We have dynamic populations. Which means the resources, be it gold or xp or crafting materials (save trees I suppose) are limited. We are all competing for those limited resources. The result is, those who have the most effective means of acquiring those resources, have the most success. Wether that means running around all day checking which dungeons are max, to being very usefull to parties who call you to join them, to doing good public relations, to having dms appreciate your rp and populate places with resources for you (be that
rp opportunities, big bad monsters to slay or added treasures/rewards).
A friend of mine loved the herbalism and decided to do it full time. He made an appropriate character (power-herbalist you could call her) and I took it upon myself to get the herbs for him. Without trying really hard, I can get a full bag ie 35(?) herbs in an hour. If I try, using imp inviz and haste, two bags in an hour. He got level 20 herbalist in like... two weeks? Of course, I do consider myself a planned herbalist and actually have maps with herb locations and notes on what grows where and WHEN and how every so often :p And that was AFTER I drained all of a certain someone's bank account who thought to pay me a fortune to gather herbs for her
I suppose this is called powerfarming, wether you do it for loot, or xp, or crafting materials. It is bad, especially for those who come SECOND (cause you'll never hear the ones who are coming out of dungeon complain about it and, yes, you'll hear all sorts of things being thrown to you from people who come second*). This is in a sense, fine. The capitalistic sense. I don't understand why people find this so surprising. In RL, don't you have to be ...er... GOOD at what you do to succeed? They don't give free trips to amsterdam to the SECOND best salesman you know (let's not get into basketball player's salaries :p).
With the recent motivation of alchemy to go to such places, it is only expected that they will be overfarmed. Now, personally, I actually check these places out and approach them only when I see them at high/max spawn, to make it worth my while. Which, unless I camp right outside it, turn everyone hostile, post guards at every entrance and wait for it to grow, runs the risk of someone coming, being more than happy facing the mid spawn and thus ruining my day - hence the suggestion DON'T HIT THEM SO OFTEN falls totally out of context: if you don't, someone else will so you might as well. But then again, growing it and hitting it myself would ruin someone else's day. There is no win-win. There is always going to be someone (or someone's party, to divert people's thought from those evil soloers who steal the rp away) who came second.
To cut a long story short, it's not only alchemy but the way resources are handled on this server that cause such friction between players. Moving these resources to other places would hardly solve the issue, rather make it someone else's problem. I dread the day that platinum becomes a resource and we overfarm the demonoligsts so we can acquire it
I hope my venomous comments ( L O L, I hope no one takes this too seriously) will help those in control to grasp a better understanding of this.
P.S. Is it better to ninja herb loot a place or kill all the monsters, steal all the treasure, and gather all the herbs? Because, unlike treasure or monsters, herbs regrow quite faster... like MUCH faster...
P.S.2. Wanna talk about overfarmed? Try scrags...
* Being told: "You are ruining our rp" still makes me crack up everytime I remember it. The complains of multiple barovian campers "Oh, this is always low because such and such camp it, I never make it in time" comes a close second.
