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Kiting at full speed sounds like the crux of the problem as it stands. What are the design plans for ammo, precisely? Because I have a sinking suspicion that ammo will occupy one (or more) of three unpleasant states:
Any ability to project military force more quickly than the 'normal' movement speed will lead to rapid political consolidation. While travel times can't be too long or trade will falter, I much prefer the idea of localized politics and economies rather than global ones. I love the idea of major roads providing the greatest movement speeds. I also like the idea of different terrain types impacting movement speeds differently. This mechanic opens up skill & spell possibilities to mitigate it, as well, eg. Woodland Stride. Also, a suggestion for improving the stamina system:
I think this would open up a lot more potential tactical and strategic options in both combat and overland movement. It would also provide several options for augments via skills, both in reducing stamina costs and boosting stamina regen rates.
Golgotha will compete competitively. If you imagine Golgotha as a raging Godzilla, then I believe you fail to understand what it means to be Lawful Evil. Lawful evil merely means justifying your aggression. See US foreign policy of the Bush administration. Or colonial European nations in the 17th, 18th & 19th centuries. Thankfully, I suspect the game mechanics will discourage colonial aspirations since maintaining satellite settlements sounds like a spurious strategy.
Since we're on the topic of beer (a perennial favorite), I'm drinking an amazing barleywine (from a bottle, natch) that is clocking in at 13.2%. As I'm most of the way through the bottle, I'm obviously drunk. That said, *takes another drink*, how aggressive (read a$$hole-ish) is the rampaging
BurnHavoc, you seem to be operating under the assumption that all losses of reputation are bad. Think about reputation less like a penal system and more like a currency: you spend reputation to engage in nonconsensual PvP. To keep PFO from becoming a 'murder simulator', nonconsensual PvP needs to be restricted. Timeouts, hard caps, cool-downs, etc. are all various restrictions that would work, but would also reduce player agency and decision making. Having a renewable resource that one spends is another form, but one that gives players much more freedom. To better facilitate meaningful group play, this cost can be deferred from an individual to a group through the feud and war mechanics (each or which have a different resource cost associated with them). If you spend too much of any of these resources on non-con PvP, you or your group will suffer diminished performance because of it.
Brilliant idea. Count me in.
Why feud if you're not a mercenary company? Or a well regulated militia? Why feud? Because feuds exist to prevent reputation loss when agressing non-consensual PvP. This benefit is balanced by an associated cost to the Company. I think it's a great system, but that doesn't mean it's free from potential abuse. As usual, the devil is in the details, which we don't have. I just want to be sure that, when fleshing out those details, potentially naive assumptions (such as a lack of small Companies) don't lead to undesirable results.
I think the key to this assumption is that Companies don't offer any benefits unless they exist to maintain some piece of infrastructure. My understanding of the current state of things is that Companies do, in fact, offer additional benefits beyond economic. Influence to spend on feuds, for example, seems like an obvious benefit. I suspect there will be others. I guess what I'm getting at is assuming people won't make throw-away companies because they lack a "good reason" is a foolish assumption if throw-away companies have the ability to be disruptive in unwelcome ways.
Implementing a redlist would be technologically trivial. It's one additional DB table lookup per boundary entry (whatever that happens to be) and some sort of mechanic to prevent griefing (like a timer) when adding someone new who is in the territory. As for a Marshal Service, having the primary limiting factor of its use be characters who have access does nothing to prevent abuse by those characters and places an especially large burden on those players to be available. I would much rather the ability be rationed by a per use cost to the settlement (such as corruption) and be freely available to be given out to anyone the settlement leadership trusts to only use the ability judiciously.
Hey, Bludd, go back and re-read Ryan's actual words: I just fail to see how making people play alts to circumvent the alignment and rep systems is supposed to be meaningful player interaction. Why bother with the systems at all if you're just going to force players to circumvent them or fail. In his view, with which I entirely agree, those 'monsters' exist to address a shortcoming of the game mechanics. That is by no mean tacit endorsement of their existence as a whole, but rather as a solution to a temporary problem. The very clearly stated goal is to improve the game system to address that flaw so that those 'monsters' aren't necessary to create a meaningful interaction.
