Changes are iminent, be it cooldown time reduction or even changing approach to whole system. We'd like to present you couple of ideas that you might want to discuss - yeah like it hasn't been done before countless of times! Jokes aside, let's check it out.
Scavenging
During early times of open beta, the gathering for resources worked in slightly different manner. You were looking for various materials on the worldmap, there was a chance for particular resource being generated. After you've acquired it, there was no cooldown. This ended in constant entering/looking around/leaving, which was not only rather boring, but also highly farmable. However, the worldmap and encounters are playing big part in Fallout games, so we could tweak that approach, and use it once again:- attach a chance to various zones to spawn various materials (be it junk, ore or whatever)
- disable ability to reroll material spawn when you force-enter from worldmap (that means you need to wander around and wait for next encounter check)
What are the pros of such approach?
- no cooldown - or rather, it's being hidden
- corelating materials with encounters, that means, due to the level of difficulty, some zones could spawn high quality resources
- it's all about encounters once again, may be frustrating to look around with no luck
Hunting
Well, but we could as well stay with current cooldowns, but we need a way for players to reduce them. Somewhat entertaining way, though that's subjective. For that, we could add items that reduce timeout - say food. You could obtain food by hunting (encounters again), or you could buy it at traders. That's additional task your player needs to do, but that's optional (well, some may find it mandatory, if they want to have the most out of it).Pros:
- additional activities
- a way to reduce cooldown
- The cooldowns stay (albeit reduced)