Break the Gank Box -- Evil Suggestions Needed

Is there anything currently that prevents a pker party from splitting half hunter half camper to milk a crafters supplies dry? I assume diminishing returns from xp debt is probably part of it but...

What system would make that unlikely to happen?

My thought is more so groups of pvpers. By having materials drop you have now given people the option to turn a passive pattern matching activity into an active combat oriented one. There will always be like minded people who have fun through combat only. It doesn't really matter if the spawn points are far apart. Such people can and will coordinate if there is a benefit to it. Because it lets them replace an activity that isn't fun for them into a fun one AND feeds into their normal play style and increases their profit, it's a very straight forward social and profitable no brainer activity. Debuffs and Xp debt are mildly problematic for such players, but your literally just paying xp for material resources you wouldn't be able to get in a way that is fun for you anyway, were as 'solving' xp debt is p.

Gathering up a bunch of people who like gathering or 'being police' for people is much more difficult. Yes there will be guilds but gathering and resource hunting is a much more solo oriented thing. Especially given depletable resource nodes. As it stands I don't see any mechanism to discourage 'farming' spawn points through this split party.

Floats suggestion of a WoW like system is mildly interesting, but has its own flaws from a crafter's point of view in that other people are still capitalizing on the crafter's time and ability to get resources since the 'hunters' have no reason to really go away in this scenario. It's likely they'll just wait for 2-3 minutes which is an economic and fun penalty to the crafter in itself. Other games solve this by allowing an option to teleport to the nearest town, but I'm not sure if Steven want's AoC to be that kind of game? Does anyone else have other suggestions to this situation?

Yeah, you are right. In order to keep the economy strong, we should have the ability to summon a bounty hunter via a card or something paid for up front. That way PvPers get a challenging fight, the devs a money sink, and the economy a stabler crafting material pipeline. As we say in business. A win, win, win.