That's a feature.Putting history in a blog would work but I was also dreaming about having an evolving world lore that is updated based on what the players have done to the world. I'll put it on my wish list.The problem with that is the same as you get in the real world, there will be as many versions of that history as there are participants. Working as intended? @Shane: Unfortunately, publishing the lore in-game somehow is a not-insignificant undertaking. However, something like an official (moderated) wiki along side the other lore wouldn't be too difficult. EVE had this arrangement for a while, though I'm not sure if they still do. Also, there will likely be 3rd-party 'news' sites that crop up no matter what, along with a small army of bloggers.
@Valtorious: The 'monsters in the basement' approach isn't the long-term goal. It's an interim stop-gap during EE while emergent behavior shakes out so that the devs can get a handle on what those 'monsters' are being used for and accommodate that play-style with game mechanics. @ Everyone in the Stand & Deliver circle-jerk: The mechanic that was presented ages ago was based on a system that has changed substantially. Furthermore, no such mechanic will be present in EE (and maybe not 'till late OE) and what it might look like will depend highly upon, again, emergent gameplay. If you want to fantasize about how you might exploit an imaginary mechanic, knock yourself out, but, please, stop polluting otherwise meaningful discussions with your masturbatory drivel.
4) I am super-hesitant to mention this since its not properly fleshed out yet and Stephen and I discussed it earlier and thought it might not be pertinent to bring up yet, but... there is a sketched out system for certain settlement positions (notably the town sheriff/marshal) to give individual players the "criminal" flag in order to force them out of town. This would a) have a warning/delay on its activation, and b) have some cost associated with it (most likely DI). It is a very specific, short-term red-list ability so that if a handful of people really are being ass***** to folks in your town you can make them a PVP target for everyone. This would be fantastic. I had the thought of a 'town constable' but didn't mention it because I figured it would be more work than a redlist. I think one key to making this potential system be effective at dissuading would-be-harassers is ensuring enough individuals in a given settlement have the power to trigger the event, but that it has enough of an associated cost (maybe in corruption rather than DI, since it's temporary?) to ensure its use is warranted.
I may be mistaken, but I believe that the concept of a "list" is mis-applied. I believe that there is no "list", only conditions which set a flag. If NB, then flag = criminal. Once someone gets a criminal flag for trespassing, I think it should expire after the character has left the controlled area. I am not necessarily in favor of the criminal trespass flag being on when not physically trespassing, but that is just an opinion. 'Criminal' isn't the only flag suitable to the task. 'Hostile' would allow for more granularity as to who is permitted to attack whom.
I will say that the lack of a whitelist/redlist is a deliberate feature of the Settlement system. I think the lack of a redlist is a mistake. It limits a settlement's ability to actively police its territory from repeated harassment. Without the easy ability to punish harassers (which enables both discouragement beforehand, and retribution after the fact), settlements will resort to higher levels of xenophobia as a protective measure. I don't think that makes for a healthy game. In fact, I would argue that settlements should be able to allocate DI to redlist individuals, companies and even other settlements, but that status would only matter in territory controlled by the settlement. Similarly, companies should be able to spend influence to redlist other companies and individuals, but only within the confines of the settlement they belong to (and only if those redlisted don't also belong to the settlement).
@Ryan: I'd like to challenge your assumption that most settlements will be NBSI, and suggest you have the power to discourage such policies. In EVE, NBSI only works because all the economic resources required by groups adopting NBSI policy either come from money faucets (rats) or are imported from high-sec, which is NRDS. Effectively, EVE's economy operates solely in high-sec. Isolationist null-sec alliances (which is all of them) can only function because they buy everything they need from Jita and then haul those resources back to their space. Jita wouldn't exist as a market hub if it was NBSI. It sounds like, in PfO, the current plan is for there to be few NPC settlements (which is great), but for them to be centrally located (which is bad). If the current designs for NPC settlements allow for them to function as market hubs, players aren't going to want to stray far from them, and isolationist strategies will prevail. As far as methods for settlements to deal with scofflaws, the most obvious solution, to me, is to allow settlements to dedicate a small (exponentially increasing, but with a small exponent) amount of its DI to tag them as kill-on-sight. Like feuds/wars, but for individuals. In the future, there could even be an associated building to lower those costs or even some sort of bounty mechanic.
