Speed mining

As a miner, I started mining a node, and after the first swing, another player came by and started mining in the same area. I was clicking the item I wanted the moment it became available, mining as fast as I could, yet somehow the other guy finished before me and ran off while I was still on my last swing.

Is there some kind of trick to harvesting nodes really quick, was that lag I just saw, or was that a bot? This is really boggling my mind right now and I need to know.

could have been just lag ;/ all the different bots ive seen drop from the sky at each node and disappear (teleport) when done mining

Could just be lag. I've noticed the rate that I can farm stuff with Botany decreases a LOT when I'm streaming Netflix at the same time. When I've got Netflix open on my other monitor, I've frequently seen people get to my node after my first swing and finish before I do.

There were a few times earlier in my leveling of miner where I saw people mining superfast as well. And I was like hmm that must be some kind of a gatherer skill they have cross-classed to speed things up or something. I never did really research it to find out. But I havent seen that sort of thing in a while now, but I have seen what your talking about. I'll be mining at my normal regular pace and someone comes along and hits it double my speed easily, and gets done.

There are speed hacks out there, but I've noticed a lot of the time it's just someone with a bad connection. Easy way to notice this is watching them just before and after mining a node. If they suddenly pause for a few seconds, they are probably already ahead of what they are doing but the server has yet to catch up.

I play on both keyboard+mouse and Xbox 360 controller. I have noticed that with the controller the response is way faster while spamming the X controller button to select the gather item in the node menu compared to spamming mouse-clicks. So I use keyboard+mouse for battles and crafting while I switch to controller for the more mindless gathering activities.

Try pressing just numpad0 instead of clicking, it's much faster, you can even press it to target the node instead of clicking on it. But not sure if its this what they are doing...