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I'm either exceedingly cheap or old fashioned (or masochistic), but I hate purchasing things off the trading post that I can make or harvest myself. Recent case in point: pristine toxic spore samples. Those babies are 18 silver EACH! Now that wouldn't be a problem for me if you didn't need 10 of them to make the raid meta utility consumable for power and condi dps classes. Why are they so expensive? Oh I don't know, probably because you can only get them on a low level map no one goes to for any other reason. Not to mention they are scattered around that map so you can't efficiently run between nodes, and you have to harvest several nodes that give junk before you finally get a single pristine toxic spore.(If you're outrageously lucky you may get 5, but don't hold your breath. We wouldn't want you to die.) This sort of thing leads to some interesting player behavior. I recently read on Reddit (and saw this at every node when I was harvesting myself) players are standing at the nodes while semi-afking for hours in order to harvest them easily and make money. Turns out they re spawn every approximately 10 minutes so maybe it's not too bad, but it's not what I'd call "engaging game play" either. I've gone back to my old standby: bring out the alts in full force. I used to do this for lemongrass when I was the chef in my old WvW guild. Simply park all of your less used alts in the map (don't forget to pile on the gathering boosts first-guild hall and boosters) and log in every once in a while and harvest with everyone. Sounds reasonable, until I calculated I have enough gold to purchase enough of these to raid 9 hours per week for 10 years. That's assuming I actually play a class that needs these all the time--and I don't. Most people would stop doing it now that they know that. It won't stop me. Here's my feeble attempt to crash the market. If you're interested, this is a map of toxic seedling spawns: