localized resource definitive fix - ~LITERALLY~ 0 downsides

[a-Simulacrum]

i'm reigniting an idea that i've seen suggested multiple times in the past, and it's an idea that has never had a single downside to it. if you think you have an actual downside to it then i urge you to wait until you've read everything since i'll be addressing some of the most common concerns i can think of, things which i asked myself as to why this idea wouldn't work which i was quickly able to rebut.

it's in regards to one of the problems we have with the game in the form of localized resources. out of all the ideas i've heard, the one that sticks out clearly as the most flawless of all is having hostile creatures spawn around resources, particular when the resource is ready to be harvested. here's the thing though, i further suggest that said resource --ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT-- be able to be picked until the creatures that have been spawned by said resource are killed (you could even lock others out from being able to harvest the resource if they didn't kill the creatures perhaps, but that's just a bonus requirement that i haven't put as much thought into). this will stop people from just having an alt lure the creatures away while another alt/person picks the node. lock the node from being picked until the enemies are dead, it's a pretty vital part to this whole equation.

perhaps i'm getting a bit ahead of myself here though, let's take a brief moment to discuss what the issue is surrounding localized resources.
1. they're all on strict timers
2. people make extremely low effort alts (salt alts for example only need to spend a few points in cooking, it's piss easy to make a shit load of these even if you're a hermit) and keep them logged off next to the resource until it's time to pick them.
3. contrary to what the second point says about even hermits technically being able to get their own share of localized resources, it's the big villages that 9/10 will win out and get the resource since they can send their soldiers (who are totally free at the time of localized resource harvesting) to go over and kill the hermits alt.

so now that we've got those reasons laid out, how the fuck does enemies spawning fix this?
well it's actually rather simple and fairly straightforward.
even big villages will not be able to make combat ready alts to take over 1/3 of the worlds nodes like they currently do now. to be combat ready you need the stats, the skill investment, the equipment investment and one of the most overlooked tedious things, the movepool to create a good enough combat deck. even if we PRETEND that big villages could do that (they can't, even with bots this is just too much fucking effort to do on a global scale like what is currently happening, at most they could do this for a few select areas), losing one of those alts is a fairly significant loss that will take time and effort to get back. compare that to losing an alt who has 15 cooking to pick a salt node. even i've lost plenty of salt alts, its literally never a big deal, infact it's so insignificant that i'm more upset that i missed out on the salt for these 3 days from that node over the death of the alt itself, which i can make another and pick some trees while on my way back to the salt node to get the required cooking skill again.
so if a village did get greedy and try to pull that shit, and you did manage to kill their alt or knock it out even (wounds alone take investment, resources and time to fix) it wouldn't feel like you just left scents for a trivial reason like what happens when you kill a naked 15 cooking salt alt.

here's another suggestion too. make the hostile creatures which spawn from said resource node be non trivial. salt nodes for example could have 3 'salt hoppers' spawn around them when they're ready to be harvested and these creatures could each have similar combat capabilities as say a wolverine/boar. i'm just spitballing here.

another benefit of this is that due to the need to slay these creatures BEFORE you can harvest, big villages will be sending their soldiers out to deal with securing their nodes, they can't just have their soldiers all on standby while their alts do all the work. this takes valuable time so that other people around the world can go out and try contest their own nearby nodes without having to worry about 'insert big village name here' (who also live across the globe) alts standing by to pick it with 0 effort put in.

this is a meaningful change that will drastically change localized resources for the better IMO. i have put a significant amount of thought into it and i am not seeing the downside to it. it encourages people to go out, it encourages conflict/other social situations, it helps to combat the bigger villages from having a monopoly on the vast majority of the worlds resources and best of all almost completely stamps out one of the more irritating uses for alt spam. it encourages much more healthy and fair gameplay around these important and valuable resources. i literally don't see the downside. with a system like this in play, we might actually start seeing resources be not picked clean within seconds of them being up.

so let's hear it, what is the issue with this system i propose to you?
i'm expecting to hear >well people will still have bot alts!, despite me already addressing that. you are vastly underestimating how much effort it takes to get alts prepped if these changes did take place. worse comes to worst, if this didn't stop 95% of alt cases (it will though, i am heavily confident in it), jorb & loftar could go nuclear and also put an additional safeguard in place like a new credo which would be required in order to even be able to interact with localized resources. you really telling me people would do all of the above mentioned things required to get an alt ready AND a fulfill a credo for each of them for this? nah, no chance. you're deluding yourself if you think that's how it would be, this will be the end of 99.9% of alting for localized resources. no doubt about it.

[SnuggleSnail]

Hostile mobs should spawn around localized resources, and the resources shouldn't be gatherable until the the mobs are killed

I can solo kill any NPC in the game on a character with 1UA/10 STR and no armor, including whales, trolls, and empowered murder nidbanes spawned off of chars with 30k str and 10k UA. Nothing that you want spawning next to every heartwood tree is going to require a real character.

It's also pretty debatable that alts camping localized resources is even a problem, and I suspect any "solution" that stops people from doing so will drastically reduce hermits/casual's ability to access localized resources.

[Vraatjuh]

Here's some downsides:
I, as a hermit, will have to go there with my main character to kill the animals around it (which will most likely aggro me all at the same time?):
1. It will be a while before I have the required str/con/ua to take on all these mobs at once.
2. I will be fucking vulnerable to assholes who will just camp local resources till somebody attacks the monsters and then can't teleport away anymore because of aggro.
3. You underestimate the botting power of factions it seems.

Especially 2. worries me.

Other then that, I do not completely hate this idea.

Hostile mobs should spawn around localized resources, and the resources shouldn't be gatherable until the the mobs are killed

I can solo kill any NPC in the game on a character with 1UA/10 STR and no armor, including whales, trolls, and empowered murder nidbanes spawned off of chars with 30k str and 10k UA. Nothing that you want spawning next to every heartwood tree is going to require a real character.

I do not think that the fact that you find ways to use/abuse anything in this game to your advangte, makes it a legit argument against this idea. It's a problem that should be solved regardless.

[a-Simulacrum]

I can solo kill any NPC in the game on a character with 1UA/10 STR and no armor, including whales, trolls, and empowered murder nidbanes spawned off of chars with 30k str and 10k UA. Nothing that you want spawning next to every heartwood tree is going to require a real character.

and how much setup / time is required to do that? if you say non, i'm calling bullshit, there's trolls all over the world now, stream yourself killing one with a fresh spawned in alt, in a timely fashion no less (which is the crux of why this change would work, doesn't matter if you can kill them with alts, it how much effort it takes and how quickly you can do it).
if it takes time to wall them off and whatever else you're doing, or the use of multiple alts to help, then that's irrelevant that you can do that anyway. by time you dealt with one camp that way, everyone else in the world will have more than likely dealt with their closest localized resource too.

Here's some downsides:
I, as a hermit, will have to go there with my main character to kill the animals around it (which will most likely aggro me all at the same time?):
1. It will be a while before I have the required str/con/ua to take on all these mobs at once.
2. I will be fucking vulnerable to assholes who will just camp local resources till somebody attacks the monsters and then can't teleport away anymore because of aggro.
3. You underestimate the botting power of factions it seems.

Especially 2. worries me.

Other then that, I do not completely hate this idea.

i've hermited too in the past and i plan on hermitting this world.
first, the risk associated with going out on your main is not a good enough reason for alts to be widespreadly used. if you want the resource, you have to commit to it, just like this change would require the big factions to commit to them too by having to send their mains.
as for your numbered reasons -
1. this change intends to make the nodes difficult to pick up early game. hermits may miss the chance to get the first 1-2 nodes if you don't wanna socialize and cut some deal with somebody to help you to fight them or something but that isn't a negative imo.
once you can handle the nodes though, due to how many are in the world, you're more often to see and acquire more of them because they now take time and some form of effort to get them.
2. this is a non issue unless you're close to a massive faction who has control of the area you're in. if not then they'll be sending their own soldiers to their own nodes. yeah sure after they've killed the creatures and harvested their nodes THEN they will probably go looking for more, but the point is by making it so they have to use their mains instead of logging in 15 accounts full of alts logged off at the node, this gives you valuable time to get your own nodes and get back to your base safely.
3. i've been apart of two of the biggest factions in the game. nobody is making and kitting out hundreds of mid tier combat ready bots and then killing hundreds of the spawned creatures. it's not gonna happen. period. even botting has its limits.

[Colin500]

1. they're all on strict timers
2. people make extremely low effort alts (salt alts for example only need to spend a few points in cooking, it's piss easy to make a shit load of these even if you're a hermit) and keep them logged off next to the resource until it's time to pick them.
3. contrary to what the second point says about even hermits technically being able to get their own share of localized resources, it's the big villages that 9/10 will win out and get the resource since they can send their soldiers (who are totally free at the time of localized resource harvesting) to go over and kill the hermits alt.

Literally a simple fix that has been mentioned thousands of times, make resources move after each harvest.
This would fix both second and third issue, and to fix the first issue resources could be switching places only after the timer, so at least we can know when to start looking for them, but don't know where.

We don't need another shit AI, that we have to cheese around resources.

[azrid]

This is a great idea. Alt spamming is cancer.
Nerds like snail are mad they cant 0 effort alt spam anymore.
Resources would gain value on the global marketplace with this change.

[lwdragon]

Like before i offered something like that:

Localized resources should spawn randomly in the world and only in quantity by 1.
Problem is that now you know spawn places, you know spawn/regenerate time so what you need to do is just come in time and claim resource. Not mention that some regions have huge amount of localized resources, when others have almost nothing.
Let say now world have so may ancient trees that it generates 100 roots in total. Why not to make so this number of roots spawns randomly in the world on the trees (or so) and stays there until someone discovers and collects it, after collecting the respawn timer starts again for that one root, just next respawn gonna be who knows where. Same can be made for every localized resource, just spawn place depends on tile types (salt crystals spawns on sand, cave tiles, or even can be mined out rarely, and so on...).

[a-Simulacrum]

Literally a simple fix that has been mentioned thousands of times, make resources move after each harvest.
This would fix both second and third issue, and to fix the first issue resources could be switching places only after the timer, so at least we can know when to start looking for them, but don't know where.

We don't need another shit AI, that we have to cheese around resources.

i brought that fix up years ago. everyone bitched about how resources might spawn in bases / other claimed land / over floor art and because of these reasons said it wouldn't be feasible.
as for the spawned animals/creatures being cheesable, doesn't matter if they can be. that is literally and unironically irrelevant. if someone wants to spend 10-15 minutes cheesing them on piss poor non worked on alts then that is a waste of time. what's far more likely is they'll go to a resource on their main, which will be able to slay the creatures quickly, harvest the node, then make their way to others. it simply takes too much time and effort to cheese a shit load of nodes with a shit character for it to be worth it.

let me just reiterate for millionth time already though, for good measure.
IT. DOES. NOT. MATTER. IF. IT'S. 'TECHNICALL'. POSSIBLE'. TO. KILL. THE. CREATURES. WITH. LOW. EFFORT. ALTS
all the creatures are there for is to enforce human interaction and make it as difficult and as tedious as possible for alt spam.
for regular characters, the creatures won't be tedious or irritating at all, they'll just be a relatively straight forward combat encounter for you to go through to get your resource. they're not supposed to be a big gated highly challenging encounter. as long as they're difficult enough to scare people from using low effort alts, they've done their job.

anybody that is saying it will be no different than it is now is blatantly lying to save face.
compare having 10 naked alts with no stats or abilities (besides the ability needed to harvest) logged off at salt nodes now, which you log in 5 minutes before the salt comes up, pick the salt, then log off immediately
to having to setup 10 and kit out 10 alts with actual investment into combat skills, stats, combat decks and some gear too and then even when you have these you have to fight however many creatures spawn from said resource 10 times over, one by one, and losing that alt to somebody who comes on their main will be far more damaging than losing an alt with nothing but 15 cooking.

the latter is significantly more time intensive to get set up, more work heavy to pick each time the resource becomes available and more hurtful if you do lose said alt (can't just be replaced in seconds)

[azrid]

This will certainly cut down the number of resource alts dramatically. Some experienced autists might not care but the majority of players will stop spawning them.

[Jackwolf]

+1