Runes of Magic -- Interesting Resource Gathering Mini-game?

I've taken a short break from leveling in Runes of Magic in anticipation of the triple exp week coming up tomorrow at the crack of midnight. Instead I've decided to take some time gathering herbs, which I've never really seen done well in any MMO I've played so far to be honest. 

Gathering in most MMOs goes a bit like this . . . 1- find a node spawn on the ground, 2- click it, 3- get item from node . . . and there you go.  um, yay? The most fun you can have with this activity is probably when you race people to get nodes and win, but it really sucks if you lose. (Also a bit of a jerk move to race like that.) Most MMOs offer you a leveling path for resource gathering and this both gates progression in higher levels and brings players back to old zones.

I've seen it done a variety of ways including the use of special harvesting tools ala Guild Wars 2 or with no special requirements at all ala Wizard101.

Seeing as how Runes of Magic attempts to build off of what you find in World of Warcraft, there definitely is an herbalism proficiency leveling track, but I think where they improved on the WoW model was in the meta-mini game of herb collecting.

After doing this for a few hours, it's seems to usually go a bit like this:

1- Find a node and click on it to harvest 2-7 items from the node.

2- The act of harvesting then begins a buff counter at the top of your screen indicating how many resources you've collected.

Shoot for 100!

3- Every 10 resources collected within the 10 minute "Collected Amount" buff counter, a couple of things happen. First, you gain a secondary "Easy Harvest" buff that helps you collect items faster.

Getting faster the more you collect!

The highest I've ever seen this secondary buff rise to is 9th power based on the counter. Second, you gain benefits every 10 points your counter progresses. For example, here's an example of one run to 100 that I received:

• At 10 points -- Gain the Easy Harvest buff that helps you gather faster.
  
  
• At 20 points -- Gain leveling experience for my Mage. Secondary buff levels to 2 (that's an extra 5% harvesting speed).

First level of combat experience from harvesting at level 67.

• At 30 points -- Easy harvest levels to 3 (again an extra 5% speed).
  
  
• At 40 points - Easy harvest levels to 4. Proc'd Nimble Harvest buff, which meant 30% more experience from harvesting nodes for the next 30 seconds.
  
  
• At 50 points -- Easy harvest levels to 5.
  
  
• At 60 points -- Easy harvest levels to 6. Gain more experience! this time, it was twice as much as it was when it proc'd at 20 points.
  
  
• At 70 points -- Easy harvest levels to 7.
  
  
• At 80 points -- Gained an amazing amount of that yummy leveling experience! Easy harvest levels to 8.

70k experience! Nice!

• At 90 points -- Easy harvest levels to 9. Proc'd a better Nimble Harvest buff for another 30 seconds (this time it was 50% experience gain).
  
  
• At 100 points -- I hit the cap!  My resource collecting buff goes away and is superseded by 3 minutes of super buff where every node I harvest for the next 3 minutes gives me double the experience toward leveling your harvesting proficiency and the fastest resource gathering speed in the game! My Easy Harvest buff expires . . . .

Something like that . . .

So, this kind of creates a minigame in a way where you try to land yourself in an area with lots of resources right as you hit 100 points; otherwise, it's a wasted buff.

Now, you can totally just ignore this little buff game and collect herbs, but I really like the effort they made toward trying to gamify the typically boring experience of collecting resource nodes.

My only wish here is that they double downed on the fun slot-machine mechanic to resource gathering. This predictable mini-game is fun enough by itself, but there can be fun found in randomness and everyone likes extra surprise rewards when doing something as rote as gathering herbs in an MMO.  For example, unearthing a treasure chest or finding gardening seeds! Spawning a rare enemy! Stuff like that!

I will say that as far as resource gathering goes, I kind of like the approach they've taken in Runes of Magic. It at least keeps the interest going while you're out collecting stuff from the ground. 

Happy Dueling!