Can we just remove shards from the game?

[chidarake]

if they add the ability to break down clusters I personally would never do it... there expensive per to buy and a timed node to mine / harvest, they would have to give me 100 crystals or something for me to think it was worth it.

shards pretty much become worthless, and the best way I know of to collect them is at the crystal node groups. with high enough levels one of the shards nodes will be double yield. that's 8 per node. running a triangle with the 2 crystal nodes gives 8 crystals and 8 shards every cycle. then when ready I would use my 500gp yield boost on a crystal node to get 12 crystals from it. basically after 1hr or so you'll have roughly 600 of each type.

now if your an extremely active crafter then that time harvesting is time wasted unless you have crazy buy costs on these things. in my experience even the most expensive crystal cost synths (like darksteel scutum) are extremely profitable buying the crystals.

to mirror the original post I say get rid of them though even if they aint to bad to gather if your willing.

[Loony_BoB]

Just go back to the old shard system. Every time you kill something? Shards! Every time you gather something? Shards!

Problem solved. Never had a shard problem in the old game.