4 hour cooldown on GSH resource harvesting

[Heat-Wave]

That is patently silly. Even if someone did scan one of each type of node on each of 20 alts ONCE every FOUR HOURS, the amount of materials gathered would be trivial.

 

And if 10,000 people a week did it?

 

EA has said a million people log in each month, 40,000 a month doing just that doesn't sound unreasonable...

 

That would be a LOT of mats... even just 10 alts, doing a round of 20 mat stations, times 10,000 per week...

 

Yea, divide it by the number of servers, it is still a ton of materials...

[Heat-Wave]

BTW, for those who say, "aww, allowing us to harvest more won't really affect the market"..

 

Let me ask you a question then... If it is so minor, if it wouldn't make a difference, then why do you care so much? Then it couldn't make much of a difference to you then...

 

If it DOES make a big difference to you, then it would affect the market, the two are interdependent...

[Calsetes]

Ugh, getting those low ones is really annoying, especially when you have a ton of alts that can finish that quest. I have more of those things than I know what to do with.

My rewards are usually metals, bio stuff or green crystals (the game must be under the impression I really like green, since it's the only kind of color crystal I'm getting )

Got some good ones too though, like that Electrum cache you mentioned.

 

I have maybe 5 or 6 of those tier 1 ones, and I started selling the rest on the GTN. I always price them fairly low, so they range from 2.5k to 10k each. Considering it's just junk wasting space otherwise, I'll take it.

[Oneirophrenia]

I just use them as decorations for the most part, might harvest one every couple of days if I remember...

 

Pretty much this. Once I hit the decoration limit (90% for Tat and 76% for NS) and come across other better things to put in, I will start taking them out.

Edited September 5, 2014 by Oneirophrenia

[MotorCityMan]

I disagree. I've done some testing with these, and here's my findings:....

 

Quote shortened for space, but in a nutshell, I too disagree with the OP.

[ML_DoubleTap]

With one toon these are pretty lackluster, but with multiple alts their benefit begins to be realized. With 10 alts even without lucky RNG you can get 20-40 of a specific material you need. With lucky RNG that only increases, my record for consecutive harvests on one toon sits at 6 currently, but with 13 alts I'd say I average 18-20 harvests per round.

 

Now where it really shines is when you have a guild that is working to supply its crafters. If the guild is low on say Electrum, you request all members hit the node and it becomes a significant amount of materials very quickly. We're currently working on a node gathering room on our ship for this purpose.

[Infernixx]

the Perfect Upari node is useful, at least. And if I'm low on particular mats for an item that I'm crafting, I'll run and grab it from the node and see if I can get enough to craft with that before I hit the GTN.

[Heat-Wave]

the Perfect Upari node is useful, at least. And if I'm low on particular mats for an item that I'm crafting, I'll run and grab it from the node and see if I can get enough to craft with that before I hit the GTN.

 

^ And that is fine, but it is exactly why the cooldown limit has to be there, or large numbers of people will stop going to the GTN, and thus the value of the mats will tank.

[Muljo_Stpho]

I wonder if they also have a chance to give you crafting missions, similar to how the real slicing awards work.

I haven't tested those nodes much, since all I've got are the crappy mission reward slicing nodes, and I don't want to waste my cooldowns on 100 credits boxes when I could be getting metals that go for a thousand each.

Here's to hoping I'll actually get some from this week's conquests.

 

I have received a purple level 340 UT mission discovery from the electronic brain and a purple level 450 arch mission discovery from the encrypted terminal.

[eartharioch]

I wonder if they also have a chance to give you crafting missions, similar to how the real slicing awards work.

I haven't tested those nodes much, since all I've got are the crappy mission reward slicing nodes, and I don't want to waste my cooldowns on 100 credits boxes when I could be getting metals that go for a thousand each.

Here's to hoping I'll actually get some from this week's conquests.

 

Yes, you can crit on gathering attempts, just like in the open world.

Edited September 5, 2014 by eartharioch

[eartharioch]

I was not expecting the random chance on each harvest of a 4 hour lockout buff.

 

The slicing nodes are technically the least valuable, as (per grade level), you get more credit-value in mats than credits in a Lockbox. The major advantage of Slicing in the open world is that you can just open the box, take your money, and keep going; whereas with mats, you have to carry them around with you (or mail them to an alt or whatever) and use them or put them on the gtn and wait for them to sell in order to realize a gain. Since you can put your best nodes right next to your gtn and storage bays, you can get them into storage or on the market a lot more easily.

[Greyhaws]

Some people here must be really lucky.

 

I have a hub in my stronghold with all the banks, GTN, etc and the four freebie nodes. I have 10 alts. I harvest these as often as I can.

 

The MAXIMUM amount of times I have managed to loot ANY node is twice - since release. 95% of the time I get the debuff on the first attempt.

 

Given the time it takes to logout, logon etc I would get better results looking for nodes in the field.

