OFFICIAL NEWS

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.

I'm curious to know how the Devs are going to weigh this poll. According to earlier claims there is one vote per accounts so that means just shy of 500 accounts voted which seems a bit unrealistic to me.

Also with the votes so close between #1 and #3 pretty much half the population would be unhappy with the change back to the old ways.

We've gone through so much change throughout the merge and we have taken the time to adjust to these drastic changes. Creating new maps for the mats, adjusting to the new economy, learning to live with 3 different communities. I've learned to accept the new style of ryzom and by reverting back one MAJOR aspect of the merge I feel like it is undermining the entire principle of adjustment.

Meagon, you not absolutely right because also 88 more accountuser vote for the old source type. The reason for that is, because the souces atm are realy not what most players wanted.

For me more people are unhappy with the crap we have atm and do not want to wait for a fix and so without an eta.

And on the voting is nothing unrealistic for me. I vote and i have a fullaccount, bingo.
Happy that nr3 wins :)))

changing again will be another slap in the face, but hey, we are used to accept whatever bone they throw at us, so, no big deal right?

good luck if you think the old way will be better after the merge. the bug will be there, and if you're not the first one to get to the zun spot, you wont find even excel anymore.

For weighing the vote I would suggest
- discarding all votes from accounts created after start of the poll
- discarding all votes from accounts with less than 48 login hours for any character
- weighing votes from f2p accounts half the vote from subbed accounts

That's a good idea as far as accounts created after the vote not counting at all.. sure maybe 1 or 2 legtimate players are not counted, but I seriously doubt that people with 4 weeks experience have had enough exposure to PR for it to affect them much (if at all).

Also as far as account with no play time.. they are likely not players (but alts or vote shills), and again, no tgoing to be an issue that should affect them..

Free accounts half votes? Not sure, but it's not really in the interest of the game to weigh the paid accounts and free accounts the same either. Servers don't operate on good will , but cash... so perhaps not a bad suggestion (I'm somewhat torn on it, some free players keep the game alive by word of mouth and enthusiasm just as much as the rest of us).

As Meagon indicates, this is not a very conclusive vote.. I can work with the current situation.. but I don't care either way if things change again, so be it, heck there's still some mats I haven't had the time to track or find yet...