A post made by Gildrein over at the official forums in regards to the topic of Gathering Fatigue. The original topic question is as follows.

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Question is, what is it for except a pain in the ass. If you do not know what I am talking about, this is the point in time it becomes impossible to gather items, a gatherer will just start damaging items even when you win the mini game. I expected to see what it was about in the ask the devs about gathering, but there wasn't.
I have heard from players it is to combat RMT, however I remember a post in the beta saying that it had something to do with the way you gathered, not to combat RMT.

Here was the reply Gildrein provided.

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Hello fellow adventurers!

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.

If you have ideas and feedback on this topic, please don't hesitate to let us know.

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