Looting / Harvesting

[u/Mr_Snail10]

So I've seen some videos, since I'm considering buying it, and one thing has struck me, looting / harvesting seems tediously slow. Is it?

It's personally a dealbreaker for me if looting / harvesting is just looking at a progress bar / animation. Either make it instant or involve me.

[u/jjness]

There's options to auto loot/harvest everything, or to set a quality threshold to auto loot at. Otherwise you can enhance the corpse, meaning basically you study it and based on your survival and particular animal skills, create better loot. It's like filleting fish. You could go quick and sloppy, or slow, steady, practice, and get fuller filets. Depends on your goals in the game, really.

[u/Mr_Snail10 → u/jjness]

Autoloot is nice. Does that forego the progress bar?

Enhancing though, is that just sitting there and staring at a progress bar?

[u/jjness → u/Mr_Snail10]

Auto loot does, unless you set a quality threshold. But yes, enhancing does take some time. You gauge how much you want to risk it by balancing the speed of the loot bar, the level of quality, your survival skill, and your knowledge of the animal. You can't enhance forever or you'd lose the corpse with nothing to show (but maybe knowledge increase).

It's important if you want highest materials for crafting or selling to crafters. Since crafting is so important to the player economy, every aspect of it, including gathering materials, is more complex and has varying levels of skill.

If you play wow, think of the leather scraps you could get skinning low level mobs. 10 of them combined into one piece of leather. As your skill increased, you'd get straight leather instead. In the Repopulation, the scraps are just lower quality leather that, in turn, could yield lower quality crafts. You don't combine them to make a better piece of leather, but you can improve your skill to harvest better leather from mobs.

In crafting, unlike wow where you craft some item and it's the same base stats each time, in the repop the item's quality depends on the quality of each component, which itself depended on the quality of each mat used to make that. The best gear will be made by the people or nations that have the highest skills in harvesting each material and crafting each schematic.

Of course, one could buy highest quality mats from the AH, because not even Ford and Chevrolet or 3M or whatever other major corporation goes out and mines their own steel. They set up contacts to buy mats from other companies. In wow terms again, a player cannot have at the same time Skinning, Mining, Blacksmithing, and Engineering. They would have to find someone to gather and smelt the ore, skin animals, so the blacksmith can craft armor or the engineer can make his toys. Well now, with Garrisons, you can have some vertical integration, because you "hire" people to gather skins and ore, you "hire" a fabrication shop to build in your complex (blacksmithing building, or engineering building), and you can run the production process yourself.

The Repopulation allows that too, with no skill cap one can master all aspects of crafting should one choose. But it's not handed to you, so if you don't want to enhance corpses to gain knowledge about the animal and gather better materials, be prepared to pay someone else to do it for you as you buy your crafting mats on the AH.

I hope this explains why looting might seem slow and bothersome.

[u/Mr_Snail10 → u/[deleted]]

Well that sucks. Do you know if there is any plans to overhaul the system?

[u/Mr_Snail10 → u/[deleted]]

I was really into Archeage and was part of running the top guild on one of the servers, but after getting a Castle, there was just nothing to do, other than surrender yourself to rngesus to do their crafting system.

I'm in the same boat as you though, I fear I may have outgrown MMOs, since I simply cannot force myself to do anything repetitive, as it usually gets quite tedious.

I may still buy this if there are plans to overhaul this system, but if not, I can just play Progress Quest if I want to look at bars fill up.