Crystal farming and gatherers

[Lemuria]

I feel that the current methods of gathering these vital resources are somewhat lacking. You either endlessly slay sprites for a chance at a drop, or you spend countless hours chopping away at the nearest tree. We have ward abilities which help us with the yield, but they're very expensive for their return, and GP restores at a trickle.

What I would like to see is a trait for miners and botanists which increases the yield of shards as an ALWAYS ON trait. Specifically shards, as crystals and clusters are not needed in quite as high quantities to warrant an ability of this kind.

The trait could improve with level, so that high level botanists and miners have an easier time gathering shards than those just starting out. In addition, tweak the wards to give increased yields with higher levels so that they're actually worth the abhorrent GP costs.

If gatherers are supposed to be the primary class for getting shards, then surely we should at least get better tools for the job.

[Thorauku]

The market is overflowing with Shards and Crystals already.

[Lyrinn]

The market is overflowing with Shards and Crystals already.

The vast majority of which are from bots.

[Thorauku]

The vast majority of which are from bots.

Exactly, giving them a skill like what the OP suggested will just result in rampant bots.

[Lyrinn]

Exactly, giving them a skill like what the OP suggested will just result in rampant bots.

It's not quite as simple as that. The problem with shards/crystals is that farming them is beyond tedious. That, coupled with the fact that crafters require disgusting amounts of them, resulted in not many people wanting to farm them, which in turn resulted in high prices. This is a perfect environment for a bot. They farm what is arguably the most annoying thing to farm in the game, be guaranteed to sell them because of the high demand, and get nice chunks of gil out of it, all with minimal effort invested. The low prices we're currently seeing are due to overbotting, but the fundamental problems are there. This is also why you saw things like bot farming diremite webs and not flax when both were in high demand. Flax is easy to farm, diremite web wasn't - which, by the way, no one seems to bot anymore because of how trivial diremite web has become.

If you make shard farming easier, more players will go out to farm them themselves, which both reduces demand and value. Depending on the botters' motives, the heavy botting may die down.

[Thorauku]

If it continues to reduce its value, do you even think that someone will bother to farm shards? When you can just farm other things that has higher value, sell it and buy the shards instead?

Unless SE completely wipes out the bots, there's no point in improving the gathering abilies of DoL.

[Lyrinn]

Botters aren't stupid either. Shards on my server dropped to 5 for a few days and they're already back up to 10. Only reason they can get away with it is because of the two flaws I've mentioned. Not fixing those flaws just because of bots is poor logic.

[Lemuria]

Some interesting discussion going on here, and I do understand your concerns about bots. One thing to remember about bots though is that many of them are lower level, since they haven't dedicated their time to levelling and mining the low level items such as shards is the slowest possible way to hit cap. I'd like to think many of them would be reported and banned long before they reached their zenith on shard gathering traits.

But it's precisely because of these bots that giving players the option to get their own shards would be beneficial. Right now, few people gather them because it's a huge timesink and incredibly tedious. The rate of gather is very slow, so players almost have no choice but to buy from the botters who sell them on the markets. Remove the market by giving players more choice on where to obtain their shards, and you'll inevitably reduce botting to a trickle at the same time.

[HEC]

When you can just farm other things that has higher value, sell it and buy the shards instead?

But by that you'll only fuel the endless circle of RMT / bots - I refuse to purchase any products / mats obviously gathered by bots. I gather all my shards / crystals / clusters myself while watching telly mostly - not the best way to do tedious in game tasks but at least I can rest assured that I've not supported those bastewads ...

[Raestloz]

If it continues to reduce its value, do you even think that someone will bother to farm shards? When you can just farm other things that has higher value, sell it and buy the shards instead?

Unless SE completely wipes out the bots, there's no point in improving the gathering abilies of DoL.

There will be a point of equilibrium where some people like how easy it is to gather and others like how easy it is to buy them.

Lyrinn is correct. The fundamental reason why bot even exists is to reduce tedious tasks. Farming gather spots is tedious as hell, but 1s and 0s running along circuit boards cannot feel anything. They cannot feel tedious, and therefore they can keep farming gather spots and feed on the laziness people have (thanks to the fact that doing it is very tedious in the first place).

By reducing the tediousness of the task in the first place, you reduce the disparity between the lack of emotion in T-1000 with actual people with actual emotion. More actual people will try to farm those things themselves, and bots will start losing its value.

Since bots can't reasonably play the game well enough to reach highest levels (at least, with current technology), levels would be the perfect filter to allow actual people to have an easy day while bots will stay at its efficiency level