PS. There is actually a group of volunteers who maintain the Myth codebase to get it to run on modern OSes (and have done so for more than 10 years) called Project Magma.
There will be choke points in Pathfinder Online. We won't make them the exclusive path to access a substantial tract of territory. I'm very glad to have this confirmed. I really want terrain to be a major influence in both strategy and tactics. I would love to see terrain be as important to combat in PfO as it was in the Myth games. While tree branches blocking arrows might be a bit out of scope for an MMO engine (at least on today's technology), things like hills and water affecting movement and combat effectiveness shouldn't be. Dammit, now I'm going to have to go look to see if I can get the Myth series for my current hardware.
as simple as, "If you don't like, it ignore it or report it." And herein lies the problem. What you profess doesn't work for many people: The Experience of Being Trolled | Idea Channel Also, I expect Ryan et al to be studying the hell out of the profound impact League of Legends' Tribunal has had on player behavior: Has League of Legends Tamed the Trolls Forever? | Game/Show
@Bluddwolf: If something is readily exploitable by the players, such as using a mechanic to avoid reputation loss, it will be exploited, and that's a problem, no matter what the magical intent may have been. What you're hoping for is also shoddy design, and based on information that very likely has changed since it was first presented. So, while you're certainly welcome to keep advocating for your idealized system (that puts you at next to 0 risk...), don't cry to hard when it doesn't come to fruition.
If you SAD someone you get one of two results 1) the person accepts and you get loot plus rep or 2) the person declines and you get to kill them without penalty. That's an excellent way to clarify the distinction! I'm strongly in favor of #1 and entirely opposed to #2, which just screams 'exploit' to me.
Attempting (however futilely) to bring this discussion back to the original topic... EVE attempts to limit non-consensual PvP via security status, but, as I'm sure many of you know, that system is full of The larger point, and one I really wanted to express in this thread, is that terrain in EVE is basically non-existent. There are a whole three location-based components to combat in EVE (ignoring grid The land you occupy has always been of monumental importance in reality, and I'd love to see this reflected in a PfO.
I'm always a bit saddened when folks who seem to want to have a constructive discussion resort to fear-mongering, seemingly deliberate omissions, and general inferred misrepresentation. It's like some of you want to run for Congress or something. Intellectual dishonesty sucks, so please try to avoid it. With that out of the way... @leperkhaun: I'm quite certain that everyone in this discussion, as well as the vast majority of folks on this board, all agrees that non-consensual PvP is integral to the PfO sandbox. I've yet to see anyone suggest otherwise. And if they did, I don't think anyone would take them seriously. @Jiminy: Your false conflation between conflict and combat is something I already addressed 3 months ago. While there will surely be plenty of overlap, not all conflict is combat and not all combat is conflict. @Urman: My assertion that SAD is high-risk rests on the assumption that banditry will be illegal in most place and will, thus, earn you the criminal flag and the threat of retribution. Places where it is legal will likely see far less traffic and economic development, which imposes its own costs. @Nihimon: My suggestion that SAD gives reputation is in conjunction with SAD giving the aggressor no special protection from reputation losses should the target refuse the generous offer. @Bluddwolf: Duels aren't the only mechanic for consensual PvP; that's what NPC factions are for. Volunteering to fight a war is anything but non-consensual.
2TB HDDs and 240GB SSDs are roughly comparable in price, $120~$150. 240GB is very likely sufficient for your OS & applications. You can get an additional 500GB or 1TB HDD for $60~$80. Or just use your existing HDD. As for the logistics, set the SSD to be the higher of the two drives in the BIOS boot order and install Windows on it. Windows will detect the 2nd drive and show it as another drive letter. On the off-chance you're on a Mac and wanting to use both an SSD & HDD (mac minis are great for this), search for DIY fusion drive.
