This red scrip system doesn't seem very casual-friendly..

[Zfz]

Just do away with the timed nodes, seriously. Requiring players to be at specific places at specific times is never casual friendly.

I can accept RNG to a certain extent because modern human-machine interface do not allow any form of reliable skill adjustment and RNG is the only way to provide variation. But timed nodes?

I challenge the devs to not test play this game during their working time. Try doing it for a month straight, after work, when you get home, and you may see how frustrating this can be.

Unless gathering was never designed for casuals, and you're trying to create a real "hardcore end-game" to gathering, so that players who specialize in gathering have something satisfying to do, then sure, why not. But as long as it's also designed for casuals, timed nodes is only ever going to be an annoyance.

1. The existence of a weekly cap is casual friendly by definition. Its purpose is to balance things out between the people who have about enough time to collect that many scrips and people who would be able to get 5x that many if the cap weren't there.

I beg to differ. It's first and foremost effect is to limit the "hardcore" progression, which has nothing to do with being casual friendly. It's second most immediate effect, is that missing the cap puts you permanently behind on your progression---not relative to the others, but relative to your own progression potential---and the group of people most likely to ever miss weekly caps? The casual players.

What the weekly cap does is to satisfy people who pretend to be casuals yet want hardcore progression. What casual players want is to be able to enjoy the game and progress at their own pace. That means allowing us to farm 2000 Esoterics or 2000 Red Scripts in a weekend if we want, then we go off playing some newly released game for 3 weeks and then come back to log in again.

The weekly caps force us to keep coming back almost every day and that is not casual.