[Dev] Realignment of Anti-RMT Gathering Soft Fatigue

[Elkwood]

We all know that there is a soft fatigue of 2500 points shared between the gathering classes it was stated by SE a few months back and is still in place today. So that I do not have to repeat and explain the system in general I have found the Dev comment in the gathering forums and will post it below here.

Hello fellow adventurers!

To clear up your questions, we have checked with the Dev. team and found out the following.

As a countermeasure against RMT activities, the probability of gaining items through gathering will start to decrease after repeated attempts over a long period of time. After a certain number of attempts, items will no longer be obtainable through gathering.

To explain a little more on what goes on behind the scenes, there is an internal counter which measures how often a player has attempted gathering activities. Players will start with a maximum pool of 2,500, which will decrease by 10 each time a gathering attempt is successful and yields an item. Once this number decreases to 1,000, players will find it harder to obtain items. At 0, items can no longer be obtained through gathering.

Stopping gathering for some time will bump this number back up. The recovery rate is currently set at 100 per hour.

If you have ideas and feedback on this topic, please don't hesitate to let us know.

The purpose of this thread is to discuss options for a realignment of said system. I agree that there needs to be some countermeasures in place to keep these classes viable, and to prevent those who use malicious means to gather consistently from obtaining an unfair advantage in the marketplace. The problem that I have is that all 3 DOL classes share this same pool of 2500 points.

Some people will say it is not shared others agree it is the argument is neither here nor there, I just got done fishing took my fisher from 22-24 today, I am in stage 4 Surplus combined with soft fatigue, decided ok enough is enough I need to level blacksmith but I need Iron Ores, I went over to my miner to mine and lo and behold I cannot pull up a single iron ore at nearly level 26, I am in soft fatigue on that class as well.

Can someone from a logistical and intelligent point of view please explain to me how fishing is going to make me tired on miner? A job that I have not touched in 2 weeks. Something really needs to be done about this because this Anti RMT thing is not really hurting the RMT as they can create 15 accounts for free at a given point in time, It hurts the legitimate player who only has 1 account, 14 accounts less then the RMT, who just cycle when they have complete gathering and mining and on there others.

SE I beg you to reexamine the system, keep the 2500 point pool in place but make it so that leveling 1 DOL class does not affect soft gathering fatigue in another class. Allow me to mine fish and botany in the same day not make it so that i can do only 1 or the other. The point of any MMO is to play the game how I want, I am the consumer, you should not have massive restrictions on something that we technically will be paying for soon, to tell me how I have to relax and play. Otherwise what am I going to be paying for? To me this is like Big Brother watching going nope sorry go outside.

I did not see a Dev tag directly related to gathering so based on the upcoming DOL changes in 1.19 based on the Famitsu interview, and the Posts by Yoshi this week, I wanted to once again post and see if we are able to get this issue reexamined. There are some who do not want to battle they want to gather and craft, you need to accommodate all aspects of your player base, not hinder the legitimate because you have no idea how to deal with the intangible aspects of RMT.

[Airget]

I might make more topic on this overall problem with the developers, but the main issue I see is a lack of "progression" with any systems they setup. Consider Stamina, it could work if it wasn't for the fact that stamina never improves from physical level 1 to 50, unless I missed something it's always the same stamina limit, however you would think that as you grow stronger you would gain more stamina allowing you to perform more actions in combat before resting. Or even regain stamina at a faster rate.

How this relates to the above is this, a soft cap is ok however there should be some form of progression as you rank up. Think of it as when you first start out as a botanist you'll probably tire out quickly aka soft cap 2500. When you reach Rank 10 you obtain a 500 increase to the soft cap.This is what they could do.

Every 10 ranks your soft cap increases, 500, 750, 1000, 1250, 1500 for a Total of 5000. Now the system could work like this.

Overall Cap: 2500
Botanist 30 :+2250
Miner 9 :+0
Fisher 15:+500

Now for the next issue would be "overall soft cap". Since one may be unaware of how much they are actually farming up they should allow users to set a limit for each gather profession in this essence, with using the same ranks as above.

Class----Limit-Personal-Total
Botanist-1000-2250----3250
Miner----750--0-------750
Fisher---750--500-----1250

With the above you are left with a limit of Botanist>Fisher>Miner if you choose to work on all gathering professions, which personally I enjoyed doing, it's a pity they put such a limit on it because they are to lazy to actually expand on the system which does relate to the above paragraph with how they just make systems that are stagnant without actually expanding on them.

The better fix to gathering would have been to make it so that it wouldn't be an easy thing to do, now I"m not sure what the actual RMT issue was, was it that they would just spam the crap out of it or were they able to make bots to perform the actions for them. If it's the latter then they should've focused harder on expanding the system so that you aren't literally doing the same thing from 1-50 with no change to the system. Like any good rpg when you first start it's suppose to be simple, but as you grow stronger and wiser you should learn of new concepts to expand to the system. The thing that gatherers really fell flat on was the overall lack of any active abilities to use while gathering.

