I know this opinion won’t be popular, but I like the stuff being rare…
That isn’t about profit, they are in demand items and you can profit on them in myriad ways regardless of commonly accepted price…whether that price is low or high.
Also, even with the campers it doesn’t take that long to gather a tile-set worth of materials. No you can’t do it in 15 minutes, but an hour a day of actual farming/camping for a week will get you the materials you need and then some. That doesn’t seem an excessive amount of time to me. I have played games where you have to farm for hundreds of hours to get mats for leet armor or armor enhancements. I don’t think of grind as a bad thing as long as the rewards are worth the grind.
If the rarity of materials is to be changed I would rather see it done from the top-down. Lowering the amount of people necessary to spawn an additional shard again is a great idea. Perhaps a perk that gives a percentile chance that minerals will not be consumed on crafting of a tile or percentile chance to “salvage” a tileset from a piece of armor when breaking it down. Maybe other rare items like springs could salvage into random minerals…
If all of the spawns are increased everything remains fair, but farmers are still going to farm and campers are still going to camp and people who don’t want to farm are still going to buy the mats outright for dram …so unless the increased spawn is market-breakingly massive the same people who control the pricing now will continue to do so…and I don’t really think it will solve the “problem.”
I don’t think there is a simple solution. Even at peak player counts it is rare to see multiple shards in areas outside of highsteppe except when shards are expiring or when world boss events are happening. The best solution I can think of is to motivate more people to leave Highsteppe and go get what they need.
In addition to forcing more spawn points by populating zones to the point that multiple shards spawn, having 30 people out in a zone all looking for resources will break up the “everyday campers” in no time …which will spread the harvest out across a broader swath of the players who need / want the stuff… and that would likely bring the price down naturally… which means people would do less farming…which means the price would go back up… so it remains worthwhile to farm them for dram when you have no immediate use for them.
The thing is that many players just don’t want to go and spend time competing for resources… and I understand that… however they do have the option of going and doing whatever they want to do and then using the dram from those activities to purchase the things they need.
I just really don’t think it is broken…
To be clear… I wouldn’t find increasing the spawn points for resources to be offensive, I just really don’t think it would have the impact on the “problem” that every one seems to think it would… If the price was truly so far out of whack with the demand then the natural result would be more people farming… but there aren’t, so it seems people are willing to pay the price…and I don’t think increasing the spawns will change the core group of farmers or campers…which just means deeper stacks for them to use to keep the market value high. Unless people are willing to take the time to farm the materials themselves…which would decrease the global demand and make competitive pricing a viable strategy.