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the new lands could be a good place to introduce some new crafting mat's from both harvesting and hunting activities.

perhaps adding a few new mob's, aggressive and non-aggressive, these mob's could be "unique" to the upper branches regions (in simpler terms, you could ONLY find these mob's in the newly found "old lands") this should allow us to add a few new looted mat's we would need enough new mob's added to add the following types of mat's: sting, claw, beak, horn, mandible, bone, skin, pelvis, hoof, eye, bud, mushroom, wood, shell, leather, nail, spine, tail, ligament, rostrum, tooth, moss, trunk, whiskers, secretion, fang, and wing.
this would seam like a large number of mat's to add and would require a large number of mob's to add, but keep in mind that some mob's drops as many as 5 different types of mat's, thus it may only take as many as 4 or 5 mob's to complete this task.
these regions would also be a good place to introduce some of the named and bosses not currently used but are programmed and coded already. there is a large list on the ryzomnomnom.com (ryzom wiki) that tells of all the named and bosses programmed in the game at the start. many of the listed mob's appear nowhere on atys, and while some are used for events, others are not. much like the days of long ago the kitin exterminator's could again spawn in the wild once every 60 days (randomly in time as well as location). they don't have to be so large to lag the server down or risk crashing it, but they can still be massively hard to kill as they were in the past. they could still be used for invasions, and those invading could be the huge creatures with a reputation of crashing the server as they did in the past.
this would also be a good place to introduce higher level mob's that are limited in levels on the surface regions and in PR. what i mean to say here is that there are some mob's that are not found at higher levels, some only reach levels up to 180 give or take. for example: (the following does not include choice/excellent/supreme) clopper's max out at Q109; cray max out at Q162; goari max out at Q106; igara max out at Q144; izam max out at Q135; javing at Q149; yber at Q95; ragus at Q153; bawaab at Q147; bodoc at Q170; capryni at Q127; frippo at Q91; gnoof at Q176; lumper at Q179; messab at Q127; raspal at Q147; rendor at Q127; these numbers may not be 100% exact as i used out of game resources to find them. i did leave out yubo's because they are always below level 50 (the highest is Q46 other then the choice and excellent which are Q60). these mob's are in need of having bigger cousin's on atys, perhaps the upper branches would be the place for those bigger cousin's. how hard would it be to kill a Q244 igara or a Q235 izam? the upper branches would be a good place to find out the answer; since homins can reach a level of 250, why shouldn't the mob's be able to reach similar levels. for most of these mob's adding some that would raise the current max level by 100 would be enough to do this, however some would need slightly more and other's slightly less. the upper branches would be the perfect place to ensure that all mob's reach levels over 200 (preferably at or over 225) and creating these mob's would be done in increments of 10 to 15 levels until reaching their new max levels.

the new mat's could also be unique to the new "old lands" it doesn't require more then one new mat of each of the current types, though as many as 4 would really create something new. so we need new: shell, bark, fiber, wood node, amber, wood, seed, sap, resin, and oil. one in each of these would add a new mat to each of the current types we have, and would add to the potential of crafting recipes, adding more then one of each mat would allow much greater variations in recipes, thus adding to the new content by adding new life to the crafting of gear, would could potentially bring back many older players (which is part of the over-all idea here). as these mat's would not be found anywhere else in game, they would not have a supreme (unless these new lands provided surface supreme's WITHOUT forced pvp zoning) counterpart. if there is no supreme counterpart to the new harvest mat's the excellent mat's would have the supreme mat stats, the choice grade mat's would have excellent stats, fine grade mat's would have choice stats, and basic mat's would have the fine grade stats. that would make these new mat's of good value to everyone, and as excellent mat's are seasonal, time, and weather based, this would make their collection difficult in it's self. the harvested mat's in this region are ecosystem restricted as well, thus you would be forced to craft them with that land's native craft plans, further restricting their use (at least for the choice and excellent mats).
a further addition to making harvesting mat's in the upper branches more of a challenge is that nodes would be random in what the max Q would be. because the idea here is to mix everything from Q150 to Q250, the max Q of nodes would need to be random. to better explain this part here is an example: say a homin prospects 10 nodes (max nodes possible for master harvester) and the first node dug is max Q of 150, while the second node they dig is max Q of 250, followed by the third node being max Q of 150 again, the forth node could be max Q of 200, the fifth node could again be max Q of 250, and so on. this would change with every prospection and every node dig would be random as to what that node's max Q could be. this would increase the challenge of collecting harvested mats in the upper branches, which would also warrant the higher grade of stats given to the lower grade mat.

i don't expect every point here to find it's way into the upper branches (most likely little of these will, and i highly doubt we'll see exterminator's in the wild, even in these new lands) but the over all idea is to attempt to give the game a clear path for updating in a way that would promote a more favorable addition of content.