Harvester please read.

The only reasonable way to make this fair is if they decide to add an NPC that goes out and farms group/raid zones for equipment. Let's set it up exactly the same way as they plan on doing the harvesting bots. You choose an NPC and tell it what tier you want it to farm, which is the same as the telling the harvester bot what tier you want. Then, you tell it what type of character you want the equipment usuable for (fighter, mage, priest, scout), which is exactly the same as telling a farmer bot which type of node you want it farming. This farming NPC would then return 2-3 hours later with a Legendary piece of gear from the tier you wanted and usuable by the class you chose. If they decide to allow the harvester bots to get rares, then allow the farming bot to get Fabled.
In all reality, those would be exactly the same NPCs. One is for adventurers who don't want to harvest and the other is for harvesters (and others) who can't or don't want to group or raid. If you're going to add one type of NPC, make it fair for ALL the players and add equal types of bots. Makes sense to me...instead of catering AGAIN only to the people that raid and don't want to bother with "menial" tasks like harvesting.
Oh, I forgot to mention. Why not also add an NPC farmer for master books? Once again, set it to the tier and type you want like the farmer bot. Another way to keep things fair.
Sound good to everyone? I thought so.

CHICKEN LITTLE, WAIT UNTIL IT'S ON TEST AND SEE HOW IT REALLY ENDS UP WORKING.

Remember, Domino is AT Fan Faire. Give 'em at least time to get BACK AT THEIR DESKS and answer the concerns people are raising.

o0odangergirlo0 wrote:

It will take 2 minutes to camp out to an alt, click the harvester, harvest 33 nodes, and camp back to your main.

A busy raid guild with 40 active players will be non stop clicking this

If it drops rares players might 2 box it with a friends account

33 nodes in 1 click is too good to be true if it gives the same chance for rares.

I would not count on the player base slacking on this, at least not until rare prices drop through the floor.

Althought I agree on the principle that a bot is a bot and a generally bad idea.... I would be more worried about the supposedly (other thread) bottomless resource storage for guilds. The need to store your harvestables somewhere (bank, broker, vault) until it's needed gives an upper limit to how much can be supplied for free to guildies.

Sigrdrifa@Lucan DLere wrote:

Where was Domino when this idea was in the planning stage?? Did she raise any objections? Did she speak up for harvesters? Sounds like she thought it was "peachy" idea and that bots were just the thing for tradeskills

tikasa wrote:

The thing is, raid gear CAN be bought. I know this because, well, I sell it.
A raid guild, however, would not purchase it for a member, because then that member is locked out of the raid zone it came from.
Oh, and I have never seen nor heard of a raid guild purchasing all of the masters a character needed. Getting a few masters for key classes is common, getting all of the masters for any class does not happen. If it did, I would have joined that guild, had them buy all my masters, and then promtly left. I look around at guilds on all servers enough to know what guilds are providing.
Oh yeah, screenshot of a guild bank with 30k plat and only your alts as members please.

Flaye@Mistmoore wrote:

To me, this is as much of a bot as the shiny collector house pet.
With the badger I can get as many random shinys as I want as quickly as I want, assuming I have done the ground work of getting the fertilizer. With the harvet NPC I can get 100 pulls every 2 hours, and that timer is apparintly shared by all in my guild, and this can not be sped up at all.
I admit, this is something SoE could implement in a way that hurts more than it helps, and I would not be supprised to see it done that way at lunch. However, it is also something that could provide those in guilds with the disposition to actually spend resourses to get one of these NPCs (high level casual guilds as a guess, count how many of them are on your server!) could use to remove some of the dependancy they have on the broker, while providing little to not other benefits.

Izzypop wrote:

Raiders that SELL raid gear like Noaani does would have no qualms at all in yet another exploit ... esp if it was SOE sanctioned. Any means needed to stay number 1 huh Noaani?

tikasa wrote:

Yes, I intend on maintaining my current position is the number one character on my server by dominating the lichenclover root market!
Which, naturally, I intend on dominating through a mass army of single character guilds at level 30, each of which has one of these NPCs, and a bot program to make them all hail the NPC and get a full stack of said roots every 2 hours!
Oh wait... people can still harvest their own roots.

Noaani wrote:

Second best quote about EQ2 ever!

100 pulls and 'a couple hours'
We'll use roots as the example.

Essentially, that could equal at a minimum....100 roots.

At max? 1000 roots and 10 rare roots. (only if it can actually pull rares)

But probably the average will be around 300 roots. That's 3 roots per pull.

Hardly earth-shattering.


With my max gathering level and a 10g time reduction shovel, I can pull 300 T8 roots in around half an hour.

So I can get a bot to do it and wait for 'a couple hours' or I can do it in 30 minutes.

I'm not sure what everyone is freaking out about.

Noaani wrote:

It is, & I don't like the Burynai house pet for the same reason.
I don't know what I wanted from "guild halls", but I didn't want to see them turn into places from which we can eliminate large portions of our interaction with the game world. The harvest NPC, in this context, is only the worst of them, because it's the only one that is actually a bot.
What bothers me more than anything else, tho, is the number of people who seem to be actively encouraging SOE to encourage botting.

Flaye@Mistmoore wrote:

Calling an RNG a bot is stretching that definition pretty far.

Maroger wrote:

My guess, she and the other devs were reading the -countless- posts begging for or demanding some sort of way to harvest from their own innroom or guild hall.

Karimonster wrote:

THAT is what I'm "freeking out" over.
However, it is nice that someone other than me is openly calling this what it is.

Flaye@Mistmoore wrote:

Personally, I think the harvest NPC is the least threatening of all of these that I have heard about so far, at least in terms of how it will affect my gameplay.
If the (main) guild I am in suddently decided to change their mind and get one/several of these NPCs, chances are, I would never get the chance to use them. If I want raws , I will continue to go out and harvest.
However, with a full guildhall, I will have no reason at all to go back to Qeynos. Ever.
The harvesting NPC has no bearing on the play experiance on the vast majority of people that will have access to guildhalls, but the combination of NPCs avalible to guildhalls have the potential to make cities virtual ghost towns. Which is worse?

Gorhauth wrote:

Kindly explain how hiring an NPC to harvest for you ISN'T a bot.

Flaye@Mistmoore wrote:

For starters, it isn't interacting with the world or interferring with other players.

Explain to me how hitting a button and in two hours getting harvests is a bot.

Flaye@Mistmoore wrote:

As a more specific responce to this particular statement...
This NPC is not eliminating interaction with the game world. It may very slightly reduce the interaction a very few people have with a very specific part of the game world, but it is far from eliminating anything.
What it IS doing, like it or not, is providing players with another means of interacting with the game world. As soon as guild halls go live, these NPCs are now a part of this game world, and interacting with them IS interacting with the game world.

Noaani wrote:

Well, I hadn't brought up those issues in this thread, since it's all about the harvesting. However, yes, I'm pretty concerned about those too, & for the same reasons you state.
At present, as described, the harvesting bot isn't that big of a deal; even I know that. It's the precedent I'm worried about, & the fact that I can't see any justification for it.