[Economy] Gathering nodes spawn behaviour of schools/veins/herbs vs Market Pricing.

[Cheewy]

Hello, hello;

I wanted to address the current situation with the market of herbs, ores, fishing and their subproducts and craftables, and their prices.

As most of the traders and farmers are aware, multiple means of farming were slowly nerfed/fixed/removed over time since the release of BFA, mostly im speaking about the multiboxing debacle, the drustvar exploits for herbs, the voldum elementals for riverbuds, the monelite elementals, among others... yet those are the, and i quote "good bugs" that players can exploit for their own benefit, but the "bad bugs" still remain, such as soome of the special herb mechanics still missing althought reported such as the Siren's Pollen one, which before could be somewhat ignored thanks to the "good bugs" but now they are highly detrimental to the economy, or the fact that half (if not more) of the actual gatherable herb/ore spots in the world are completely missing in freakz vs retail.

The ever shrinking playerbase (mostly raiding wise, and those interested in constantly having consumables, since the casual playerbase kind of remains mostly as it is), along with the aforemention fixes to exploits/bugs or changes of policy, has led to a drastic change in the economics, and im sure that everyone has seen this one way or another most noticeably the Battle Potions market, specially the raiding comunity.

We can make an argument, that we've yet to get out of the current hole that has been left by the recent multibox ban, and some of the other fixes, making those that exploited or multiboxed having a very large amount of materials that now they are slowly selling at exorbitant prices, now that the normal players have run out of their own mats and can't really farm around the clock, and yes this argument is very valid, and true, over time the market itself will stabilize, but the problem im pointing out here are the other issues that are destabilizing the market and overall is hurting the playerbase, and will keep doing so in the long run, unless either farming is fixed, or better even, eased based on the current farming comunity. If the "good issues" are been looked into and fixed, we may aswell get the "bad" ones fixed too right?, otherwise we will keep going downhill like we are right now. I just need to mention the agility battle potion prices as an example. The current fluctuations are insane to say the least.

Leaving aside bugs, or exploits; one of the biggest issues with farming gatherable spots right now is the basic way in which the spawn rate of said items is working. And how the nodes of herbs are been set up.

For example, Bridgeport (literaly below the bridge) is a very popular place for star moss farming, there are roughly 16 spawn spots (which all feel as individual nodes considering the spawn behaviour). Herbs themselves can respawn anywhere from 5 minutes to 7 minutes (theoretically speaking each herb spawn node should have a 6-7m internal timer, and a new herb spawns at any given spawn within that node after that time), this isnt the case for that place, and it seems to be strictly tied to the density of players going in and out of the zone refreshing its phasing, at a high leveling pop time of the day (usually around 4pm svt) you can easily go there and route the full 16 town spots and never have to stop, giving the flowers roughly a minute and half spawn timer, to every single spot. Yet during midnight when there are much fewer players moving there, you can do the route and then have to wait for it to re-start a few minutes, sometimes even go as far as the full 7 min spawn timer that is closer to what it should be like. This same behaviour seems to be present in every active node in the bfa zones, which is extremely polarizing for zones with low pop, where herbs are always respawning at their maximun time. This means that players will tend to want to go to zones that already have a decent influx of players, or even active farmers, making it "easier" to farm there, given what i said above. Yet theres also the issue of a herb despawning off your phase 30s after a different player grabs it, which leads to farming zones been either butchered by players farming at random and creating alot of conflict among the players there, or leading to people trying to coordinate so that the zone spawns the herbs at the same staggered speed (which is rare), this is a relatively common sight at Norwington State for riverbud and siren's farmers. This is also true for miners, but not as popular since ores are much less valuable in terms of usefullness, unless someone is specifically aiming to craft/reroll 415 blacksmith gear, but just with like 90% of the strength based specs, they are the vast minority, tho the 415 crafted rings are quite popular, which is where most of the ores end going towards lately.

So with those issues mention, im going to give one example of why the market is quite crazy for some time now and will "stabilize" eventually, but still remain like that. So, with the fact of the previous exploits been fixed, and the existing pollen bug, well not a bug, rather a lack of mechanic. Means that anything that involves siren's pollen is usually going to be priced higher, since the average gathered herbs per siren node is roughly 25%~ lower than that of a normal herb (mostly because its missing its special mechanic that offsets this lower base drop rate), ontop of that, the exploit bug to the voldum adds, meant that farming riverbuds would require to do manual farms, and right now theres only 2 places in the world with enough nodes/time spent to be worth it, those been one around nazmir, and the other (and much more popular) is norwington state, also based on the popularity it means that more players are activelly there, and since its also a lowbies zone, you get more spawns across time, again going back to what i said earlier with the spawn behaviour, which makes the less popular zone even worse. Those 2 herbs that i just listed are the 2 herbs used for Agility and Intelect battle potions. Now the left one is Strength, which uses Sea Stalks (which are the herb that is currently spawning the closest to retail in terms of nº of nodes, which makes it relatively easy to farm, and thus its low (altho still high) price but that is because of the lack of farmers), and Star Moss, that is the cheapest herb by far, and easiest one to farm.

