Immersion ideas - Node appearances, hidden player levels, discovered crafting.....

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A lot of people agree with you on this one. Sadly, I think the last we've heard is still that all buildings will use the racial appearance from the last levelup.

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The problem with this, is that it's double-edged. If someone is moving in to attack you , you have no idea whether you should run or fight back. It would make gatherers have to think twice before trying to defend themselves or their spot (and maybe lose their work so far), and make that risk calculation much harder than the other side's "eh, I'm a PvPer with an empty inventory. I'll be stronger than most people who focus seriously on gathering, and even if not...".

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The problem with hiding things like recipes and requirements in the Age of Wiki, is that they'll be figured out and then become simply an annoyance to everyone but the first pioneers which forces them to leave the game, break immersion, and get into the habit of looking things up. I don't feel this is healthy for the game, and I don't believe it can properly achieve the goal, either.

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This is the same problem, where in the Age of Wiki. Even though you could also unlock things organically, 'accidentally', you would put "being competent at your class" behind either "playing exactly the way the devs expected, assuming they made the unlock conditions fully intuitive" OR "having to look up the conditions and then grind them out". This will work for some people, but there are a lot of people that it won't work for, and those people will be stuck in the same place. Learning to look things up to progress. This one isn't as bad as the recipe scenario, but it's not great either.

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Keep on it! If we keep them aware that the community is interested, they'll have it in mind in case they get further into the node appearance design and realize it's more practical than they thought.

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While I agree that this might be more thrilling or add intrigue in some circumstances, it will have a strong chilling effect on PvP (in part because said gatherers will be more or less required to always run, just in case). I'm not sure that's healthy for AoC, but I do see your perspective.

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I don't perceive that people will spend a lot of time wasting ingredients to try unknown random recipes (if you can lose ingredients this way). On the other side, I see this as either a chore, or (if the recipes may in fact provide a meaningful advantage) something that people (highly competitive guilds in particular) will just be incentivized to write bots for (and then use the working recipes on their main accounts later). "Try XXYZ. Try XXZX. Try XXZY. Try XXZZ." is prime bot material.

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As a PvP gamer, I dislike this. It means that I am unable to find even fights. If we can both gear, build, and train to our peak forms, then my opponent and I can get a good fight in. If he had the luck to find one of these (if its well enough hidden to not be on the wiki), then I can't have a good fight based on skill and effort. Even if we both play really well, it's not an even match. The game is just "unbalanced", and probably not through lack of my effort, but through lack of my luck. It seems cool, and makes a great story or 'legend', but isn't actually that great for PvP play . It's a valid style of game, but not one that I prefer.