I found this at Eorzeapedia. It'd been awhile since I looked around there....and that new DevTracker thing they do is really nice!~



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Community name “Gathering Fatigue”

“To clear up your questions, we have checked with the Dev. team and found out the following.

As a countermeasure against RMT activities, the probability of gaining items through gathering will start to decrease after repeated attempts over a long period of time. After a certain number of attempts, items will no longer be obtainable through gathering.

To explain a little more on what goes on behind the scenes, there is an internal counter which measures how often a player has attempted gathering activities. Players will start with a maximum pool of 2,500, which will decrease by 10 each time a gathering attempt is successful and yields an item. Once this number decreases to 1,000, players will find it harder to obtain items. At 0, items can no longer be obtained through gathering.

Stopping gathering for some time will bump this number back up. The recovery rate is currently set at 100 per hour.”


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So, that's not really too bad....I mean, I can still get ~150 items before resources get scarce. Besides, that's more time than I'd want to gather in one shot anyway!