SAD will provide the bandits with MAX daily rep gain for performing it as well as providing the merchant with increased penalties to people looking to kill him. How very prescient of you. Or perhaps just speculative. Or wishful. On the other hand, much has changed, and will continue to change. My wish is that there will be no mechanism that allows folks engaging in non-consensual PvP to avoid reputation loss, and that there will be (less grindy) mechanism to regain it.
Since I haven't seen anyone else mention it: If at all possible, buy an SSD large enough to hold your OS and applications. Put all your media (music, movies, pdfs, etc.) on platters (HDD). Running your system from an SSD will boost most application start times by a factor of 3 or 4, including OS start-up. SSDs offer a huge quality-of-life improvement over HDD.
It's interesting to me how responses shift from "wow, that's a great theory" to "no that's bad because it would negatively impact my preferred play-style". Unrestricted non-consensual PvP creates cultural problems, as Ryan has discussed at length elsewhere. On the other hand, a sand-box without non-consensual PvP isn't much of a sandbox. This is a video game where most of us want to be able to resort to violence in ways we wouldn't ever consider in our own lives. I unequivocally want non-consensual PvP to be an integral part of the game. Because of the aforementioned cultural problems, non-con PvP needs limitations. The best way to do that while still maintaining the freedom of the sand-box is by associating some increasing cost. In PfO, this exists, mechanically, in the form of wars, feuds, and reputation. Wars and feuds shift the cost from an individual resource to a collective one. Meaningful decisions are those where one has to balance between cost, risk, & reward. The aggressor in non-con PvP is assumed to be engaging in a low-risk activity, since they are the ones to choose the terms of engagement. Thus, if there is a high reward activity they can partake in, such as killing people to take their stuff, it needs to have a meaningful cost. That cost is reputation, and no feat or skill should mitigate it. That said, I'm all for feats or skills that enhance ones ability to gain reputation. In fact, that's precisely what I would like to see Stand and Deliver offer: a significant reputation gain if the aggressed party agrees to pay, but no other benefit. Such an ability would be of little cost, but would offer high reward along with substantive risk.
As for the contentious issue of PvP, I'd like to see non-consensual PvP (of which banditry is, 100%) be allowed and be a supported play-style. However, outside of combat, I'd like to pose substantially more risk to, or require more resources from those who partake in it. Characters partaking in non-con PvP will almost certainly be carefully choosing their victims so as to minimize the risk or effort required in combat. To balance that, there should be significant effort or risk required in accomplishing more mundane acts like character advancement or economic development. This contrasts with those whom bandits pray on, who face far more risk or require more effort to protect themselves from bandits, but aren't restricted in other areas of character growth. Of course, this is all predicated on ample opportunities for consensual PvP where everyone involved is deliberately exposing themselves to similar levels of risk. But I'm confident PfO will have plenty of opportunity for consensual PvP.
I want to see terrain be a huge factor in the game. I want the environment to feel like an integral part of the game, not just a scenic backdrop. I want movement to have a large impact on tactical combat, broad military strategy, and even economies. I want movement speeds to vary substantively based potentially on interactions with terrain, roads, class abilities, ability scores, feats, load, armor, maybe skills, and (eventually) mounts & vehicles. I want units, both PC and NPC, to take up space (but maybe not in town) so as to place noticeable limits on the movement of groups. I want high-ground to offer a combat advantage, for trees to offer cover to/for archers, for a narrow mountain pass or river ford to offer a strategic advantage. I want to see trade dictated by local and regional resource concentrations. I want to see local economies revolve around resource abundance & deficiencies. I want to see the flow of goods, both bulk and individual, be dependent on direct player actions. I also want methods of accelerated movement for traversing large distances (so trade isn't a horrible chore) but only along narrowly-defined routes (such that alternative options may offer lower risk or better rewards). I want goods to take up physical storage space as well. Displaying a dozen suits of armor should require a fair bit of physical space. Carrying that many should be difficult (not to mention incredibly awkward). Accounting for terrain/movement/capacity is annoying bookkeeping in a table-top game where the focus is on climactic adventure. Computers, however, are great at annoying bookkeeping tasks and with a robust economy, the game benefits from these limits.