On an average day an Strength pot can go anywhere from 100-200g, where an agility pot can go anywhere from 400-600g baseline, at worst they can be as high as 850 baseline on a friday before raiding guilds start their runs. With the prices of sirens and rivers going from 40-60g/pcs against stalks at 15-25g and starmoss at 10-15g.

As you can see theres a steep difference there. And mostly has to do with nº of nodes in the world, their spawn behaviour, which in turn is based of popularity, and the siren's bug, which by itself cuts siren's farms by 25%~.

In case of curiosity, and to really see how much those numbers amount to, i will give an example with a normal 3h raiding night from my guild, where in a single night we spent 306 pots (granted this is progression and wipes are included) this split across 13/20 players. 96 of those were STR, 104 INT and 106 AGI, strength sums (at an average price of 125g) to around 12k gold at pot market value (not herb value which would be naturally higher even with the 50%~ surplus from rank 3 alchemy recipes), intelect to 41,6k at an average price of 400g, and agility to 58.3k at an average price of 550g (Total of 111.9k gold in 3h with only 13 players using battle potions). This numbers are high by default given the fact that its a progression guild wiping on a boss fight for a few dozen times. But you can see clearly the numbers difference based on your main stat. And given that agility is commonly the most popular in the server, it makes it even more obvious.

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So, with that out of the way; i would have a few sugestions to atleast stabilize the herbs market and by proxy the ores and fishing:

-First step would be to fix the nodes map of BFA and manually include every spot there was in retail, or atleast come up with an automation that would place a node (with an average amount of x spots per node) every x yards from the previous so that theres a higher density of gatherable zones in the overall of zandalar and kultiras. Considering that right now we play with less than half of what should exist. This would help alot with platinum / anchor weed / riverbud farming, since those are the ones with the least amount of nodes on freakz compared to retail.

-Second would be to fix the siren's pollen issue which is one of the most important things to fix, else products made out of siren's would still be drastically more expensive, this would get rid of roughly 20-30% of the price increase for siren specific items.

-Third, and the most complex one, would require to look exactly at the behaviour i descrived earlier to how spawn nodes behave with players coming in and out of the phase, reducing the time it takes to respawn to its bare minimun if enough players are traveling in and out of that said phase (which from what i've seen tends to be 1.5-2m herb/ore respawn per 4 players traveling in and out of a phase excluding the farming player), and then modify, or change it so that the respawn rate of herbs is static for all players in all phases, or at the very least make it so that the maximun wait time is always static and considerably lower to accomodate to the much lower amount of farmers that the server has compared to a normal blizzard server (this timer could very well be 3-5mins max wait time instead of 6-7m).

-Lastly, incase the first step cannot be fulfilled, would be a way to either increase the amount of items gathered from items based on your rank in a custom way by steps based on rank, to accomodate for the lack of farming spots and/or bugs. Or to add a new system, or an old exploit that would allow a higher influx of mats.

Note*, to those that did play with the AH since release, you can probably recall taht even with the exploits in place, althought the price of herbs was considerably lower than it is now, and closer to what it was in retail, it was still slightly higher. Yet it did acomodate for that extra source of resources via bugs, instead of nº of farmers.

Sidenote* Lets not even get started on the food market, where versatility and haste food is almost non-existant since almost nobody is bothered to farm for it, and those to do it is mostly for self consumtion, again due to the lack of farmers, and the prices those items have when they are put at the market, lowering the apparent demand for them, and subsequently reducing the supply, which in turns increases the price passively, since most players only care about the short income.

Apologies for the white wall of pure eye pain, i just wanted to get such a conversation going and see if we can get enough interest in it so that the devs do something about it, because the current situation wont be fixed unless something is done about it, or if we manage to double or triple the farming community, but that would just mask the issues, and this is only going to get worse, just like it has since BFA started with the boom of the new economy reset.

Fertilized by solitude, watered by tears of the moon, the night blooming flower shines for eternity.