same realm, then globally.

So if every capped critter was being killed at a rate of 10,000 critters / day, but ithzir seers were being killed at 25,000 / day and fallen crusaders were only being killed at 1,000 / day, seers would have a huge penalty, crusaders would have a huge bonus, and everything else would produce treasure only at the baseline with no bonus or penalty. In practice, though, most of the ups and downs happen much more locally than that.

That's mostly coming from various horses' mouths over the years, with a bit of conjecture added based on me experimenting with capped treasure in Plat where it's easier to observe (and cause) the fluctuations. Those experiments have led to a few theories on what's actually causing the "loot sucks at cap" problem, but it's not as simple as "everything's pushed down all the time", because that's not possible in a system built around an arithmetic mean.

Dave, Brandain's Bard

>You can't count Warcamps since that is only accessible to 1/3 of the population, and the GMs have always maintained that you don't NEED to be in a society to succeed in the game. Also, the warcamps do not exist on the hunting pressure system the way other hunting grounds do.

I think you more or less can assume warcamps. I won't offer an opinion on what the design or success factors are, but rolling up a new character, and getting them to the second step Sigil of Location takes about 4 hours or less of your time. Then your warcamp monkey can find you a warcamp anywhere, and the path stays open for 5 minutes. Sure, maybe we shouldn't assume everyone wants an additional character (and where the character lives or how much to have them travel), but that sounds a lot easier than assuming everyone has a capped character (and it's a lot less work to get a GoS monkey than a capped character!). Especially considering the vast and huge amounts of concern over available capped hunting areas, this is an easy solution that pretty much anyone can do for themselves. I think in the context of capped hunting issues, we might as well basically assume anyone complaining has at least done their homework.

As far as skinning itself, I don't really have a strong opinion either way. It's strange that it's one of the ways underhunting is okay for loot. But it's not even really clear to me how it would be changed. Someone with a higher level is unable to skin the creature? They make really poor quality? They can't sell it for very much? The first two don't really make sense, and the third one can be circumvented giving the skins to a lower level character to sell.

In the context here, specifically, the best and easiest solution is to ensure that skin prices have some average scaling with level. I don't personally see much wrong with "skin farming" although it's easy to agree it's a bit anomalous in terms of how underhunting works. It wouldn't fix the general capped hunting pressure and other sorts of things. And yes it won't help anyone who can't skin. But uh, you're capped so why not diversify your skillset? Especially if the problem is lack of loot and there are clear skills which would offer more of it.

---

>An officer of the Sorcerer Guild arrives and glances around. "Ah, there you are, Vathon!" he says in a slightly agitated tone. "I have come to formally declare that your membership privileges have been revoked."

>> I'd love it if there was another check for skinning that would leave the quality of the skin alone but when checking for levels, if person is 10+ levels over critter it makes the skin worth 2 silvers.

Won't work. If character A is too high level, he could just hand it over to character B who is below the critter's level and sell it for max profit then hand the coins to character A.

They'd have to somehow make the check on value at the time of the skinning, which would likely require some serious rewrite of the system. It would also have to take into consideration bounty tasks, and differentiate value at the furrier and quality of the skin. Big mess.

I've seen this explanation before. The question then becomes what creature all the treasure at cap is hiding on.

Keith/Brinret/Shiun

Be nice to Wyrom or I will cut you!

Skins are affected by hunting pressure. Even if a level 100 skinned a level 40 area for 18 hours it would become worthless for a long time after.


The treasure system is already completely backwards, let's not move even closer towards that system. I'd like to see it move FARTHER away.

<<I havent ever skin farmed but I have seen people skin farm hours and hours everyday. I somehow doubt they would do this if it became completely worthless after 18 hours. I get the price goes down but does it go down to literally like 20 silvers per skin if the top price is above 1000?

Also, I see nothing wrong with making rewards tied into risk. Once you reached your capped goals what keeps greedy mobs of capped people from ruining the nice spot for people of that level range?>>



I was thinking along the same lines. There has to be an individual baseline, right? It's not like if hunting pressure in a given level range were exactly equal you would expect to see about the same amount of loot from each, right? For instance, maybe bonespear is "poor", so its baseline is lower than somewhere else in the range. It can go up if nobody hunts there, but other areas start at a higher baseline and would actually need to be overhunted a bit to reach the level of bonespear's baseline. At least that's how I think it works? I dunno!

And as greedy as I am, I can't say no to ensuring that capped area baselines are significantly higher than the baseline for lower levels. And if they already are, then I want MOAR!

~Taverkin