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Please make gathering about gathering, not 99% running around, 1% gathering

Zapatos80Zapatos80 Member, Alpha Two
in Artisanship
I know that a lot of artisanship is currently placeholder, but I still want to adress this. First, the elephant in the room: fix the obvious gamebreaking bug/feature of nodes with a fixed 2h timer respawning the same rarity all day (even legendary). But even without this atrocious "tracking and camping 2h timers" gameplay loop, gathering tier 2-3 ressources (and copper/zinc) ends up being 99% running around hoping to find a node to 1% gathering. That's also terrible gathering gameplay.

When I think MMORPG gathering, I remember Ultima Online, where if you wanted wood, you'd just head out to the many forests and get chopping. Sometimes you'd get more, sometimes you'd less, depending on how heavily harvested a given region was. If you wanted ore, you'd head out to the many mountains or mines with your pickaxe and get mining, not knowing what kind of colored vein ore you might find.

Make the gathering gameplay about gathering: I head out to the forest with my lumberjack axe and my survey tools and I get chopping. The better my tools/survey skills, the more tier 2+ mats and the better rarity I find as I chop. The survey could also tell me what kind of ressources usually spawn in the area and what chances I have of getting various mats in a given area (according to the future land score). This gives me a general idea of what i'm likely to get when I start harvesting the mountain or forest (NOT specific, pre-determined WoW-style nodes).

Artisanship is the main reason I play MMOs, and although I love the intricacies and potential of even this current barebones system (the interaction between gathering/processing/crafting), I have 0 motivation to keep going with this gathering gameplay loop. Hopefully we can get a big overhaul to the gathering gameplay sooner than later.

Comments

  • VolgarisVolgaris Member, Alpha Two
    This wall makes it really hard to test anything. Can't praise those enough who have sacrificed their time with this grind to really dig deep into crafting.
  • oddsterooddstero Member, Alpha Two
    Eh, some resources should be hunted for and rare. And with the way things are clustered currently, there's usually other stuff to collect nearby so you're 1% isn't really accurate. Maybe if you are riding around only looking for Willow or Copper...

    And having too many of the same resources in one spot is also boring. You can go out to the desert and collect 20 agave or 20 poppies (thousands of poppies) for the commission all in the same place and that's equally not so fun.
  • VolgarisVolgaris Member, Alpha Two
    I assumed he was being hyperbolic when he said 1% lol. But if you want to smith you will be running around looking for copper for quite a while and if that's the case 1% might be too generous XD. From what I read on the forums when the server boots and the resource nodes are generated one or some of those nodes are the "special" node that always spits out epic or higher materials. This node when harvested will be on a respawn timer. So the player that gets to it first will know when it will respawn and can basically locked it down until the next reboot. This breaks gathering. Static node locations, static respawn times, static "epic" nodes... what is it 2005 still?

    Not saying NW was perfect, but I didn't hate gathering in it. (I generally hate gathering because you're just running around like a drone). Nodes in a zone would respawn if the nodes got below a specific threshold. If there were 100 max hemp nodes in the area, once that number got below an X value hemp nodes still on their respawn timer would start spawning early. You couldn't harvest a zone out of resources. I don't think this applied to every resource but many it did or at least seemed to.
  • deriwhyderiwhy Member, Alpha Two
    I do hope this changes sometime soon. The scarcity of even low level nodes is daunting to say the least. I know this is Alpha and I'm here because I want to help test (and give input) the game, but my focus in most MMO's is crafting/gathering. As it is now, I can't really do much of anything. I spent 3 hours running around in an attempt to find Zinc to grind up Armorsmith. In those 3 hours, I found 2 Zinc nodes and 2 copper nodes, totally 7 Zinc and 4 Copper.

    I've also noticed that people are able to monopolize nodes they do find, if they have the time to revisit those nodes every hour on the dot. I'm sorry, but that's not ideal at all, because that just makes the game feel like work, and gives autistic people with excessive free-time a clear advantage.
  • MyrTSLMyrTSL Member, Alpha Two
    Zapatos80 wrote: »
    I know that a lot of artisanship is currently placeholder, but I still want to adress this. First, the elephant in the room: fix the obvious gamebreaking bug/feature of nodes with a fixed 2h timer respawning the same rarity all day (even legendary). But even without this atrocious "tracking and camping 2h timers" gameplay loop, gathering tier 2-3 ressources (and copper/zinc) ends up being 99% running around hoping to find a node to 1% gathering. That's also terrible gathering gameplay.

    When I think MMORPG gathering, I remember Ultima Online, where if you wanted wood, you'd just head out to the many forests and get chopping. Sometimes you'd get more, sometimes you'd less, depending on how heavily harvested a given region was. If you wanted ore, you'd head out to the many mountains or mines with your pickaxe and get mining, not knowing what kind of colored vein ore you might find.

    Make the gathering gameplay about gathering: I head out to the forest with my lumberjack axe and my survey tools and I get chopping. The better my tools/survey skills, the more tier 2+ mats and the better rarity I find as I chop. The survey could also tell me what kind of ressources usually spawn in the area and what chances I have of getting various mats in a given area (according to the future land score). This gives me a general idea of what i'm likely to get when I start harvesting the mountain or forest (NOT specific, pre-determined WoW-style nodes).

    Artisanship is the main reason I play MMOs, and although I love the intricacies and potential of even this current barebones system (the interaction between gathering/processing/crafting), I have 0 motivation to keep going with this gathering gameplay loop. Hopefully we can get a big overhaul to the gathering gameplay sooner than later.

    Well said! I hope the devs are listening and at least address our concerns with a post of some type regarding the direction they intend on going.
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