This reworked raiding system is tons better than the previous one. Kudos!! As for the notification system, keep it instant. Raids, at a meta level, are designed to encourage PVP. Any other alert system will only serve to reduce incentive and opportunities for PVP. With so many potential outposts, raiding won't be a significant force of economic warfare unless done on a broad scale (by a warring faction). All a delayed alert system does is change the risk to reward ratio for the raiders, a ratio that is much better managed by the rate at which goods can be stolen.
You get 30 days of training +/-. That's what you get for a subscription. We give you some other things as a gift for being a subscriber. There will be lots of of other things you could, but don't have to purchase. So what will 'login and interact with other players' access cost? Will there be a subscription level that that is 'Vegas style all you can eat buffet'?
Lots of bits have been spilled arguing about 'PVP' in PFO. Unfortunately, many folks are talking past each other because term is ill-defined, and actually has multiple meanings. Most often, when the term PVP is bandied about, it's referring to PVP combat. However, when those who would rather avoid PVP combat suggest restrictions on it, those who desire PVP combat falsely argue that 'crafting/trade is also PVP', and that games without PVP aren't real sandboxes or are boring. When this happens, inter-player conflict is being conflated with player vs player combat. While those two ideas are certainly related, they form a venn diagram of actual activities. Not all PVP combat is conflict driven and player conflict certainly exists outside of the realm of combat. Economic markets are prime examples of player conflict. However, the risks and rewards involved are very different than those of combat. Insisting they're somehow both 'PVP' trivializes the inherent complexities in the two different systems, and is usually used to advocate for unrestricted PVP combat. I'm fairly certain most folks here (and certainly the Devs) agree that without player-driven conflict, any sandbox created is going to become stagnant and boring fairly quickly. Furthermore, that conflict needs to involve combat in some way, especially since combat is ultimately what the game engine is designed around. However, just because combat is a possible outcome of conflict, doesn't mean it necessarily should be the outcome of every conflict. As a quick aside, the adjective 'unsanctioned' when used to describe PVP combat is misleading. There is no overarching authority who sanctions some combat and not others. That authority falls solely to those involved in the combat. In the rest of the world, we call that authority 'consent'. Thus, if you get attacked when you're out foraging, you're experiencing 'nonconsensual PVP', not 'unsanctioned PVP'. So, while conflict is certainly integral to PFO's success, and combat is integral to PFO's gameplay, conflict and combat can take very, very different forms. Asserting it's all the same is misleading, at best. Personally, I'm in favor of a system that allows nonconsensual PVP combat, but only with substantive consequences. Consequence-free nonconsensual PVP combat is a system that appeals to a very select group, and has been repeatedly shown to be a commercial failure.
Fleet doctrines in EVE are intended to normalize speed, effective range, and type of 'healing' required by members of a team. Rigid fleet doctrines are also a relatively new phenomenon over the 10+ years EVE has existed. I totally anticipate the strategy behind them being applied to combat in PFO, though I doubt any of the strictness will come about for many years. As for general 'administrative' skills, ie. non-combat, non-crafting, focused, limited-skilled alts are the norm in EVE and will likely become part of PFO so long as characters with those skills are required, but otherwise unappealing.
I really like League of Legend's approach to paid content: The only things exclusively available from cash are purely cosmetic. Every piece of game mechanics is unlockable simply by playing, though cash can also help speed up the unlocking process. In the context of PFO, I would see that as cash buying skins for equipment, characters, buildings, etc. (basically anything that involves new art, but no mechanical differences), and buying increased XP, but only up to a global cap that matches that of the 'oldest' characters. I'd feel cheated paying for a subscription yet still having meaningful choices about my character 'locked' behind spending additional money. However, I may be willing to pay additional money to change some of the choices I previously made about my character. If and when new races are introduced, I'd prefer to be given an option to select it without cost, but only once, no matter how many new races are introduced. Beyond that, I'd think that changing my race or even resetting some skills is something valuable enough to me to spend additional money, if I wished.
