Hey. I just had a good idea and I need input about it. I thought that after mining some iron ore (or some other crafting resource) I could just camp there till it respawned. This could be doable if the respawn rate is high enough....

na to camp just one spot is not common, if ther are fixt spots you figur out the ultimat lop run and check the hole map.

Common, yes. I've seen people doing it every now and then in other MMOs. Frankly you get much better results running a circuit around the zone hitting spawn locations. Camping one spawn only really works if there's already a lot of competition and you don't mind waiting a half hour for each batch of two or three ore.

It might not be a bad idea going by the beta....its such a big world, and the materials are spread about. It might prove faster to camp one ore if the respawn rates are fast enough.

But it wouldn't be worth it IMO, considering you can dismantle armor & weapons to gather any resource you are lacking.

Gather as you play from the start & you should do well enough.

In some MMo when you found some resource rich spot - you could colect it and quickly zone few times. Each zone have separate pools of resources -but placed in same spot ;D

But this is really bad idea, and io reallly doubt this ever happend in TESO. Also this would kill resource price in market

if you wanna gather resouces, go explore and collect them.

I would Love to see something diffrent - nodes that are "player bound"/instanced for everyone so without risk of node-looters. I saw this few times in last beta.

I was busy finishing some monsters, whaamm, some player run right through me, crouched -and heres go my Nirnroot -.-'

Think camping is mostly done with bots,

Yup, camping is the least efficient way to go about gathering.

Since there are passives that make gatherables more visible, you can really get plenty of mats while questing and exploring for XP as you level, I found. Not to mention that you also get mats by breaking down loot... white drops from trash mobs are fine for this... so in fact you could ignore gathering nodes altogether and do your "gathering" by fighting exclusively. (For leather, naturally, that's the only way to go; you get it only off enemies.) Whether that's more efficient I couldn't tell you, but you're getting XP and skill points to put in your crafting skills at the same time as gathering, which you don't get by picking stuff up off the ground... so I'd say it's a contender for the best approach.

I forgot about that...

Dismantling an item typically yields less than what is needed to craft said item, but yes, you could in theory skip gathering altogether and get your mats from item drops. You can also put some points in the hireling perk, which supposedly will send you some mats once every 24 hours.

Personally, I think it's worth it to go ahead and get the first level of the keen eye perk for the resource you want. Makes spotting the nodes much easier, as some of them really blend in to the surroundings. (Which is actually kind of cool.) Not sure about further points, since I think it only extends the range on it if I remember right.