Thanks

That is a very fun idea.

Simple. Effective. Fun. I like it! Good idea @Kaitona! Keep 'em coming!

Sign me up.

This does bring up an interesting question... where does all the gold come from to make these coins?

I like it! Something to do when you feel like playing but not actually playing. I do that with fishing when I don't feel like doing anything, but just want to be in game. I go find a nice spot to fish at. Gold panning would be cool.

Maybe what we have here is a universally liked idea. I've heard the legends, but I didn't believe they were true!

An idea that has so far only had positive feedback from the forum, and has had no negative comments, of course means that Zenimax will never implement it.

I am blown away by the positive comments for my idea, thank you for being supportive. I thought about how this might work today and came up with the following:

Gold would be found in areas where you'd expect gold to be, such as river beds. With fishing, you can see activity in the water so you know where to try and fish. Instead of bubbles in the water, the sand in the water would shimmer or glow - in a subtle way. Most of the time you'd find ore but occassionally you'd get gold.

The mechanics would work like this:

You're running along and you see a glow near a river. As you approach it, it becomes interactive. You click on it and your character removes a pan as he bends low, like how your character does now when they gather clothing raws / alchemy flowers.

From there, the screen would change, as it does when you try to pick a lock. On the screen would be a top down view of your pan.

With the lockpicking game, you move across the tumblers and press a button to depress the tumbler. When it vibrates, you release the tumbler and if it locks in place, you move onto the next tumbler.

Panning is similar. You scoop the pan into the water / gravel by pressing a button. You have a limited amount of time to find the gold, like the lockpicking game. This increases as you get better at gold panning.

Flashes of gold may appear in your pan. You then swirl the pan around, using the right thumbstick or mouse. Ore or gold will appear in the pan periodically. Your controller will vibrate when it's time to stop swirling. This is when you click a button (like R2) to see what you have. If you've got ore, you raise the pan and take the ore. What you're hoping to see is gold though, which can then be sold for gold coins.

In EverQuest 2, there was a fun mini-game of collecting shinies. Anyone that played that game will know what I'm talking about. Gold panning will be fun because players will race towards spots that could have gold. It may be nothing or it could make you rich. I don't know how much gold you'd get, I'd leave that up to the developers but I'd propose it would be enough to make you a very wealthy player. It's just rare to actually find gold. (almost like a lotto system)

Trait gems maybe instead of Ores? *OARS"??

corpse wrote: »

My wife just suggested that like the lock picking for chests and doors you have the range from simple to master and the time allotted gets shorter the harder it is. Something similar could be done with your idea for the panning. Low level zones/areas would be on the simple level with RNG chance at being more difficult, while harder zones are obviously more difficult to start with. Rewards would scale with difficulty yeah?

Low levels you'd probably end up netting a lot of trash like "Sand" and "Broken Shells".

Actually I was thinking this would work differently to the scaling system found in the lock pick mini games. You'd have just as much success panning for gold in a low level area as you would in a high level area. This makes it an even playing field for everyone and replicates real gold mining - poor people had a shot at getting rich. Perhaps as you level the skill up, you unlock larger pans? I haven't thought about that.