Full acknowledgement that professions/crafting is WIP. I wanted this out there for consideration before a different system is entrenched.
Outline
Instead of gathering nodes being limited resources that respawn (limiting the amount of players that can use them), each node is infinite but individual gatherers have an allotment of "harvests" that refreshes each week.
Miscellaneous
Outline
Instead of gathering nodes being limited resources that respawn (limiting the amount of players that can use them), each node is infinite but individual gatherers have an allotment of "harvests" that refreshes each week.
- Eliminates incentive to spawn-rush while maintaining a lever to throttle incoming rate of materials
- Optionally, you can still have a cooldown for how often an individual can use a specific node (once a day on the Tin in Fool's Canyon for example, or only having this for high grade nodes)
- Optionally, you can have higher grade nodes more costly to harvest
- Encourages more cross-player collaboration to meet tradeskill goals, rather than relying on an individual's farming capability
- i.e. barter your materials from more players that have 2 bars each, rather than that one character that has 10 bars
- Adds some more strategy and interesting decision-making
- Gatherers need to decide whether to save their allotment for higher grade nodes, or spend it on the easy, accessible stuff (and if they are using the materials, their priorities shift as they progress and need different things)
- If rare nodes are locked behind harder content, groups will form to get a larger amount of gatherers to that location, rather than just a single individual
Miscellaneous
- Would be helpful to have a !command to check your available allotment
- OOC suspension of disbelief is required but it feels equivalent to nodes that become available on a semi-predictable timer
- Civillians could be given an increased allotment of harvesting to distinguish them as the premier crafts class (thanks to Spinal for the suggestion)
- Reasoning being that civillians just have more time, since they're not adventuring, training, etc.
- There is a risk that players could create alternate characters solely for the purpose of leveraging their harvest allotment. Individuals doing this for themselves are prohibited by the muling rule, but it is harder to detect with coordinated player groups.
- Alt-gatherer behaviour would need to be discouraged/punishable.
- Mechanical mitigation would be to tie harvest refresh to expenditure of the character's RP XP pool. Rather than a weekly refresh, allotments are accrued after a semi-randomised amount of RP XP ticks are gained (still with an overall cap per week of how many can be gained). This would make alt-gatherers time intensive to maintain and forces interaction with the world.