While this is completely off topic but not exactly since it does relate to how they could've expanded on gathering without putting a limit on it, they could have added the stamina and TP system to gathering.

Quikc example (I"m just going to use random stamina cost and TP to explain the system)

Botanist 15 (since this is the gathering profession I focused on the most)
Active Abilities: (Lv-Ability-TP-Stamina-Info)
5--Eyes of Nature--500--100--Strike the tree with more care reducing damage done to it
10-Caring Hands---750--50---Soothe the tree restoring life force to it
15-It's log!--------1000-250--Pinpoint location which will yield logs
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So basically the above is a quick example of how active abilities could be added to gathering. Basically let's say when you "gather" your TP remains until you change class which includes changing between gathering classes. Your stamina determines how long you can stay at a gathering node for as well as the personal limit for the node. The personal node being "you can gather from here x amount of times". With each swing made you obtain 50 TP, for a successful swing you obtain 150 TP and for a successful cut you obtain 300 TP. With each swing made you lose 50 stamina, sometimes if you are way off on a cut you'll lost more stamina.

So basically in a quick run down of progression through a node it could go as
Player stamina 3000/3000
Cut:Result-Stamina-TP
1-Success------------50--150
2-Fail-----------------60--050
3-Success Obtain-----50--300
4-Success------------50--150
5-Crit fail-------------75--050
6-Crit Success Obtain-50--300
7-Success------------50--150
8-Success Obtain-----50--300

In 8 cuts you use up 435 Stamina and obtain 1450 TP. And as you progress you can use that TP to restore, enhance, amplify your overall results.

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But yea, overall the main issue I have with this game is how stagnant everything feels when you step back and look at it as a whole. If I may give another example the whole Action Cost system was handled poorly. When you look at it Blizzard I II III and IV should not all cost 3 AC To use, especially when you consider that your Action points actually increase as you level. The idea behind setting abilities is the ability to be able to customize yourself and make yourself stand out from other players. Though when it comes to Conjurer, while you think perhaps they would have to choose what element they focus on when they create their ability list, they have the potential to hook themselves up with all of the elemental damage spells so that they can easily exploit an enemies weakness.

A simple thing with this is they could've done 2 things. They could just easily increase the AC to use those abilities such as I=3 II=7 III=12 and IV=15. Or they could've created "Overlapping" where a higher tier ability must go over the lower tier in order to be used such as you set Blizzard I on top of Blizzard II for a total of 6 AC used. But the only way you can sue Blizzard II is by overlapping it with Blizzard.

With the latter in mind though it could lead to interesting abilities added to further amplify the potential for customization through abilities. Basically combining abilities to create new ones or slightly augment other abilities with new mods or status effects added to them.

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Anyways I'll lay off all the tangents but if you just look at their answer to RMT with gathering and all their systems in the game, you'll realize there are a lot of shortcomings to them. I had really wished that SE would've released an MMO that allowed more customization then just gear and had an expansive gathering system that was engaging rather then the same monotonous task continuously done til rank 50 with no clear sign of anything changing.

I really want to like this game, but every time I log on I can't help but feel myself unable to try anything because I just realize how dull everything feel. And while this opinion may cause me to get flamed and I may be going off topic I will commend them for the changes they have been making, For the times I have logged on I did look around real quick, the quest system is alright, though it is hard to get into the story when it feels like exposition from the NPC then performing the task at hand lol. The gather/hand material quest are interesting but feel a tad stagnant where the rewards don't really feel worth it overall. With gather/hand it would be cool if the quest given by the NPCs at the shop would improve your rank potentially leading to secret objectives and new skills to learn from the guild masters.

But ya even as I state everything above when I just look at everything I feel a tad overwhelmed cause it feels like they are trying to add a lot but at the same time it feels to bare bone to actually enjoy it. I think it feels bare bone because they haven't really done much to expand on the Guild Marks. While the bare bone system was setup as a way to buy abilities to enhance your class there is such a small amount of abilities to choose from that in no time you'll obtain all of them. Guild Marks would've worked if they actually focused on adding a wide range of abilities and traits that you could use to augment your characters skill set rather then leaving it stagnant. While if they hadn't flopped as bad as they did at the start we might be seeing more story progression, ship-building and more abilities for each class I can't help but think that certain aspects that should be focused on aren't really getting the proper attention.

While I guess that could be because of the auto-attack they are adding to the game because they don't want to try and expand on stamina to make it more progressive rather then stagnant improvement as you rank up. Like personally I don't see what would've been hard to have auto-attack in the sense that you set your "main attack" for auto-attack and set a stamina limit to how much stamina you want spent using that move leaving the rest of your stamina avaiable for using TP moves.

