I would love to see some sort of dispatch building where you can add various gathering thralls who will just go out into the world and gather resources for you. It doesn’t have to be a lot of resources - clearly not as much as the player would ever gather, but there could be a time indication bar that once it ticks down, that thrall returns with a number of resources relative to what you have that building set to gather.
Additionally, there could be a risk of the thrall dying depending on what you ask it to gather. Maybe you could even just send your combat thralls out like this and the stronger the thrall, the less likely they are to die, with any tier 3+ thrall having a 0% chance to die when gathering simple materials such as stone or wood, and 4+ tier thralls having a 0% chance to die when gathering ironstone or coal.
I posted a suggestion about this not too long ago as well. The grind of the game is honestly obscene, and it would give thralls a purpose. I would be fine if they forgot the animation, pathing or AI entirely at first. Just make a generator like the Compost heap that takes a gatherer thrall to work that can be placed in the world.
I’m not a designer for Funcom, but if I were: I would suggest that we create gathering buildings/placeables that can be placed in the world (like a wood-pile or splitting station / mining shack or mining cart–not a metal one, but a wheeled wooden cart or something) that stays in the world and generates resources. I would also recommend that we start to look into alternative methods of Land Claim that can can be “captured” or seized by other players. If people were able to throw up resource generating properties in the sandbox that could be sieged/captured it would encourage more PvP on PvP servers for reasons other than “I don’t like you” or “I wanna wipe this server”.
As far as PvE goes. Excessive landclaim may be an issue, but this is also already an issue in the game that still needs addressing.
Unpopular opinion: passive resource gathering would be a terrible idea under the present circumstances. Once you hit level 60 and have the right gear, it’s actually ridiculously easy to farm up massive amounts of most resources in a rather short time.
People already complain about massive builds that take up a whole grid square (or several). Imagine what it would be like if you didn’t have to lift a finger to get those mats.
Not to mention that Funcom has more or less gone on the record that they’re not okay with passive resource acquisition. That’s one of the reasons they gave for changing fish traps.