Quote Originally Posted by Gildrein View Post
To explain a little more on what goes on behind the scenes, there is an internal counter which measures how often a player has attempted gathering activities. Players will start with a maximum pool of 2,500, which will decrease by 10 each time a gathering attempt is successful and yields an item. Once this number decreases to 1,000, players will find it harder to obtain items. At 0, items can no longer be obtained through gathering.

Stopping gathering for some time will bump this number back up. The recovery rate is currently set at 100 per hour.

If you have ideas and feedback on this topic, please don't hesitate to let us know.
Instead of making it so people just fail every attempt the devs should cause a third situation to happen within which the items that are succesfully gathered are too poor quality to use. (ex. Pine Branch -3) Make these items result in normal SP gain but totally useless in any synth. Also, give them a default value of 1 gil so people have no reason to keep them or try to sell them. As far as I can tell, people don't really care about the loss of items. It is the feeling that we are being double penalized for attempting to Grind SP that is so controversial.