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

[Kabooa]

Buy a favor for whatever scrips/tokens. It lets you *walk* into a specified dungeon and gather in it. You have 20 minutes to find the nodes. Critters optional -- I'd have some, but not the full dungeon worth.

OR

Buy a new leve with scrips/tokens. Reward is X mats. If you do excellent on the requirements, get 1-2 of the good mats as a bonus.

Anything but this RNG spam misery-train.

I mentioned this before, but the way the Favor system works is to help work around how they set up the scrip system - Changing favors almost necessitates a change to the scrip system. Not saying that's bad, just saying keep that in mind.

More specifically, favor farming in its current form acts as a reason for gatheres to go out and get materials such as hardsilver sand, abalathian spring water, herbs, etc. This is because the collectible turn in system works as a massive material dump. You favor farm for the rare materials, throw up the random stuff you farmed to get them, crafters buy both, etc etc. It's a well oiled (if not well polished) system.

The main issue is that it takes far to much time if you wanted to use 9 tokens a week; For a casual player this basically means you're not allowed to do anything else, even if you only use a few tokens instead of all 9.

I'd suggest something else that still ensures the market sees plenty of available materials for crafting collectible turn ins.

Favor is no longer a 5-stack of 15 minutes. It is now a 1/1 scrip turn in that lasts for an hour.
Using favor grants an hour long buff with 10 stacks. When stacks reach 0 the buff ends.
Upon clearing a node, a Concealed node is guaranteed to spawn if Favor is active.
Activating the concealed node reduces your favor stack by 1, and leaving the node causes it to disappear (like a spoiled node)
Clearing a concealed node has a small chance of increasing your favor stack by 1.
While favor is active, GP recovers twice as fast.

This incarnation is much more time friendly for those who want to snap up favor materials and be done with it; Running through a stack of 9 wouldn't take more than a couple hours. However, it also serves as a slghtly bigger reward for gatherers who instead take the time to run out the buff as long as possible (1 hour maximum) by giving additional GP to use either on Ephemereal nodes or on normal nodes to increase gathering yields. When you want to farm materials, use a Favor, then cap off at the end with Ooids/Herbs.

It also guarantees the user at least 10 per scrip, with RNG only serving as a bonus and never a penalty.

[RiceisNice]

....

Some of the nodes honestly give jack shite when it comes to favors, esp the botanist ones. Bladeleaf off the top of my head is in forelands, and there is only one set of lvl 60 nodes there for coneflower, which is used in one (cost inefficient) recipe.

The primary problem is the amount of time that the favors require. I mentioned this eariler, if you're averaging 4 items per favor, you need a minimum of 90 minutes for one crafting material. Mainhands and body take four materials, offhands take 3. It's absolutely rediculous how much time commitment you need, even if it was a collaboration within an FC or buying mats from other people (because the RNG factor if it will ensure that the supply will always be much much lower than the demand) because the items needed to trade for the materials are restrict to that specific favor.

Oh, and whats the point of letting the gathered favor items even be HQ-able when you can't even trade them in for additional bonuses >_>

[gzuscry]

Oh, and whats the point of letting the gathered favor items even be HQ-able when you can't even trade them in for additional bonuses >_>

This probably to not let Nymeia's Ward to kick in, so they countered to let you gather HQ version. And lower quality function was probably introduced no to let us reduce clutter in inventory, but just to not let you gather too much favor mats..... conspircies.... -_-

[Thrustie]

...

As someone else pointed out, over half the locations are garbage. I npc over half of what I gather because there's no market for 8 stacks of cow bitter. Honestly I'd be mostly appeased if they tripled the yield and changed the time to 5 minutes. The amount of items I get or the fact I have to use gathering tokens isn't even the main issue for me. It's the 11 hours doing favors. Shorten it to 3-4 and I can tolerate doing half an hour a day gathering.

[tomtensfarfar]

As someone else pointed out, over half the locations are garbage. I npc over half of what I gather because there's no market for 8 stacks of cow bitter. Honestly I'd be mostly appeased if they tripled the yield and changed the time to 5 minutes. The amount of items I get or the fact I have to use gathering tokens isn't even the main issue for me. It's the 11 hours doing favors. Shorten it to 3-4 and I can tolerate doing half an hour a day gathering.

Why not gather some crystals instead?

[Thrustie]

Why not gather some crystals instead?

Spiritbonding. Crystals are too low to SB. I was doing crystals for awhile but I'm not particularly low on crystals so it didn't feel very productive. Spiritbonding has been a nice bonus to doing favors as I can bond a set of crafting accessories every 2 or 3 favors. That said, it doesn't do much to mitigate the mind numbing grind of the whole affair.