OFFICIAL NEWS

wrong, the bug appears either way

Let's hope for option number one. As a relatively casual player, things are now much improved.

Before the merge, if I found supreme mats I knew the game was dying... now if i get the odd supreme mat I know it was the homin who died.

Which frankly, (you don't mind if I call you Frankly?) is the way it should be.

As for the bug, I 've relied for years on those mis-messages to know when I should move on ... I'm not sure I'll understand a straightforward "it's not here divit, go look elsewhere"

Fix in case of option 1) ETA = uncertain, month ? 6 months ? a year ? bug cant be fixed ?

Fix in case of option 2) and 3) ETA = next server maintance after server poll is over which can be the day after or within a week after poll closing.

Tantalos: That's only half the truth: As I said before, option 2 and 3 do not fix the digging messages, and thus do not fix the situation on the surface.

Irfidel: None of the options will fix the bug. It is naive to believe that this would be the case, no matter how the vote is.

But option 2 and 3 will relieve the situation especially in the PR, given that the bug will not go away soon. Would it, there would not be this survey. I am sure that the devs and the ryzom core team are doing their best to fix the bug, and that it will remain high priority no matter what's the outcome of this poll, which, in my opinion, is tainted by campaigning and flyby f2p votes most probably, anyway.

I would welcome going back to the grouped spot scheme because it granted new PR diggers chances for exc and sup findings during leveling, and gave an incentive to level furher when they found themselves unable to harvest exc or sup in high level PR. All season spots were not likely to be depleted on the fly, and are not, now. The other were emptied after season change all time.#

Now, this chance for PR beginners is gone. They will find exc and sup only by chance in the best case. And, even worse, nexus minor as an interesting digging region has been destroyed that way, contrary to what the lore says.

Therefore I advocate solution 2 or 3, and would advocate it no matter when and whether the bug will be fixed.

The prospecting/tracking bug of giving misleading messages has been there all along. The buo spot in GoO by the Kara TP used to give you no mats found in this area. Move to the center of the node field and you would get depleted message. Experience told you to wait a 1 to 3 ingame hours and the choice mats at least should be back.

But how did you know there was anything there? There were at least 2 out of game map sites that told you what was there. Otherwise the no mats in this area message would have caused you to travel elsewhere with an empty bag.

And those map sites did not have all the spots mapped. And they didnt develop those maps over night. It took a long time to collect all the data that they had.

For those not using outside maps , at least the discovery of a choice spot meant that you might get the same mat in exc or sup sometime at that spot.

With the complexity of the mat spawning I doubt you will ever get perfect prospect messages. Not without a team of programmers redesigning the entire system. The best that we can hope for is a little better priority in the messages that the system does send to us so as to be less misleading.

As PR was designed after the surface world the placement of choice/excellent and supreme at the same spot was probably a necessity.

In the real world prospectors do not always find all dig spots, but when they find a low grade spot there is the hope of finding a better grade of the same type nearby. And that concept is good for a game world too.

why not have Choice/Excellent and Supreme/Excellent (since Prime Root Excellence is also scarce and finite in there can be double of ithat Sources)

This poll is a joke. More ppl voting for mat location then all of the merge related polls together.
Very hard to believe these are all unique player votes.

HI, I vote for 3.

The current situation is just invivable. However I hope that the bug cann be fixed rapidly.

Daomei: I hear you. The bug however exists for a longer time than I play this game. That means it is certainly not on a high priority currently. Which emphasizes my point. As does this survey.

It may not be easy to fix. However if we look at the infamous ring-crash-bug, in hindsight it just was really low priority. Presumably because Winchgate did not want to afford another server to host officially sanctioned (or officially developed) scenarios. As soon as the development efforts were focused on it, it was fixed within a few weeks.

I'm on thin ice here, because being a software developer myself, and not having looked at the source code that I'm discussing here, I can only work on observations. I have a different theory for this survey that I don't want to discuss, because all speculation is moot and does not really help.

The game would benefit from bugfixes, though. And so far we, as a community, were pretty clear on that. Both with respect to old players as well as new players. And the prospecting message bug is a good example of one that affects all of us. I don't think it helps if we discuss who is hindered most by this.

Return the Pre-merge material locations. ALL of them, not only PR.

But Amiko -- I *like* the new locations in Void. :))

I like having new things to research and learn every now and then, Atys changing has always been important. I say randomize more often, and add more lower quality mats in more locations. Or get crazy and introduce more types of mats.

Looking like this survey is going to give us no answer.. unless we consider bitttymacod's suggestion that option 2 and 3 are really the same..

I do find it reather curious that whenever one option takes the lead, another is catching up. I do hope the devs are watching out for level 1 toons voting, or looking at the incoming IP addresses (not very reliable for unique votes either).

I agree that 2 and 3 are basically close and are most probably implying a "not 1" decision. And I agree further that there is a lot of cheating in the voting process.

It would be quite hard to set up "rights to vote". A possibility would be to allow subbed only, though I would not feel well about. A further one would be excluding all accounts created after the start of the poll. But that would have worked once, now fake accounts are in existance - most probably many preexisted such as the lvl1 toons cheating with occupation special products.

Best solution would be an open vote. Then, numerous methods to manipulate would be visible to the publc.