gathering:
in most of the MMOS, the gathering staple is old and unimaginative, gatherable resources are splattered through out the map, you can find flowers in the lava and copper ores in the swamp.
the player accidently stumbles on the resource and if he has the appropriate skill and tool he fills his backpack with the resource.
which leads to weird situation where picking a flower is somehow equivalent to cutting down an oak.
and picking up a lotus flower is so much more difficult from picking up a thumbleweed that you have to be trained professional to succeed in the task.
only few games in the past dared to move away from that staple.
my suggestion is --> no gathering skills.
only surveying / identifying skills
a- the resources can be everywhere but not everybody can locate or identify them.
if you dont have herbalism you dont even know how to distinguish between healing plant and a weed, an edible mushroom from poisoned one, between edible berries and just buds.
b- there are single collectibles and mass collectibles.
example for single collectibles: all foraging; picking flowers and fruits, skinning, etc. (can be more)
theese are picked up on individual basis, good for solo inclined players.
you reach a forest that you expect your resource to be,
you use your identifying skill and you might spot a usefull resource to pick up, you pick it up. you can locate several resources with one use of identifying skill or none.
you kill an animal, you use identifying skill on the corpse and you figure out how to skin it properly.
you cant use surveying / identifying skills in combat and they are interruptable.
the rest is classic.
example for mass collectibles: woodcutting, mining, magical essence gathering, etc. (can be more)
in order to gather mass collectible, this is where it gets interesting; you have to be prepared.
you need to hire an NPC worker crew and you need to hire a donkey/mule/ox.
(these can be purchased at special vendors, smaller, slower and skilless cost less and require less skill to use)
when you use surveying skill and you locate a place for mining or woodcutting, you set up the mule and a mining/ lumberjack crew
and the crew start working until they fill up the mule, ( between 5 to 10 minutes depend on the size of the mule)
while they are working a local mobs will be attracted to the noise and attack the NPCs, your job as an adventurer is to defend the NPCs untill they have filled up the mule.
as longer you stay, more mobs will spawn. (so you can cancel the crew in the middle in order to avoid the hard fight and get half mule of the resources etc...)
for each dead NPC, the work will be slower and the price of next NPC you hire will be higher forever.
the ammount of mobs also scale according to the quality and quantity of the resources. (if quality/quantity is implemented).
the attracted mobs will be the level of the area or the level of the initiating player- which is higher.
so high level player gathering in low level zones will not be very easy /productive, in order to balance the economy.
when the mule is filled up to 100% all players who participated in the defence of the crew will get a small (single digit) amount of the resource in their backpack as bonus for helping.
when the mule is filled up, it will start walking to the closest discovered city/outpost and it will be attacked on its way by spawning mobs and stationary map mobs could also be attracted.
the players will have to defend the mule on its way, each 1% of the caravan HP means less resources arrive to the outpost. when the mule reached the outpost the gathered resource will be transfered to players bank.
it is possible to implement "guild expeditions" which require guild officer to buy and operate and it will attract elite types of mobs during the gathering and escorting the caravan. the gathered resources go to guild bank directly.
this system will open another meta game within a game, supplying the players with dynamic content. (even more on PVP servers....)
everybody wins, it is a party content with mob generation where non-related players will usually join to help for XP, drops (skinners can skin the dead mobs) etc.
it gives something else to do on duo/party/guild level, not only mob camps, and it makes gathering resources more interesting.
(yes it is possible to grief by training mobs to the gathering expedition, but... that is life, we can figure something out on the fly...)
not all gathering resources could be gathered this way, but I think the more - the merrier.
(this gathering system loosely based on the system that was used in the original Firefall game, as somebody who played almost all of the major MMO titles in the last 15 years this gathering system i loved the most, even more than the legendary SWG or Landmark)
