Next Update 04/11/2018

[Dark Mits]

Outside of Rings, I didn't find gathering all that much enriching either. I mean, Jerky is good enough on its own for me to try to gather stuff for Meat Stir Fry (or what it's called). Also, Karaage lost its appeal early too.

Farming for Rings also had appeal while we were still levelling them up. After we got our 5-6 desired rings done, there is no use for the extra materials.

The only "replayability" for gathering/fishing is from Yerkes, and even that is not that much since they reduced requirements to 1 material per week. I still have 600 Empty Bottles to give to him even though I stopped farming Tokyo and Las Vegas at least 6 months ago, when I completed all farming achievements.

[Golgotha]

The new AQ fields so far were literally useless. All they've done is provide a Quest that drops Pyroxenes you could already get from Free Fields which can be exchanged for extremely outdated 13* Weapons. Reducing Gathering just to the 100k DO is a little dishonest btw. Gathering is responsible for Rings and Cooking which further expanded character building and preparation for Quests (pretty much every Solo PD or Solo EQ video on Youtube has people eat some kind of dish). Besides Omega *is* getting a free field soon and the Material Storage will become more accessible once added to the SG shop so I wouldn't be surprised if we got more Rings in the future. Hero is still lacking interesting Ring options since launch.

I can agree that they spend as little effort in updating AQ as possible. Still its almost the only way to play the game that is above SH and isnt a raid/schedule/extreme challenge.

With how much they like making tutorials for new players, gathering recipes are still left in the raw list of whatever goes, where you have to manually comprise a list of fields to visit if you dont have about 80 spare storage slots. That in combination with stamina system that implies you might want to rather spend it entirely in one field. So I kinda expected more of it than just dropping in a field, causing fever and jumping out. Like I dunno, quality of spots depending on depth, rare spots, integration in other quests? Like in AQ maybe? Anything?

Rings are okay, its just that I have to make them by regularly appearing in a certain field for a minute without having to actually play the field. Isn't it weird?

So gathering feels disconnected from the rest of gameplay as much as possible, and looks more like an experiment in SG monetization than anything. Which is why I put it in line with other systems that create an impression of test units in similar way.