I don't think outposts, as envisioned, will generate the kind of meaningful pvp hoped for. Here's why (warning, heavy theory-crafting ahead): If an outpost is easily destroyed, economic analysis of it assumes that it loses all value (or gains negative value, based on resources provided to enemies) as soon as the company is no longer actively extracting resources. To mitigate the loss of the investment in the outpost, either (1) the returns from it (value of the resources gathered) have to be great enough to produce meaningful profit in a relatively short period of time (which establishes the minimum time frame a company must reasonably expect to control the outpost), or (2) there have to be enough outposts that the rate of loss inflicted by external forces is a small enough margin to be written down. In the first case (1), a small company may very likely only be able to maintain control (defending it from casual† raiders) of an outpost for something like 6 hours, due to OOC constraints. In those 6 hours, the company not only needs to recoup the cost of the outpost, but also needs to generate enough value to offset the value they could be making in other (risk-equivalent) professions. These conditions lead to two further options: (1a) outposts are dirt cheap or (1b) outposts have high production rates. In the second of these two cases (1b), outposts in lands relatively devoid of threats will quickly dominate the market with their vast production, lowering the value of the resources produced and making outposts in threatened lands not economically viable (not to mention further cementing economic power in lawful lands). This is undesirable. In the other case, where outposts are extremely cheap (1b), defending an outpost probably won't be worth the risk involved. Furthermore, it will likely be economically advantageous to destroy one's own outpost rather than risking having its output seized by an enemy. This leads to little, if any, actual combat PvP. The other general case (2) is that outpost sites are plentiful. If this is the case, the rate of loss caused by raiders has to be comparatively low enough to be tolerated. For the worst case, I am assuming a production loss of 40%; I don't expect anything higher than that to be tolerated by the companies managing the outposts. (Once you're having half or more of your work stolen, you're generally incentivised to steal someone else's instead.) This 40% efficiency loss is also likely to be the highest 'cost' the player-base will accept for operating in lands not under strict control (eg. chaotic, or low taxed). With the maximum acceptable loss-rate assumption established, the maximum likely loss-rate needs to be established to determine how many outposts are required to enable the max likely losses to be equal to the max acceptable losses. If there are too few outposts, the max likely losses will be higher than what would be deemed acceptable. Since I'm working toward a conservative estimate (to help reinforce my point), I'm going to assume a settlement population of 200. That seems, to me, like a minimum-viable size to be able to hold land. That's 20% of the 1000 that the largest settlements' populations are projected to be. Assuming an 80/20 population distribution between settlements and outlaws (again, a conservative estimate, especially in lawless lands), a settlement of 200 might have to contend with an outlaw population of 50. Again, applying the 80/20 rule to online vs offline population, I'm assuming there will be an average of 10 'outlaw' characters online in the vicinity of a settlement of 200 (where there will be ~40 online). Assuming raiding is a viable source of income (which, if it isn't, this whole discussion is moot), I'm going to assume, from those 10, a single casual† raiding group is active. Furthering my conservative estimate, I'm assuming it takes a raiding group an average of 3 hours to raid and destroy an outpost (because of general player downtime, walking, hauling, scouting, etc.) Putting all these assumptions together yields my conservative estimate of a loss of 8 outposts per day, if destruction is incentivised. As establishment of an outpost isn't difficult, but still requires effort and resources, I'm going to assume that the outposts are re-established at the same rate they're destroyed, albeit with a 24-hour loss of production (since it does require [likely thankless] player effort). Thus, a loss of 8 outposts per day, each causing the loss of a day's worth of production should be a maximum of 40% of the total output of all the outposts. Thus, my conservative estimate is suggesting that each settlement have easy access to 20 outposts as a minimum. If I'm a member of a settlement and I get notice that a couple of the two-dozen outposts we run are being attacked, outposts that have very little value, any PvP effort I mount to defend them will be only because I have nothing better to do. And even then, I'm only going to ride out to meet the attackers with a force large enough to easily overwhelm and drive them away. Why bother risking the inconvenience (and equipment loss) associated with dying when the settlement will just pay to replace the outpost? † Casual meaning a group just large enough to overcome the NPC guards and haul away as much loot as they can carry. tl;dr: Disposable outposts aren't worth fighting for (or break the economy).
