OFFICIAL NEWS

+1 Neva, the best reason to vote for any option but the first really. At present, it's untenable, there are some workarounds found by some of us, but they're really not universally known.. nor 100% reliable in and of themselves.

I voted 1. I like it now as the exe and sup nodes are in different places. After all sups are empty pretty soon after season change I can still go look for excellents. I also like the challenge that arises from new source locations.

And about the bug: I actually don't know what the issue is. The bug with depleted nodes showing the status of other nodes inside your prospection range is ancient. There are at least two ways to easily work around that. Both tracking and node prospection work fine for me as i always know what the displayed message means (although it's sometimes not exactly the message i would expect - a fix would be nice).

"maybe you dont know the game realy "
humm!! i did find all the mp (sup) i needed solo for my craft and solo gaming is also a way of playing is it not?!

"By the way: you use the older crafters also i gess"
Having a good contact list is not part of the game!!!? ;)

I don't find the new spots a probleme. what ever the solution will be it will be
Good game to all!

ps: Lonara if you need mp or crafteur contact let me know ;)

The options presented imply that the bug has to do with ressources being splitted. The bug don't appear if the different classes are being groupped either redistributed again at new or reverted back to the old spots.

Why trying to fix a bug that dont appear if the mats are groupped ? I guess everyone want to use PR again ASAP and dont want to wait for fixes unabe to unbugged dig in PR for months ? years ? never ?

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.