How To Fix Gathering Without Throwing the Baby Out With the Bathwater

There have been numerous complaints as of late about how the gathering system works. My goal is to properly explain that complaint, why the current systems are what they are in Alpha, why the design is actually wonderful from a gatherer's point of view, and how current complaints can be addressed within what I believe to be the current design philosophy.

Explanation and Problem

The gathering system works like this. Upon a hard server restart and every 24 hours or so afterwards, each static gathering node on the server does an RNG roll. That RNG roll is to determine the base quality of every resource on the server, what we could call the "Base Node Rarity" (BNR). When anyone mines any tin node, or any gatherable, regardless of any of their gathering stats, they will at least acquire that resource at the quality its BNR determined initially. That resource will then repeatedly respawn over the next "day" at that quality rating until the day is over and the resource re-rolls its Base Node Rarity (BNR).

This means that if you are not immediately on at server start on Thursday doing a gathering route to test every resource, you're missing out on camping legendary resources for the first day. This can get rather tedious to constantly gather resources every couple hours and interrupt your grind, but when you start working with a large guild it becomes incredibly simple. Eventually resources get missed by the campers later in the week, and after hard resets the static spawns are in different locations, but as soon as you hit a high tier resource you can camp it until its server-side gathering quality rolls again. This will only get worse as more players understand it, which I think almost every active player does at this point.

Your character's Gathering Quality Rating is essentially a joke. It involves two rolls every time you gather something, and your gathering rarity only affects the first roll. If you succeed your first roll, you then get a "Second Chance" roll to try and get a higher quality resource. Without going into the first roll breakpoints, lets say that you somehow did everything in your power to try and get your gathering quality rating high enough to where you were succeeding the first roll every 1 in 2 tries, or 50% of the time (pretty much impossible by the way). You are completely unable to affect the second chance roll, here is your percentage chance to have each rarity proc on the second chance roll:

Uncommon - 90% (9/10)
Rare - 10% (1/10)
Heroic - 1% (1/100)
Epic - 0.1% (1/1000)
Legendary - 0.01% (1/10000)

The node quality rating does not affect the second chance roll, if you are hitting an Epic Tin node and want it to proc legendary, you have a 1/10,000 chance to do so still on the second chance roll. I hope you can see the problem. You will only be getting Heroic procs 1/200 times you gather something, Epic 1/2000 times you gather something, and Legendaries 1/20,000 times you gather something even with insane gathering quality rarity. This is why on gatherables that are not static spawns and without any BNR, like huntables, you will almost never see Epic or Legendary quality, and it's essentially impossible to get high tier gear that requires mostly animal product ingredients.

The complaint players have is simple: If you don't camp resources there's no point to gathering, and another player shouldn't get tens of legendary materials in 1 day while a casual gatherer only gets 1 legendary from months of playtime.

Intrepid's Potential Intention and Inspiration: Star Wars Galaxies

Ashes of Creation takes a lot of influence from many MMOs, but when it comes to gathering its greatest inspiration is probably Star Wars Galaxies, which explains a lot.

The idea of gathering in SWG is that you are going to go exploring for high tier quality resources, and then farm them. The quality system in SWG is much more complex than the current iteration of Ashes alpha, and as another topic for another day I wish they imitated that part of the game more. But more importantly, this is a similar exploration-gathering system to what we currently have, albeit more fleshed out in SWG. The goal is pretty simple for SWG, find the best quality resources using a Surveying Device so you can craft the best gear, or sell it to others at an insane price. About once a week the resources reset, and then players have to change where and what they were farming to maximize their profit. But this reset time has a lot of variables to it.

This is a beloved mechanic of Star Wars Galaxies even though materials are zero-sum and rivalrous just like in Ashes. The point of the gameplay is to treat gathering not like a mindless activity to passively generate income like we are used to in games like Runescape or New World. The gathering gameplay IS the exploration, and the rewards are great if you keep on top of resources more efficiently than your competition.

And now all of a sudden, the BNR system makes sense. It isn't a bug, like many have claimed, it is a feature of the gathering system they plan to iterate on.

Why this is great design

I hope you are similar to me in that you have played a lot of Runescape and New World. Those are games where you truly just turn your brain off as a gatherer, and you are making the same exact income as a bot. In New World since that's freshest in my memory, I ran the same exact mining routes over and over again for days on end. Players in top companies on my server would constantly brag about cheating by using bots to just run the routes for them, and there was basically nothing I could do to compete with them for Starmetal or eventually Orichalcum routes. I couldn't kill the bots for their resources, and I couldn't improve my gathering gameplay to be superior to the bots. They ran 24/7, whereas I couldn't.

Now obviously, those people should have been banned for botting, as I hope they will be in Ashes. But understand this, you could literally not be better than a simple bot program in those games when it came to gathering simply because that's all there was to the gameplay. You just hit the same buttons over and over again on the same gathering routes, and you get income from it in the form of materials

That, to me, belongs in the wastebin of MMO design. The SWG and hopefully Ashes system is intended to reward you and me if we are intelligent about our gameplay. If you figure out the best places to gather resources compared to the competition, compared to a bot program that just gathers every node it sees, you will make a much higher profit than the average player at a much faster rate. You are rewarded for improving your gameplay, and exploring a vast diversity of areas rather than running the same route over and over again.

How to fix the current problems

The main solution I have seen from other players to the current gathering issues is this: "Get rid of BNR. That's right, just scrap it, and let me passively mine resources and proc legendaries at the same rate as everyone else, where the only improvement I can make to my gathering gameplay is to put on better gathering gear."

Kill me.

OK don't kill me, but also please, Dear God, Steven don't listen to these people. Here are some solutions:

1) Hard server resets shouldn't reset BNR. Have the timers continue where they left off when you took the servers down. That's probably not an easy feat, but it's the quickest solution to server restart rushes, and you'll need to have that in place for launch. This should be the same for world bosses as well.

2) Survey Pylons need to work as intended and within a more robust gathering framework. Yes, they are a work in progress, but the pylons are intended to work as Surveying Devices did in SWG. Right now, pylons only increase gathering quantity and gathering rarity which is to say, barely at all (remember our proc gathering percentages.) But, I think I can see the intent with certain materials.

Right now, there are many "forests" where tier 1 trees (Oak, Ash, Hemlock, Larch) will spawn randomly in that area. They unfortunately all roll as common just like huntable animals do. I think the future isn't to have BNR on an exact gathering node every 24 hours, but to have heat maps of gathering areas that are rolled instead. For example, maybe Section A of a forest is rolled to spawn mostly as common trees, but Section B has a much higher chance to spawn as uncommon. That would let BNR work over areas instead of exact static nodes, and remove camping an exact gathering node from the system entirely. The purpose of your survey pylon will be to tell you the immediate and immediate future BNR in that area, and that will let you know where the best sections of forest you can farm at are.

Survey pylons in my opinion should only work on the same exact tier of gatherable as the pylon is. The higher quality materials used to craft the pylon should provide more precise ranges for possible rarity spawns in the area, and maybe even more exact locations within an area for current higher quality gathering nodes.

3) Variability in gathering node timers and quality reset timers. I should not be able to just log into my alt at set periods of time to gather legendary Western Larch every couple of hours since I know the exact spawn timer. The BNR should also reset more randomly. I shouldn't know if it's been 24 hours to go searching again, maybe if it's been 18 hours and the BNR of an area has reset, I won't know that unless I use another surveying pylon.

4) Gathering rarity rating should boost the node quality rating, not work separately. This is basically it. If I'm mining an epic node, it shouldn't be a 1/10,000 chance to proc as legendary if I have insane gathering gear. It should be a 45% chance for it to proc as legendary. If it's Heroic, it should have a 9% chance to proc as legendary, etc.

5) Land management should work to improve BNR. If you know the land management system, you know. One of my favorite moments from Pre-Alpha Two was that we cut down an entire forest and it didn't regrow. I hope everyone who supports this game gets to experience that. If my fellow citizens of Miraleth are tending to the forest, we should be getting more Weeping Willow spawns over the area, and they should be of higher quality. And also let me kill all of these damn invaders trying to take all of our wood! Miraleth for Miralethians!!! Alas, a time for another post.

Hope you enjoyed this post, and it gave you a good idea of how the gathering system currently works. And hopefully I gave some good suggestions to Intrepid on how to fix problems with the current gathering iteration. And even more hopefully, Intrepid already knew all of the gathering camping problems, had better solutions to what I suggested, and this post just put some readers at ease for what to look forward to in Ashes. That or you fell asleep halfway through and I provided some good Z's to you.