Harvesting Trees Question

I sure as hell hope we can't. Cutting down every tree would just become a chore, while finding "the right" tree in the see of unneeded ones would hit you with a tiny dose of dopamine, the same way a rarish drop from a mob would. Having every tree cuttable would also go against the design goal of soft friction between players, cause why would I try removing some gatherer from some location if said location had enough trees for 10 people to cut them down at the same time w/o any problems.

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I have played it up to lvl 25 or so. And that is exactly why I dislike that feature. Though mainly that was due to NW letting you level up all professions so every tree around me just taunted me with a "you could be leveling up your tree cutting rn instead of doing whatever it is you're doing".

Also, how do you balance "drops" from a tree? Do you not get wood from cutting down a wholeass tree? Do you only get a singular piece of wood from it? But even if you did, you still have hundreds and thousands of trees around you so you'll have the same amount of resources by the end of your gameplay session. And how would you balance that in the recipe stage? Especially considering that piles or rocks or flowers or realistically any other resource will be way more rare than trees in a forest.

And now you have a huge imbalance between the professions and the pricings on their respective resources. A flower gatherer might pick 20 flowers that go towards 5 strong potions, so those 20 flowers would cost quite a bit. But those 20 flowers only grow on particular hills and a dozen other flower gatherers would want to get them too so you have competition for them. The same could be applied to rocks or metals or whichever other resource that is not trees. All of them will have competition for the limited amounts of the resource.

All while trees are super abundant, potentially require hundreds of piece per recipe (because there'd be thousands and thousands on the market, due to every lumberjack being able to cut trees down in the hundreds per hour) and due to just huge supply you'd most likely have low costs. And now every lumberjack needs to grind trees for hours upon hours to earn as much as a flower gatherer does in an hour after some quick pvp.

And if you try to counterbalance that with either "not all trees drop wood" or "not all wood is usable, so there's rng on drops" then you'd just shift my suggestion of "find a glowing tree" to "find a glowing drop", except with finding trees you're just running around enjoying nature and maybe doing some other stuff on the side, while with finding rng drops you're just grinding the same few trees in the hopes of dropping the valuable stuff. All while not being able to do anything else and not competing with anyone for the resource because every lumberjack can just have his 3-5 respawning trees and just run circles around them. In other words you're just grinding trees for hours.

Now I get that some people will obviously find that activity appealing and might not even care for the bigger picture of market balance or whatever, but exactly how many such people would exist on any given server and would that be enough to support the potential market demand of "we need thousands of wood pieces because recipes require dozens of them, because every tree is choppable and the balance would break if we didn't have it that way"?

I feel like a lot of people that loved the feeling of NW resource gathering fell in love with the sound design of the game rather than the activity itself. Yes, hearing distant sounds of woodcutting or rock smashing was cool and all, but the same can be achieved with rare cuttable trees too. Except with rare trees the sound of someone cutting it could be an attractor to any potential competitors for said trees. So if there's a few cuttable trees growing near each other in a dense forest, the sound of you cutting them down might attract other lumberjacks to your position which could then lead to potential pvp. To me that sounds like a real PvX game.

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Yeah, except the potion's effect is gone if a few minutes, if not instantaneous, while shields can go for days potentially. And one person can use all 5 potions, while 5 shields would provide defense to 5 people.

The issue is the difference in scale and the balance between different scales. Like I said, if flowers are rare and several people are fighting for them - you have yourself some high prices per unit. But if the wood is abundant and there's barely any fighting for it because there's enough trees for everyone - there's literally no point in having the price per unit be any higher than a few "cents".

To counteract that Intrepid would have to make recipes that require a ton of wood, but barely any other resources. And that "a ton" would really have to be a ton, if you want to make the lumberjack profession a worthwhile job. And soon enough you'll get to a point where a single person just can't physically farm enough wood to earn the same amount of money a flower gatherer would.

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To the crafter they might, yes, but that would only lead to the same grind I've heard about in NW, where people would just spamcraft the same fucking item to level up their crafting. That doesn't feel good to do, it leads to overabundance of trash items and to a stronger requirement for sinks designed just for that kind of resource. Because if you don't have a sink for it, sooner or later you'll just have people with near-infinite amounts of said resource because the supply vastly outpaces the demand.

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Which is literally what I'm suggesting, but w/o the pointless grinding of pointless wood. And you can still have tiers of rarity too, it's not like I'm saying to just have one type of special tree that can be cut.

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These two contradict themselves. If you have big sinks (I see that weapon as such sink) - you need to keep farming wood. And if you need to keep farming wood while it doesn't give you any XP - you feel like shit because you're not progressing your profession.

All of these things are not really a problem if instead of every tree being cuttable you have every 10th one being cuttable because it's the only one that has value. And then you have tiers of rare spawns within those 10th trees, with their wood used in different recipes.

But if you just want to make some cool tree cutting sounds in the forest I'd be completely fine with letting the character chop any tree infinitely w/o getting any resources from it. Hell, that could even be a misdirection tactic. Some dude is looking for a new tree spawn and hears someone chopping in the distance. Decides to go there to contest the trees just to see that the sound was coming from some maniac just infinitely chopping a plain useless tree, while their friend might be cutting down real trees in another location.

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And I'm taunted by every tree being harvestable. Every time a ran near a tree in NW I thought to myself "I need to cut down that tree". And this thought was pretty much omnipresent because that world is filled with damn trees. And it ate away at my desire to do other things, because it was constantly nagging me to cut down more trees.