General Discussion

I'm not talking about crafting, obviously that is a good thing.  But having to harvest the ingredients, is that a worthwhile task in an MMO or is it too tedious?  There are times when I don't mind harvesting and there are times when I think it's too much of a time sink.

Certainly there are ways of being able to collect crafting ingredients without having to harvest them.  You can make them drop items, you can make them available at merchants and you can make them quest rewards.

I asked this of a fellow gamer and he said he enjoys harvesting much more when there's a chance of acquiring a rare item from the harvest.  For example, finding a rare precious metal while you are mining for an ore.

Originally posted by Zindaihas

I'm not talking about crafting, obviously that is a good thing.  But having to harvest the ingredients, is that a worthwhile task in an MMO or is it too tedious?  There are times when I don't mind harvesting and there are times when I think it's too much of a time sink.

Certainly there are ways of being able to collect crafting ingredients without having to harvest them.  You can make them drop items, you can make them available at merchants and you can make them quest rewards.

I asked this of a fellow gamer and he said he enjoys harvesting much more when there's a chance of acquiring a rare item from the harvest.  For example, finding a rare precious metal while you are mining for an ore.

It's one of those features that many people would call "fluff".  This is why, IMO, most of the newer MMOs are so shallow.  Cut a little bit of fluff here, a little bit there, and pretty soon you're MMO is nothing but grinding and loot whoring.

Harvesting is not a bad thing, but when overused it can become very annoying. 

I have always had the idea of doing things like interesting quests to receive the wanted items.  For instance, I must obtain the uber plant, which is held by Mr. Alchemist in his basement.*  Unfortunately, he has many guards covering his ingredient, as well as several unhappy dogs.  This means I will have to complete this challenging quest to create the "mike470 potion" (the bestest potion of the all, of course)

You see, I don't really mind harvesting, for as your friend said, you can find the rare ingredients to give that potion that extra kick.  I realy like that, since in Oblivion I remember coming across some unknown plants; which I would quickly harvest and throw into my inventory..  But, perhaps, to get these interesting ingrediants, you could either come across them with a) luck  or b) meeting NPCs to give you clues to where these ingredients may be.

*I am using collecting alchemist ingredients as an example of harvesting.

yes.

It really depends on the game. Some games, harvesting absolutely sucks. Others, it is a requirement.

I hated harvesting in Everquest. Had to spend hours upon hours of farming crap to get enough materials to try leveling. You didn't always get a skill point. So you have to go back out and farm for hours again. Then if you wanted to make anything worthwhile, you had to farm for another major chunk of time.

Then Dark Age of Camelot came out and removed the harvesting aspect until Alchemy/SC was added. It was nice to only need money to be able to skill up but DAoC had a really rough crafting system requiring many, MANY man hours to get to a high level. But the no harvesting was great.

World of Warcraft. I despise harvesting in this game. Flat out. All it does is increase the amount of time you have to spend in game trying to get enough materials to skill up. Then again you have to spend even more time farming up the mats you need to make anything even worthwhile. Core Leather Armor and Dark Iron Armor absolutely blew because of the sheer time requirement to get rare random drops off trash mobs in Molten Core. BC hasn't gotten any better.

Eve-Online. It is kind of a requirement to harvest due to how the game functions. However...it was not a part of the game I invested much time in because I didn't find it a whole lot of fun to shoot space rocks with pretty lasers.

Personally, I hate harvesting. It gives gold farmers another asset they can use to earn money to resell to players. It also causes prices on the more rare items to become astronomical...if you can even find them ala Core Leather, Fiery Cores and Lava Cores in Molten Core.

I sort of like Guild Wars system.  There isn't harvesting, but you use a tool to "disenchant" items to get materials for crafting gear.

Yes if it's like Ryzom's harvesting, where it's interactive and how you handle the resource node affects how many materials you get out of it and what quality they are. It doesn't involve or otherwise require combat...although keeping the node stable and extant is rather similar to combat, and even damages you if you fail. ;) Finding special materials depends on location, season, weather, and time of day.

More info here.

I'd like to see a mix between swg style resource gathering and interactive resource gathering.  The concept of placing a harvestor and coming back a few days later and finding a bunch of resources is really nice, and is of great benefit to players who are more combat oriented and those crafters who need massive amounts of bulk resources.  If you add the ability to also gather resources interactively, where you could find rare resources as well, then I'd think you'd have a great resource gathering system.  I personally do not like interactive only systems, as they get very tedious for me.

I think a good example would be a spawn of a rare resource over a specific geographic area.  First, everyone rushes to put down harvestors, and those with harvestors in the best concentrations using the best harvestors are gonna "win" that spawn.  But in addition, everyone who didn't get a harvestor there, or those who just want more of the great resource, can still manually gather the resource, in addition to having a chance to find an additional rare resource or highly concentrated sample of the main resource.

I think harvesting is a good idea, but I also think there is a lot more to it than that.  I personally beleive most people don't enjoy the economic/crafting side of MMO's, is because most developers don't really develop it.  I mea