Joey Bylos has published the latest Age of Conan Producer's Letter on the official site. He runs down the list of what the team has been working on and what players can expect to see in game, including world boss events and a tradeskill update.
I've talked a lot about tradeskills in the last couple of months, so today I will stick to providing you with some details about the new gathering system.
I have already touched on salvaging which involved breaking down loot into components that can be reused in the crafting system. However the complementary system to salvaging is the gathering.
When the tradeskill revamp was being designed, the team wanted to address several of the flaws with the current gathering node system.
Firstly, they are static, permanent nodes which makes them a target for bot farming. Secondly, due to their prevalence in the Resource and Building playfields, players are able to create their own private instances for farming the nodes.
It hurts the economy of the game when resources are infinite and uncontested and farmable by robots. So, when we enable the new tradeskill system, there will be some major changes to the way that resource nodes work.
They will become random. This means that nodes will appear in random locations across playfields. Players will need to hunt for them and you can expect them to be contested on PvP servers.
Read more on the Age of Conan site.
