I just realized how stupid my original post was so i erased it.

Anyways, i was just wondering if anyone had some sort of idea on how the herbalists out there can counter the effects of the few who overharvest or cause plant extinction.

Its just really horrible right now to walk into an area and see that more than 90% of the rooms either have one plant extinct, or be entirely empty of plant life.

Just to elaborate on the situation...

currently in my clan we're trying to replant half the rooms in the glomdoring, each missing something between 1-4 of the plant types that belong there.

according to my mapper, there are 209 tainted forest rooms there.

i'll do a really low estimate and say that half the rooms need to be replanted. that comes out to about 104 rooms that need to be worked on...

i've timed myself at about 20 rooms per hour so far. so that comes out to more than 5 hours...

keep in mind that i said that 50% was a low estimate... just yesterday i patrolled the southern serenwilde and found that not ONE of the rooms there had all the plants that it should've.. entire stretches of the forest were stripped clean of plant life.

Greedy overharvesters suck.

Someone had a good idea in another thread:

Stop replanting. Let the overharvesters suffer for a while and force them to learnt to replant, then overharvest from them. It sounds fun.

My Glomdoring?

*Grabs protectively at Brennan*

But really, controlling overharvesting is impossible. Any time a new player joins and makes an herbalist he will likely wander about harvesting as much as possible until someone goes, "OMG U JERK I WILL ENEMY U NOW KTHXBI!". And then there are those who simply know they will not be caught and do it anyway; more money for them, no reprecussions.

I believe our plants already recover from overharvesting better than other realms. In fact, if you could view a summary of the amount of plants in the realms and of the market prices of all herbs being sold in shops, you would see that they are all on par with other realms (except horehound, though that should change since demand for that will be plummeting with the change to health potions and thus its price will come down).

Though I find this interesting. It really is an economic experiment and was curious to see if this would happen to herbs in this virtual world. If you want to know why overharvesting happens but this does not happen with commodities, check out these links: Library of Economics and Liberty and Wikipedia .

Wow that was interesting and exactly what is happening in Lusternia. Yay for socialism, and yay for health potion changes

Honestly, and this is coming from someone who's NEVER had an herbalist character, even in Lust.

The people who harvest from 60 to 5 in EVERY room in an area are just as much to blame as those who harvest from 5 to 0. How'd you like if you spent cash on credits, learned Herbalism, to find no herbs left to harvest?

The agreement that the Hunters held within their own guild was wonderful. We agreed to NEVER harvest below half of the current supply in the room. So, for example, there's 60 flax in a room.....the MOST we would harvest to would be 30 and usually that was rare. It's common sense. So, the next person would only harvest to 15 down to the plant's minimum. Common sense I say

I liked that system (pristine law - I had an Arboreal there) but it was a lot more enforcable since only two guilds were able to harvest instead of theoretically half the realm (five out of nine guilds). So we're stuck relying on people's self-control and seeing how well that's working out.

Actually 4 guilds could I believe, Hunters, Arboreals, Wardens and Ilaferi?

*edit- Not sure how it happened but that was a double post. Sorry about that.

I wonder what would happen if the number of herbs a room was doubled? It might make the price plunge, which would scare off the overharvesters?

Wardens could only harvest a few herbs, Ilaferi dealt with poisons so couldn't harvest at all.

Ilaferi dealt with poisions? I only thought that was Idras and Saboteurs? But, I know about the herbs Wardens can harvest *TRANS TRAILBLAZING ROCKS* but ummm.....yeah!

Yeah, in place of the elixers, Ilaferi got poisons. Trans Trailblazing -does- kick ass, but I prefer trans Bowmanship!

STANDREADY
SWITCH BROAD
*fire*
SWITCH NET
PINSHOT
N/NW/W/SW/S/SE/E/NE...
SWITCH SPIRAL STRYCHININE
DSHOT

Or you could just repeatedly shoot them with net pinshots, that's nasty too.

Wardens also had a hard-coded 30 plant minimum and could only harvest limited types of herbs, hence why I excluded them. And yes, Ilaferi generate some poisons instead of harvesting some herbs

A couple of suggestions on the way herbs grow -

- If a room has 30 or more herbs, they should regrow twice as fast. For example, if there are just two or three buds on an arnica bush, only one would grow back per day. But if there were 35, it makes sense that more would grow back.

This would, I think, promote people to be more thoughtful about harvesting strategies. Do you pick a room down to 10 herbs left, and get one back per day, or do you only harvest 30 and let them grow back twice as fast?

- Plants, or at least some varieties, should spread to other adjacent rooms if there are currently 60 in the main room. If there's 60 kafe beans on a bush, but the adjacent rooms are bare, runners should be sent off, or spores spread, and a new bush with a single bean should start to grow in the adjacent room (or rooms).

Supposedly plants can "take care of themselves" - I think this would go to prove that. It doesn't make sense that plants would be growing healthily in one room, and yet never ever spread to a room just inches away from it.

I think those are excellent ideas, Sidharta.

I especially like the idea of spreading from one room to another, though I wouldn't restrict it to 60 in a room to spread. Maybe the more herbs that are in the room, the greater the *chance* it would spread, and have a certain minimum number for it to be possible.

I have an idea about multiple herb types in a single room. Perhaps the max number of a given herb can be affected by the other herbs in the room? For example, if there are 4 types of herbs in a single spot, each herb won't be quite as prolific as if it were the only one there, in terms of absolute number of herbs in that room. In such a case, maybe the chance for the herb to spread laterally would be increased as well, so while that room won't hold huge numbers of the herbs present, they would be present over a larger area. Some of the plants could even turn out to be symbiotic, boosting each other's growth when present in the same room, or antagonistic, with one killing the other off slowly or even mutually choking each other back.

I would also like to see at least some plants have a secondary terrain type in which it CAN grow, but at a lower rate and maximum than it's favored type.

Something similar to that has been done with astral nodes (readnews announce 29), in that they regenerate power more quickly with the more power they have. Unfortunately, there are still ones drained all the way down to nothing. I've seen at least one or two drained to nothing on each of my rare trips out there.