Chocobo Digging Updates?

[Claquesous]

Along with Gardening, Chocobo Digging has become much less profitable these days due to the abundance of materials available from Abyssea. Here are a couple changes I would like to see:

1. More zones! Come on, let me dig in the past.
2. More items! Now that elemental ores are worthless, can you add some more valuable items for us high level diggers to dig up?
3. Less fatigue. I understand that fatigue was implemented as an RMT counter measure, but are there really any high level chocobo diggers? I don't think it would really hurt anything to bump the fatigue threshold by 20 or so per digging level.
4. Faster reload rates. These really aren't a problem at all these days, but if you make the fixes I suggested above everybody and their Moogle will be out digging and so it will be!

Thanks for your consideration.

[Unctgtg]

I think its fine just the way it is.

[MarkovChain]

No it's not fine lol. SE should allow for non RMT to do chocobo digging as much as they want.

The RMT used this was to dig nonstop 24/24 with bot. Make it so that if you "dig nothing" like 10 times in a row your fatigue increases by 1 and when it reaches 10 you have to wait 24H. No way RMT would bother keeping digging something with this system as it would force them to not bot.

[AyinDygra]

Chocobo Digging really does need changes.

Available Items
As a maximum skill digger with a Chocobo raised for max digging stats and a full set of chocobo riding gear including the special digging body piece, it used to be my primary method of making money (combined with crafting what I dug up), but the most profitable directly dug up items (elemental ores and orichalcum ore) plummeted with the introduction of Magian Trials and Abyssea's gold chests (massive supply, itsy-bitsy demand.) It is still possible to make money with digging, but I wouldn't count on it as my main source of income anymore.

Inventory
My main issue these days is still inventory space. To most efficiently use my time, digging requires me to go out with about 20 stacks of Gysahl Greens and enough room for everything I'll dig up without tossing every single junk item (pebbles, I hate you so.) Before, I had no trouble making room for about 40 slots to dig comfortably. These days, I have so many unused seals from Dominion Ops that I eventually want to use, and don't want to discard, plus all the Rare/Ex accessories and items that are not covered by the new storage slips, that I really don't have much room anymore. I have all the inventory expansions that are available, and it's still tight. Once my server finishes its merge, I'd have to go play inventory juggling through the delivery box to make room again.

RMT
My main issue with RMT was that they'd "Dig up" certain zones so no items were left for me when I got there. The fatigue idea stopped individual diggers from 24/7 digging, but they had multiple accounts that they simply rotated... making fatigue only really impact honest players who can't dig 24/7 with different characters. The only thing that really stopped RMT, in my experience, was the drastic drop in price of anything worth digging up. It was no longer profitable for them to abuse the digging system.

3 things that would help bring back Chocobo Digging, for me, would be:

* Gysahl Greens stacking to 99. This alone would probably give me enough space to dig these days. (4 stacks plus 15-20 open spaces for dug up items would be easy to make room for.)

* Add new items to digging (perhaps in new areas) that are worthwhile to dig up. I don't expect exclusive items to chocobo digging, but we need something. (I wouldn't mind completing some quest like digging up new chocograph pieces to bring chocobos into the new areas, or only allow personally raised - not rented - chocobos to dig there.)

* Availability of items tied only to Fatigue, not to "Zone stock." I wouldn't mind the fatigue-limited number of items I can dig up if I could use all of my dig attempts in only the area that has the valuable items that I'm trying to get, during a single digging session, at the time convenient to me to go digging. When zones are "all dug up" -- empty of items -- either you wait for the zone to slowly restock (chocobo riding time is limited, so you can only wait for so long before having to either rent a new chocobo and ride back out to the desired zone, or use another charge on your whistle) or move on to another zone that has less optimal digging results, just to get "something" while you have time to dig (real life schedules, limited time).

I may add a few more suggestions as I take more time to think about it.

[Haytienne]

Yes please

[Olor]

I would like to second Ayin's comments!

[Fiarlia]

Though I don't do Chocobo Digging, these sounds like pretty good changes.

[geekgirl101]

Why isn't this being looked at by anyone else? It's a fantastic idea that's been overlooked and ignored. Overdigging isn't an issue anymore because there's no profit in it. 2 years to cap chocobo digging skill providing you dig every single day and spend over 7mil in ghysal greens? It's become a dead hobby. It's like those lousy facebook games, "sorry we know you like our game but you can't play anymore today." It's lame, and even if RMT are still actively digging zones out putting a 100 item fatigue aint gonna solve that issue. All you've gone and done is stopped the actual players from being able to take up an ingame hobby whilst RMT and their excessive number of accounts are just logging in one after another, and the same goes for the RMT fishing bots.