Posted April 1, 2016 With the recent addition of tile alchemy, I found myself grinding Forestry for more efficient fruit harvesting. Peeking at the decompiled source, I was disheartened to see that picking fruit from trees has a difficulty that scales with your skill--likely a remnant from before pruning existed, which also scales with skill and is generally far better for grinding Forestry. While scaling difficulty isn't inherently a bad thing, it limits how good you can get at an action. In the case of Forestry, higher skill actually makes you worse. A few quick trials in a simulator showed an ugly trend: even with a QL95 sickle, your average fruit QL actually goes down as your Forestry skill passes 80. I had hoped that I was just missing something with the skillchecks and this wouldn't happen in the live game, but the simulator was right on the money, and indeed my average fruit QL has gone down after grinding from 70 to 90 Forestry. The increased skill does speed up harvest time, but that is cold comfort when I'm actually worse at producing fruit. The problem is all in the difficulty for harvesting fruit, which is (Forestry skill / 2). This means that, beyond 80.0 skill, picking fruit actually has a higher difficulty than mining gold, and the difficulty keeps climbing while your sickle QL can only go so high before it becomes impractical to maintain. My solution would be to set fruit harvesting to a fairly low difficulty, somewhere around 20; it should be harder than picking sprouts, but not by a great deal. Since the simulation was correct about my experience with Forestry, I'll also use its results to show the difference in live versus proposed QLs: Live fruit QLs, with Forestry/2 difficulty: 70 skill, QL95 sickle: ~QL58.7 average 80 skill, QL95 sickle: ~QL59.4 average 90 skill, QL95 sickle: ~QL57.9 average 95 skill, QL95 sickle: ~QL56.27 average Proposed fruit QLs, with 20 difficulty: 70 skill, QL95 sickle: ~QL70 average 80 skill, QL95 sickle: ~QL73 average 90 skill, QL95 sickle: ~QL74.5 average 95 skill, QL95 sickle: ~QL74.7 average The fun thing about 20 difficulty is that, even at 99.999992 skill, harvesting fruit with a QL1 sickle would still have a ~50.4% gain rate. Players could still grind Forestry by going out and harvesting fruit, while there would still be the expected incentives, and rewards, for very high skill. 11 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 1, 2016 (edited) If this is true, it's just broken. +1 IMO if we're playing a sandbox and not some Fun RNG Simulator, skill nothing should affect fruit QL too much, because i fail to see how you can mess with your apples when picking them from a tree. Edited April 1, 2016 by zigozag 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 1, 2016 (edited) +1 one of the reasons why I don't grind forestry over 80. Maybe we could also add chance for extra fruit? Let say +1 at 70 forestry and +2 at 90 forestry with +3 at 100! Edited April 1, 2016 by archer 3 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 1, 2016 +1 I find the quality inconsistency in harvesting fruit annoying, foraging, etc - as with all the RNG related activities in Wurm. How can fruit being picked - in season - range in ql from 1 (with dmg) to 99 - it is just a stupid waste of time and effort ! Please, Dev's, fix RNG ~ to be more in line with skill level, ql of tool and materials used. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 1, 2016 +1 Stick a cap based on forestry skill on top of that (like any other gathering skill) and you have yourself balance. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 1, 2016 +1 problem id'd and a potential 'reasonable, simulator tested' solution pointed out by the community - what more can a development team ask for? 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted April 4, 2016 I'm going to take this one step further: Remove any scaling of action difficulty with skill. Harvesting fruit is not the only thing that does this, and it makes no sense for a task to get harder as your skill improves. If the purpose of this scaling is to "average out" QL of results by making your skill matter less, there are better solutions to that. 3 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
