Quote Originally Posted by origamikitsune View Post
The point is, SP needs to be adjusted. I don't feel it is appropriate to raise the SP gain on a fail in general; that could make it to easy to gain SP by intentionally targeting and failing higher level nodes. But certainly higher SP on a fail at a node appropriate to your rank. And/or more SP on a successful harvest so that those 250 or however many actions are worth something.
Unfortunately, it already is very advantageous to target higher grade nodes in terms of SP.

Gaining SP via many (easier) gather attempts at lower grade nodes is counterproductive. If I am getting 7 gathers * 80 SP per gather = 560 SP per node, I'm eating through 7 out of my 150 in short order. A bare 21 nodes would eat up all of my 'clean' gathering. If it takes two hours to do this (six minutes a node), I gain another 20 gathers (from regen), enough for another three nodes. Essentially, after 2 hours of gathering to gain SP, would have hit 24 nodes and gained roughly 13.5k in SP.

In contrast, if I attempt nodes far above my rank (like Grade4 at rank 22), if I am getting 2 attempts per node, and 260 SP per successful gather (and still 130 SP per fail!), this yields 520 SP per node, but I am only consuming 2 gathers instead of 7, for almost the same SP (although in reality it is a bit lower, since the success rate is lower). However, if the same six minute per node rate holds (it takes longer to find the nodes, but less time to process them, say), then after 2 hours and the 21 nodes, at most there would have been 42 successful gathers, while 20 gathers would have been regained. In practice 30 successful gathers would be more realistic, which is not far above the regeneration rate.

On a final note, gathering from secondary points is the worst. You gain 1/2 SP on a successful gather, and the gather rate is so fast that it is quite easy to burn through the 150 gathers in short order, especially because the secondary points don't move, so it's very easy to cycle around them.

TL;dr - The current system promotes targeting very high grade nodes in order to gain SP, rather than nodes that are notionally within your rank.