The raiding mechanic sounds wonderful, though the hostility interaction may need some refinement (it's really difficult to judge without seeing how all the pieces interact). The strip-mining mechanic, however, sounds far too powerful (at least if outposts are any sort of investment). As things are described here, any sufficiently sized force is probably easily capable of destroying as many outposts as they want in a given evening. Mounting any sort of defense force, much less a sizable one, is nigh impossible without foreknowledge of the attack (ask anyone who's done null-sec in EVE). Controlling an outpost for 2 hours will require markedly little effort compared to the (assumed) investment. Furthermore, they're rewarded not just by depriving their foes of resources, but by destroying their means of production while gaining said resources. That's way OP. As Andius mentioned, destroying infrastructure should require a significant investment from the attackers. In this case, I would suggest some sort of continued presence at the location for many hours. Perhaps some sort of system where damage to the structure starts of very slowly but increases exponentially with time and effort (you have to chip away at the mortar before you can tear down the wall; or bring siege weaponry). Also, working toward destruction and working toward resource collection should be opposed efforts. Dealing damage to the structure should reduce, or outright halt, all production of the outpost, not accelerate it. That said, I do like the idea of accelerating resource production at the cost of future production. If the generation 'curve' for the resources is tuned well (tails on both ends, best rate in the middle), it could be good incentive for raiders to put themselves at increased risk by staying around to exploit the outpost for a while. They could even choose to strip-mine it before destruction, should they be so confident. Naturally, the decrease in production after such an event would have to be great enough to be a net loss for overall resource generation so that it's not exploited.
I think the term 'foraging' as a replacement for 'harvesting' is much more evocative of the behavior described. It doesn't quite work when discussing resources like metal or stone, but I think it's close enough overall. Then, replacing 'gathering' with 'harvesting' creates an intuitive, to me, pair. 'Foraging' and 'harvesting' contrast nicely and aren't likely to be confused with other jargon in the game (unless food is a thing our characters will actually have to manage, but that's unlikely). The concern about newbies not getting to deploy the harvesting kit is, I think, misplaced. First, the novelty of pushing the big red button on the magic harvesting machine isn't, I suspect, going to be a lasting draw. Furthermore, while this blog only indicates the speed of harvesting is dependant on character skill, the blog it updates indicates the quality of the resources harvested is also potentially limited by character skill. Most folks, newbie or not, will want to maximize the returns on their investment of time and would likely be more than willing to allow someone else to oversee the actual harvesting. Drawing on some personal experience, when I played EVE, I spent a significant portion of time exploring (mostly looking for advantageous wormhole routes). While I wasn't actively collecting direct resources with this activity (more like resource potential), it was sort of analogous to foraging in that it involved scouring an area for valuables (of a sort) and reporting my findings back to my corp mates so we could collectively take action. In this 'profession', I was more than happy to hand-off my discoveries of nodes that would require a more serious undertaking to harvest the available resources, often with the agreement of a small finder's fee, but usually just to help line the coffers of my corporation, which was then better able to supply me with new toys. I still like the idea of a harvesting node only being 'known' to the character that discovers it until they point it out to others within a close proximity. This still gives the discoverer leverage to negotiate while not limiting the potential gains. In fact, the system as described either discourages specialization of skills (because you'll want to spread them among all the resources you might encounter) or discourages harvesting resources a character isn't specialized in (which seems like an arbitrary damper on player behavior and enjoyment).
I'm also of the mind that 'gathering' and 'harvesting' have the reverse connotations of those described by the blog and could use some renaming. As for the mechanics of the actual extraction of large quantities of a resource, I think that requiring the character who discovered the site be the one who initiates the extraction, is on-hand the entire time, and is the determining factor in how long the extraction takes (only the time, not the quantity/quality, as far as the blog indicates) seems a bit overly limiting. Perhaps a mechanism whereby the extraction point isn't visible as such, much less interact-able, to anyone other than the discoverer until they explicitly make it so (which would require close proximity) would serve similar goals of preventing claim jumping. To my mind, this also helps with game immersion in that one needs to know precisely where on a rocky outcropping the rich vein of minerals is hiding.
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