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I've just achieved the PRODUCE 100 honour. And I'm the 13th person to reach it. And I've only just begun since Station missions. So 12 serious manufacturers, before me.

Damn, @Yayeh good on you for clearly laying it out all at once. Thank you for taking so much time out to write such detailed feedback. Great job.

I haven't had time until now to really lay out my thoughts on this (which are a lot), and for ease of reading, I'll be separating my long-winded response into three sections: 1. If there's a cap on gas clouds, why I do not think the initial farm seeded by Song "strangled" resources. 2. Why is there a perceived lack of resources (and I say perceived, because I am not a developer, so I cannot see how many asteroids/clouds there are out there currently, waiting to be gathered. and 3) Possible solutions.

DISCUSSION ON THE POTENTIAL GAS CAP

Again, this is speculation, because I am not a developer of the game, but let's say there is a cap on the amount of gas clouds that there can be at any given time. Song's farm had approximately 75 gas clouds in one zone comprising of three different clouds: tritium, helium11, and iriil. So for the sake of debate, let's say 25 of each. There are some in this discussion who believe that this gas farm was inhibiting other clouds forming in other areas, causing a very sharp decline in available resources, etc., because there is a cap on the amount of clouds. If the cap exists AND if the cap was defined by one particular resource --- take tritium for example --- then the 25 tritium clouds that were in one zone of the game took up 25 slots of the allotted amount of tritium gas clouds allowed. There are over 1000 space zones in the game. If we destroy those 25 tritium clouds, then the theory is that there are 25 more allowed to be "wild gas clouds." If these wild clouds are distributed evenly over 1000 space zones, that comes to 1 gas cloud per 40 zones. If this is the case, the perceived scarcity of resources would not change. Having a farm or not having a farm would not make a difference. 

If the cap is based upon the number of clouds total, regardless of cloud type, then again, those 75 clouds in the gas farm evenly distributed across 1000 zones of the game would still not make a difference in the perceived scarcity of resources. The only way that Song's gas farm would have made a huge impact on the possibly existing gas cap is if the cap was ridiculously low. If this is the case (which I don't think it is), is increase the gas cap (if there is one), and examine respawn rates and adjust accordingly.

Now, there IS an interesting possibility in the second example. Should the possible gas cap exist on the number of clouds regardless of type, then ULTARINE (and a lesser extent elessium) would be the reasons why there's a perceived scarcity of gas. Why? Because both the products that these gases produce and the little amount that's needed for those products make the demand for these two gases very small. Therefore, they go greatly under utilized, and therefore take up a large amount of allotted amount of gas.

WHY THE PERCEIVED LACK OF RESOURCES


There are multiple reasons why there's a perceived lack of resources (and again, I say perceived, because 1) I am not a game developer and cannot see how many resources there are out there, and 2) I have not taken the time to explore every inch of all 1000+ space zones out there.

#1) The last resource update was amazing. It effectively doubled the amount of resources with the changes to asteroids and amounts of gas needed to make refined units. In addition, the spawn rate was no longer tied to the amount of materials already existing in the game in players' cargo holds. The result was resource gathering Christmas. There were asteroids everywhere. There were gas clouds everywhere. It was really fun to go around and gather tons of resources for an extended period of time and manufacture tons and tons of products. This became the new norm (for awhile).

#2) Station missions appeared and gathering resources increased.  The station missions created a large demand for resources in order to keep up with repairs. I can only say what happened in Song, but the resource gathering contest that Song is sponsoring coupled with an incentive program for gathering resources generated a lot more interest in gathering resources. Let's assume that there was an increase of resource gatherers SH and CA. More gatherers = less resources. Less resources + potentially not effective respawning rate = even more perceived scarcity of resources.

#3) Material requirements for manufactured products. Many of the station missions required multiple # of the same items to complete repairs on the stations. Some of these materials have very difficult requirements to produce. Let's take rglass for example. It takes 8 vandium and 19 tritium to produce. Let's look at tritium, since this discussion is centered on clouds. It takes 95 unrefined tritium particles to make 19 refined units of tritium required for 1 rglass. If you look at the station missions, there's a lot of rglass, arrays, and sensors requirements. That's a lot of rglass needed. I don't know the exact numbers of how many rglass that Song has had to produce for station repairs, but I'm just imagining three factions needing that much rglass ------ yeah, that's A LOT of tritium that went into those products. And that's just station mission repairs. Add to that all the products that manufacturers made (if there were able to) that required rglass outside of station repairs, and yeah. There's going to be a perceived shortage of tritium clouds out there.

#4) The map and time.  Like I said earlier, there are over 1000 space zones. However, I think it is safe to say that players will generally search for resources closer the where the refineries are. Therefore, out of the 1000 space zones available for potential resource gathering, my guess is that there are zones that have been much more thoroughly gathered from than ones very far away from refineries. Player tendencies therefore have "made space smaller." And again, when you have many more gatherers looking for resources in a smaller space, there's going to be a perceived scarcity of resources. And why wouldn't you go explore zones less traveled? Time and marks. It takes a very long time to travel out to those zones and back to a refinery. Yes, it certainly is possible, but give a player the option of flying all the way out to one of the less explored zones and come back to a refinery is asking a lot, particularly since there are a lot more fun and rewarding things to do in Starmourn. And sure, you can decrease the time by using skipdrive skills or voidgates, but voidgates cost marks to use. In many cases, using the void gates sucks out any profit that you might have gotten from resource gathering. It just makes more sense to invest in other areas of the game.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

While there are several that come to mind, I realize that this post took more time than I have, so I'll try to summarize one interesting idea in regards to #4 (the map). One possible solution is introduce a couple of stations in cosmpiercer zones that can support refineries. There's a lot of possibilities with this:

1) Stations or potential refinery sites in cosmpiercer zones, particularly between Zinari and Ibyssian, would make it at least more enticing for gathers to explore those areas and less time consuming to gather resources.
2) This would create more value in owning cosmpiercers.
3) This would create more potential use of existing OPEN PK spaces ---- YAYYYYYY SPACE BATTLESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
4) (insert other awesome things here, because I've run out of time)

Please discuss this post and other posts further.

I find the objections here disingenuous, especially since CA has also started up their own farm.

While I agree that spawn rates of resources should be raised (and that a modifier be added so that it's possible to support a larger population, something that static rates don't allow), the problem that people really have isn't with farms themselves; rather, it's that one faction of the game (not theirs) figured it out first.