Harvesting hides and animal parts

Llyr wrote: Also my brain keeps screaming opportunity cost at me as i sat through way too many lectures about that to ever get it out of my brain >.> As someone who is not an economist, but has been involved in business and financial decisions for over 30 years, I have to confess that the whole notion of "opportunity cost" seems totally bogus to me. Once you make a decision to spend money on something, that's it. There can be no genuine "cost" to something that you didn't do. But since economists are obviously doing a great job in running our real world economies perhaps I might be wrong .

Gragnog wrote: The cost of troops and gatherers and the value of them differers from person to person. In my opinion gatherers are cheap and troops are expensive. Basing the value on market prices is really amusing to me as those are based on what people think things are worth. For me hides and other gathered items cost nothing as I gather them myself but I never have enough weapons and armour and have to buy those, thus to me troops cost something and gatherers cost nothing. Trying to convince me 60 skinners are worth more than 60 Marshals is a joke. Animal parts around my cities and hides are never sold but converted into items my military can use.

Edited by Halithore - 30 May 2013 at 16:48

Auraya wrote: ES2 wrote: Auraya wrote: I'm still unsure why you need to kill harvesters when you can bump them, unless someone has sent an army to mark your kill. Whatever you claim - 5 squares, 10, 100 - you can do so without killing someone's skinners.  <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">I would imagine it would be a form of punishment for leeching off of someone else's kill.  ..and therein lies the problem. If you don't mark your kills and it isn't on sov, why are you getting annoyed? Just bump them and be done with it.  Plenty of people kill NPCs, take the hides and leave the other parts because they are not very profitable - scavengers aren't really much of a problem, those parts are only going to waste. That or there are, for example, 8 hides left on a square and a larger player doesn't want to waste a cotter's time for only 8 hides.. but a 50 pop player might.  Everyone has a different rule as to what is acceptable and what isn't. It's confusing for me let alone players newer to the game. Bumping says 'hands off' without the need to destroy anything. Unless someone is actively and repeatedly harvesting your kills, I don't see the need to punish them.<span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.4;"> </span>

I don't have a huge issue with people harvesting near me if I am not going to harvest the parts myself. If I want you gone, I'll bump you. Other players have made their positions clear and if they want to be more aggressive about it that is their business and their alliance. If you have read this and wish to harvest near Gragnog you now know what he expects of you, and if you can't be bothered to comply you know what to expect of him.

My issue is more of locality. I keep my alliance clustered, as do my confeds. That means we have a relatively small harvesting area that is densely populated with harvesters. If there is something dead near me, I want my allies to have a shot at it. If someone I have no relationship with, who lives 30 squares away and has plenty of NPCs right next to him, prefers to kill and harvest in the middle of my territory instead, that deserves a bump in my mind. Except, when they decide to set an army on that spot, I can't just boot them off gently. Troops and cotters die and it turns into drama. So if you ask this intruder not to harvest so close and he replies "If you had sov there I wouldn't be harvesting 3 squares from this town, but since you don't I have as much right to it as you." By that token I could send fifty armies to occupy every non-sovereign square around this person's capitol and harvest anything that dies there. A jack*** move to be sure, but apparently well within my rights.

Agree with Hora in that there are places on the map where the level of NPC vs. NPC kills is great enough that there is no requirements to send out armies to produce something to gather. I accept that the numbers of people trying to gather may also be a factor.

There are also places on the map where common hides are quite hard to get in any quantity which makes building or replacing skinners far from easy.  I ended up having to buy enough to make my skinners and would be very annoyed if someone killed them off instead of bumping. For the same reason there is a risk in sending an army to an NPC kill in that you might unintentionally kill someone else's skinners.

For something that I had actually killed I nearly always let my army occupy for a day or two. As much to keep my gathers safe as to mark my kill.

Of course you adapt to the environment that you are in. An area with many active gatherers is going to require more care than one where spare wildlife is plentiful. In a similar manner a small player from a small alliance would probably not be very successful enforcing a ten square rule. In fact it would be an extremely foolish thing for a player in a small alliance to try.

They definitly do!