I've run tests with friends. I live in Australia and play on Zalera server. Pick a friend who lives in NE USA area. We both go to start mining a node at the same time. The friend who lives close to the server farm is able to swing/collect twice as often as I can.

It would appear that the game client doesn't allow you to swing again, until the server has communicated back to the client that it's allowed to.

What this does is create a disparity, and makes gathering very, very slow and tedious for those living distantly to the server farms.

Is it possible to allow the game client to send another mining request after whatever the server-side timeout is meant to be (perhaps add 200ms on top of that for packet latency variations), without having the client first wait for the server to say it's ok?

This would seem to be a simple solution that would greatly level the playing field between gatherers regardless of their location in the world.

There have been times where I can start with someone, and they'll be finished as I'm taking my second swing. That's just unacceptable.