 

Might be worth it for the higher level ones but the free ones are really not much more than decorations. No idea why they didn't just implement them the same as nodes in the field. You need the gathering skill and the node disappears for however long before you can gather it again.

[Grayseven]

From what I've gathered (pun intended, deal with it) the higher the tier the greater the chance of a lockout debuff.

 

You can gather desh for a while before you get the debuff, but grab a Grade 6 or 9 and chances are it'll debuff you on the first go.

 

These are convenience items and are not mean to supplant running missions or gathering in the wild. If I find myself one or two mats short, I can tap my home node and get what I need without wasting time to run to a planet. But it's still more beneficial for me to run to a planet or send my companion on missions if I need a bunch of something for, say, the Conquest event.

 

If you expected to be able to craft without ever leaving your house or putting credits to work on missions, you were mistaken.

[Muljo_Stpho]

I don't know about that. In my attempts the ratios of 1-2 use lockouts vs 3-4 use lockouts vs 5+ use lockouts has seemed about the same regardless of whether I keep harvesting any of the freebie grade 1 nodes or any of the grade 6/9 nodes that I've managed to get. Most attempts get 1-2 shots at it, sometimes you'll get more, and on a rare occasion here or there you'll get a big streak.

 

It would certainly be a rational design decision if the rate was tiered though. Set the chance of picking up the lockout on each harvest at, say... 20% for grade 1 nodes, 25% for grade 2 nodes, 30% for grade 3 nodes, 35% for grade 4 nodes, 40% for grade 5 nodes, 45% for grade 6 nodes, and 50% for grade 9 nodes. This approach would enforce the notion of higher grade materials being somewhat rare and difficult to obtain. You could reliably collect a relatively high amount of low quality stuff as work-free freebies but the higher quality stuff would give you more trouble and it would yield a smaller pile of freebies.

[ViciousFett]

There sure are a lot of people that "don't care", yet take the time to post a reply....

[Khevar]

There sure are a lot of people that "don't care", yet take the time to post a reply....

I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.

[ghoul_drool]

Some observations:

 

- It is my impression that a lockout will occur quicker if the toon doing the harvesting does NOT have the skill to gather. It's anecdotal at best of course, but as a rule I try to have my toons gather only what they have as a crew skill.

 

- The top number of scans I could do before a lockout has been six in a row so far, all on the same node.

 

- Nodes have an internal cooldown after being gathered of a very short time. This prevents one node being harvested by 22 alts in a row. Having multiples of a certain node is therefore not useless.

 

- I have had slicing nodes yield green and blue lockboxes and I can finally confirm they DO in fact yield gathering missions, just like in the open worlds. My encrypted terminal coughed up a 450 slicing mission yesterday.

[Muljo_Stpho]

Actually I think the unclickable nodes may be a bug after all. Here was a node run I had cycling through some characters the other day:

 

* 5 of my characters had been left logged out in my Nar Shaddaa stronghold where I have my nodes, the rest had been left elsewhere and traveled there

* logged into first character already there, harvested encrypted terminal and got exhaustion right away

* logged into second character already there, encrypted terminal was unclickable, harvested from perfect upari node (side note: I have only ever harvested from this node exactly once before this so I don't think there's a counter or anything disabling them after a certain number of successful uses like someone earlier had assumed.)

* logged into third character already there, encrypted terminal and perfect upari both unclickable, harvested a green color crystal node

* logged into fourth character already there, all three previous nodes unclickable, harvested a red color crystal node

* logged into fifth character already there, all four previous nodes unclickable, harvested a different green color crystal node

* logged into first character that was left somewhere else, traveled to stronghold, all five previous nodes were found to be clickable. Not just the first one or two I had used, ALL of them were functional this time.

* cycled through most of the rest of my characters traveling to the stronghold from somewhere else each time, harvesting various nodes, and never seeing any more unclickable nodes

 

My conclusion is that leaving characters logged out in the same stronghold and loading directly into the same stronghold on different characters consecutively can cause nodes that you harvest to load in broken, but loading into the stronghold after logging in somewhere else will load all nodes correctly.

 

Before this, in the first week of strongholds when I had characters logged out in all strongholds and was using the free grade 1 nodes in all of them, I had thought I had noticed a pattern of broken nodes fixing themselves in the time it took me to cycle through 1-2 more characters, but I realize now that the times when I saw broken nodes must have only been when I went through a few characters in a row that were loading into the same stronghold.

 

- It is my impression that a lockout will occur quicker if the toon doing the harvesting does NOT have the skill to gather. It's anecdotal at best of course, but as a rule I try to have my toons gather only what they have as a crew skill.

 

This sounds like a reasonable theory and we'll have to try to test it out a bit. I wonder though... Would it just be having the matching gathering skill or is it possible that it calculates the chance for exhaustion based on the level of the skill as well? Like perhaps the default value for the rate starts at something high like 80% and it subtracts 5% for every 50 points in the skill? (Note that in this suggested formula if you lack the correct skill it would simply be using a value of 0 for the skill level.)

Edited September 7, 2014 by Muljo_Stpho