In the 2.9.0 update, we’re adding a new system for harvestable resources that will ease exploration. You already know the system that adds stars to group of monsters that are rarely attacked; well the same concept is now applied to resources!

How it works:

When a resource is available, it gets bonuses depending on the quality that can usually be harvested from resources of its type and the experience earned (for the related profession), and these bonuses increase the longer that the resource remains unharvested. Resources earn 4% bonus per hour; they reach 100%+ bonus on top of their original quantity and experience in 24 hours and about 200% in 48 hours. These bonuses can’t exceed 200%.
 
Bonuses for harvested quantities are simply added during the harvest; the harvester obtains basic resources and extra resources. The amount of the extra resources depends on the bonus that the resource had accumulated.
 
The minimum and maximum quantity that can be harvested by the character is displayed when a harvester hovers over a resource. The bonus is also displayed and is represented by stars (1 colored star represents 20% bonus, same as groups of monsters) and by the amount of resources obtained thanks to the bonuses.
 
When the character is harvesting, the amounts of resources earned are displayed in two figures that appear over the harvester’s head. The first number corresponds to basic amount of resources and the second number refers to bonus resources. In order to improve the readability of these quantities, we’ve slightly improved their display location. Now they start just above of the harvester’s head, instead of overlapping the character like before.
 
Experience bonuses for the related harvest profession are calculated in a very simple way: x% bonus on a resource gives x% extra profession experience during the harvest.
 
These harvesting bonuses are preserved between maintenances.

A slight change for cereal:

We’ve come to believe that cereals are respawning too quickly in general; a level 100 Farmer usually doesn’t have the time to harvest all the crops on a single field before the resources start respawning. This quick respawn time encourages players to choose a map and stay on it for their entire harvesting period, which we believe is regrettable. The time until cereals reappear is the shortest (150 seconds) among all other time of resource reappearance. We’ve thus decided to increase it to 600 seconds. But before you break your keyboard in half, we will reduce this respawn time if we find it to be too restrictive.


 
There are many farming maps in the game, and these fields often contain lots of resources. Such an accumulation of resources in the same place also pushes harvesters to stay on the same map and considerably reduces map readability.
 
Therefore, we’ve started to modify maps that contain big fields by reducing the number of cereals in order to make them “lighter”, easier to cross, more pleasant to contemplate, and faster to load.
 
For the update 2.9.0, we’ve started with Astrub Fields; you can go take a look at them and get an idea of what kind of modifications may be coming for other farming maps. This progressive change will allow us to see if these modifications are correctly balanced. The other fields will be changed gradually during other updates.

 

Don’t worry, we’re not planning on turning fields into tiny gardens that only contain a handful of crops; we’ll keep some maps with way more resources than others, but you should also prepare to see some maps that currently contain huge amounts of cereals looking a little more open.
 
Our goal isn’t to make harvesting cereal harder for the sake of simply making the profession more difficult, but to make it more meaningful and balanced. Reducing the quantities of cereals and increasing their time of reappearance is partly compensated by the introduction of the resource maturity system.

Objectives:

Our objectives for this change are quite simple:

• Encourage people not to camp on the same map all the time to collect their resources or level up their profession.
• Improve the value of resources present in small quantities on some maps (even these maps with smaller amounts of resources can still be interesting due to the maturity system).
• Reward exploration and recon of areas that aren’t used by many people (such as “hidden” maps for example).
• Distribute characters that collect resources over a higher number of different maps.

 
This system is already available on the test server and will be spread out over all servers with the update 2.9.0.