Still in place but it's different now. You may have read this as well:
You have a pool of 2500 points per gathering class. Each time you gather something successfully you lose 10 points. When you get down to 1000 points (i.e. after 150 successful attempts) you will start to damage items more than occasionally. When you hit 0 points you will be unable to get anything. Each hour you can regain 100 gathering points, so one day (24 hours) should almost refill your gauge.
A Dev explaining it too:
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.
Edited by user Tuesday, April 17, 2012 1:08:36 PM(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified