Increase gathering rates

On the next wipe, I suggest increasing the gather rate to 5x or something similar. I like the activities that have been included on this server adn I think if gathering didn't take up 90% of our time there would be a much wider group that would do the activities. I think increasing the gather rate will make an especially important addition to the next map with the North vs South thing. Of course I think there needs to be some changes to the store system...the prices paid for easily gathered resources need to be cut drastically or eliminated altogether to prevent people from gaming that system. C4 should still be drop only as well.

Any opinions?

If I did jack up the gather rates would have to pull mats from the shop for balance issues. Also worried that increased gather would cause a lot of big buildings left empty which might require more server wipes to keep memory resources down from the memory leak currently in game. I would like to hear more on this from everyone.

Here, I'll weigh in on this from a purely economics and also a player view.

First the player view: It can be quite a chore getting the resources for a proper house, especially when you need to make it large and complex to prevent raiding. On top of this, the amount of wood it takes to make metal fragments is ridiculous in my personal opinion. 10,000 wood will melt down only 1,000 metal fragments and that's painfully slow. That's a total of only like 5 floor tiles upgraded. One metal hatchet will collect right at 10,000 wood at the current gather rates. So from a player perspective looking at people who don't have currency in game to spend on stuff, yes it does look like gather rates are kind of low. 2x wouldn't be that bad, I think 3x would be kind of pushing it though.

From an Economy Perspective: Easily gather materials, such as Wood, Stone, Metal Ore, and Sulfur Ore (in that order) are the currency basis of our economy in Rust with store mods. By adjusting gather rates, we would have to adjust the buy and sell price of not only all the building materials making it worth less to sell (to prevent an overglut of money), we'd also have to adjust the prices of every single other crafted item as to prevent a "crafting-to-sell" money farm for the dedicated worker. I.E. - Extra wood makes for crafting bows and arrows to be more lucrative, sell the bows to make money, use the money to buy metal fragments, use the fragments to make a super house that's inpenetrable due to exhorbant costs of C4. As materials are the basis for all financial transactions since we don't have a money for killing animals and money for killing people, etc, any change in gather rates are going to alter the balance of power and provide the niche groups with more leverage over the greater populace. We have to be very careful about the changing of gather rates, or any fragile balance we have will be destroyed.

I agree with Matricii, the balance is fragile...and increasing the gather rate will most definitely screw with that balance.  It would require alot of work to re-price all the store items.  It may end up being just too much of a pain in the ass.  But I hope not.  I had thought that eliminating the ability to sell wood, stone and such.  But I see the point about churning out arrows.  But what, ultimately, would be wrong with that?  If you can't sell or buy wood from the store....

I guess with that line of thinking the topic devolves into just getting rid of the store plug-in.  I for one don't have a problem with that.

I think the store mod actually adds in something to the game, allowing people to be able to get things they don't find through other means of generation (i.e. selling of resources and other items to recycle). But right now the only means of getting money is through selling stuff, and the easist stuff to sell is resources.

Yea, I gotta be honest. I never thought about selling my mats to the store. The only thing I've ever sold to the store was stuff I've taken of my "victims". After thinking about it and reading about it here I just sold an ass load of charcoal that was taking up waaaaay too much space. Hell trading out coal for wood is ok by me! lol

But anyway back on topic. Whatever works for you guys. Im just getting to where I friggen HATE gathering mats. Not looking forward to the wipe. Except for hoping it brings more of the regulars back

I feel ya on the collection of mats, would be fine if we were only forced to wipe every couple of months, thats why i put the economy and banking in was to offset the fact of wiping so often, with economy bank and store, you can get back on your feet quicker imo. might have to gather a few mats, but easier to do when you can buy your equip right off the bat.