The respawn changes have some large mechanic issues

I agree that penalization of single party players is not a good way to go, there aren't enough resources to have fun gathering with virtually any reduction in spawning (R36 has been bad enough with spawning or changing of node availability and location, especially for those of us who are still in 2-skull difficulty), I couldn't even imagine trying to effectively gather resources with more than 2 people in a given area for lower level areas.

I personally have fun gathering, it's relaxing. I don't mind that it takes time as long as I can keep at it without having to be interrupted every 4 nodes with an enemy, or having to wait 30-40 minutes for the piddly amount of node spawns that I already went through come back.

I guess I understand some kind of reasoning to not flooding the economy with ore or making it tough to earn things, but it's not good design when those factors obliterate the fun of the game. Right now, I feel like the fun of the game is taking a huge backseat to the strange need to create a realistic economy.

 

I remember being in one of the last mines that hadn't been forced solo/party and the mining there sucked. So there is something to be said for increasing spawns for larger number of players.

Just as a quick idea, something like 1 = 35%, 2 = 50%, 3 = 75%, 4 = 100% (of current spawn rates), maybe 15% more for each additional up to 8, and 10% to 16. (I think 16 is the current "full house" for adventuring scenes, so the cap at 16 would discourage overloading scenes.)

That would make what, 240% at 16? While that is only 15% per player, that's 120% per group if you have two full parties of 8, or 75% per group if you have 3 x 5. The actual numbers are un-tuned, but I think the general idea would work.

I may be thinking first about resource spawns here, but the same should work for mob spawns too. That way, having a full house in Derp Ravenswood won't result in over-farmed mobs and people wanting to hack a fresh instance via party management. It might even make the infamous East Perennial Trail more playable.

 

I think there is a large group of the community that were attracted to this game because of the option to play multiplayer FO and solo. To penalize people for their preferred play style doesnt make sense. Might as well just get rid of FO and solo if your goal is to have people not use those. Rewarding people working in groups seems to be a more popular way to go. It could even be as simple as crafting material E.G. chunk of coal, only drops in multiplayer. To take away from the current game modes does not seem to make a lot of sense. That is my opinion at least.