Guild Wars 2

I don’t know how many of you enjoy the idea of gathering, or have the time for it like some, but the idea was to have a scout or a personal gather-er that you could obtain from the gem store for X amount of gems. This would be account bound and could only be acquired once per account. Once you have this item and activate it a window would pop up of the world and only the areas that you have discovered would show, so if you just start out you would not be able to send this scout to areas you have yet to explore. Once you pick an area, lets say queens dale, you have the options of picking what materials to gather, let it be ore, wood, or herbs. Next you pick the time the scout has to gather… from 10 min to 24 hours. Once his time is up he/she would come back with said materials from gathering and you have time to play with your friends.
Now for the equipment he/she would use, would be based on what you have given them… so if you send them out for 24 hours and they run out of tools then you are left empty handed, so the ones that have the unlimited tools can be given to the scouts for this job, but that means if you come across a node you would need tools which would lead to more gem store purchases of future tools. ITs a win for both Anet and players in my opinion.

Why is this better than taking those X amount of gems, turning them into coin, and buying the materials you want on the trading post?

In practical terms, this sounds, as Felbryn observes, an awful lot like a more complicated version of buying gathered materials off the TP. The extra flavor/work might be fun for some, but, since buying off the TP helps grease the wheels of the economy (creating demand for materials, removing via TP tax, etc.) I don’t think the potential fun is worth the trouble.

It’s certainly an interesting idea, and might even be fun, but all the micromanagement is also work, and it’s very difficult to judge what the value of such a thing would be, over just spending the gold on materials from other players.

How is this different from a bot programmed to harvest from a map?