Basically setup a ration for your stamina Manual/Auto 60/40 ratio in which 40% of your stamina would be used for auto attack and when you are under 60% you would not use auto-attack anymore but you could input it manually if you wanted to, but at that point of time you may just want to use TP moves to deal more damage.

I will hold my breath on auto-attack though, if done right it could work but I can't help but think that stamina was an interesting system that if they had just tweaked it to allow a person to obtain more stamina as they improve their physical rank, that it would've worked.

Anyways that's all from me for now, there are other things that I'd like to mention but I've said to much already, I am interested in seeing the dungeon system that I hoe is introduced soon, with all the patches I can say that's the only one that really grabs my interested. But ya all this junk as just been on my mind for a while I just really hope that when things stabilize they will actually follow through with the one thing that was suppose to make this game unique and that was the promise that hand/land would be able to have a richful experience as a fighter. While to an extent this could be true for hand, I can't help but see land getting a bit shafted by the overall concept they are aiming for now.

[Elkwood]

Airget... that is one long ass post lol, but the ideas are there none the less. Everyone is entitled to there opinion and I think the ability to expand on the 2500 point system you said is a very good idea. Sadly they are getting rid of physical level as well as the stamina gauge in the future so I am wondering how that would all fit into your post.

Perhaps the idea could be linked to the job level as well, but in increments of say 25 points per level.

At level 1 you start with a base of 2500

Level 1 = 2500
Level 10 = 2750
Level 20 = 3000

So on and so forth, I still believe that the 2500 points needs to be separated and not linked to DOL as a whole but to the individual job. No matter what happens SE truly does need to look into this system and examine it instead of just giving us a hard no answer. It has nothing to do with keeping up with RMT, or surpassing them for example, it has to do with the hardlock on normal players. As long as they keep the limit locked to all 3 DOL with the same base points, the inherent issue is still going to be that a level 50 fisher would not tire you out as a miner and vice versa.

SE is to concerned with cutting off RMT at the base that they do not see in the games current environment RMT is flourishing. This entire system is in place to prevent RMT from exploiting the game, but it is not working. If SE expanded this to include all characters on 1 account it would drastically reduce the amount of Gathering RMT is able to do in a given day.

Example you have a level 50 Miner on 1 account and 15 mules you are leveling up.

The 15 mules are level 1 and each have a point base of 2500, now if they said the 2500 covered all 15 mules and once it was expunged then none of the mules could level that would curb RMT. It would force them to level the 1 character the same as all of us. By killing Leves the way they are this will prevent them from exploiting leves the way they have been, now it is time to expand that to DOL and ease our restrictions.

So taking your formula or the one I mentioned earlier into account, you can come up with this.

Level 50 * 25 = 1250 + 2500 = 3750 Gathering points

This would be for all gathering classes on a single character linked to the account. Once the points are used up on a character the other characters would have no gathering points available and RMT could no longer exploit the system. However the other gathering classes IE Fishing and Botany on that character would still be able to perform there jobs until that point base is used up.

SE would inherently be limiting a RMT to 3750 points instead of 37500 as they currently have now.

[Eugenics]

:O Someone has way too much free time.

[Elkwood]

:O Someone has way too much free time.

What does free time have to do with anything, we are trying to make legitimate suggestions to SE so that they actually look at this topic rather then just blow it off.

[Eugenics]

Becuase at the end of the day it's not gonna stop Rmt's.

[Elkwood]

Becuase at the end of the day it's not gonna stop Rmt's.

Except this isnt about RMT its about how a normal player cant progress because of the RMT procedures prohibiting it, and ways to improve the current system so that it does not affect the normal player as much as it does now.

[Eugenics]

I didn't have much trouble getting fishing to rank50. Yeh it almost got to the point where i couldn't even catch a fish but that was after some really hardcore grinding from r47 to 50. I can't talk about the other gathering classes since i haven't played them much.

[Elkwood]

I didn't have much trouble getting fishing to rank50. Yeh it almost got to the point where i couldn't even catch a fish but that was after some really hardcore grinding from r47 to 50. I can't talk about the other gathering classes since i haven't played them much.

Yeah if I don't do any other gathering classes there is no issue getting to 50, but if you try leveling say Botany and Miner at same time or Mining Fishing and Botany at same time they share the same pool of 2500 possible gathering points and it makes it near impossible to level all 3 classes at the same time. Unlike leveling Crafting or DOW Classes which you can do at any time until you hit hard surplus.

That not being able to reel in a fish is the soft cap that you kept hitting. Had you tried to do another DOL class the same thing would have happened instantly whether you had ever leveled the class or not.

[Eugenics]

Ahh i see your point, my bad and yeh i see how that could be a pain in the arse.