Why Timer / Unspoiled gathering sucks - A NQ rant

Hi Community, Hi SE,

The relationship between players and gathering should be simple.
Player spends X hours mindlessly or skillfully doing an activity.
This activity rewards items which are of value to other players.

Normally, and I may just be speaking for myself, I go gathering when I'm waiting for my DPS queue timer to pop.
This gives me a reason to stay interested in the game when I would otherwise be bored or prevented from doing other things I like. (Chocobo racing)

Timer based gathering defeats the purpose of this.
1) To timer gather, you spend exorbitant amounts on teleport fees. Even more so after the 4.0 patch, since you can easily spend 999g each way.

2) If you don't want to teleport or want one specific item, you are stuck with nothing to do for 20 minutes or more.

3) No one expects gathering to be fun. We expect it to be rewarding in ways that are fun/profitable later. I would love to watch anime of Scrubs while gathering, but I'm too busy sweating timers. This is stressful.
Stressful means less time I want to spend doing something.

Positive feedback:
Instead of artificially inflating the value of items through timer gathering, consider lowering the gather rate.
Create rewards systems that benefit skilled players:
Player managed to get 6/6 on a hard node? Free GP
Player successfully gathers one of each on a node? More free gp or increased hits.

Instead of punishing players for "good" behaviour, game it and reward it.

You are aware that there are significant more not-times items to gather than times nodes? So if you only want to gather to kill time: You can easly do that.

With Stormblood we got 2 eorzeanian hours again to hit nodes - I'm finding this way beyong stressful, its just a thing to get used to and involves some planning, nothing more.


To go through your points a bit and then finish why I'd prefer timed nodes over other possible solutions to limit the amount of items gained:

1) Teleport fees - if 999 gil is to much for you to pay, you're not gathering/crafting right. 999gil is nothing compared to the price people are paying for the items you've gathered or even more the items you've crafted from them. (We also need the "high" teleport costs to take money out of the game - if you want to spend less, aks your FC for the teleport-buff or use scrolls from your GC to reduce the cost of teleporting)

2) "If you dont want to teleport"? Yeah, sure, if you dont want to teleport to the gathering location, you wont get anything - same with any normal node, really... for the "want one specific item"-part: That comes down to your organisation skills. I do consider that a bit annyoing myself, I'll admit that. But in the end its really "I know that I'll need this item often, so I'll hit the node each time I can"

3) As already mentioned: at least the SB are feelign really relaxed to me; HW could be stressful but whenever I went on real gathering-tours it felt also engaging and you were always busy - instead of having this really dull gameplay. Besides: I can watch a movie and gather even timed nodes...? :confused: Its probably really just a matter of getting used to it

A last note to "rewarding skillful players" - really? Gathering requires no skill at all - you'd be rewarding either the waste of GP or luck...
Lowering the gathering rate sounds awefully unfun - I'm already frustrated each time I miss when my gathering rate is 93% and you want to make that worse? Or have me spend lots of scrips on GP-potions so I can use "skills" to increase the gathering rate? No, not fun.

Which leads me to the question why I prefer timed nodes over other solutions:
We are in an agreement about the need to limit the amount of certain items and there could be several ways to do that:
- only have one or two nodes out of the 6 node set spawn that item - we had this with some ARR-nodes and I consider it far more annoying than timed nodes. It forces me to hit nodes that I have no use for and gather for longer than I want to - timed nodes are nice in that regard: I get to the node, hit it, get my items and know that I'm done for the next 30 minutes.
- have the item appear at random -we're having this in HW and I hate it. I dont want RNG in gathering, no thanks. Timed nodes gurantee me that I'll get my items without having to pray...
- have the item appear only after so and so many items have been gathered sucessfully on that node - cool, leaves me one, maybe two hits to get what I want while getting tones of stuff I dont need. Its not fun to clutter my inventory with useless things, in order to get what I'm really looking for...

TLDR; Timed nodes are an efficient way to limit the amount of items, withour relying on unfun mechanics like wasting time gathering useless things or RNG.
(so unless you can come up with something better... please, leave the timed nodes... I'm not opposed to getting rid of them but I cant see a better system right now - and personally, I've arranged myself with them and neither find them stressful nor unrewarding)

Nothing stops you from collecting other materials and selling them to buy unspoiled ones while you wait for another unspoiled node spawn. If you are serious about it, you should be using favorite and return destinations to reduce teleport costs (Return is only a 15 minute recast while an unspoiled node is on a 30 minute cycle).

In my opinion it's much better than RNG, and it keeps the system fresh as you have different kinds of ways of materials.