Before I start my post I will state that I do not harvest from nodes currently being harvested by other players if I can avoid it (i.e. there was one time a guy was farther back behind a tree trying to avoid aggro - and I did take one hit from the node without meaning too).
My reasons for this is I understand many people don't like it and would rather not burn my bridges, not necessarily because I think doing it is the wrong course of action. Also much of my time is spent in antonica and I rarely run across people at my nodes anyways.
All that said, I don't personally care if people harvest from the node I harvest from.
Quote:
If i walk in a resturant and see a guy eating a sandwich, i dont help my self to it. I think its a no brainer!
Let take this quote and look at it a different way. Your on your way home and stop at a McDonalds. They have 3 apple pies left. There are other people who want those apple pies too behind you. You could just take all three apple pies because you got there first, or you could share.
Now, if you did take all three apple pies, and you stop at the next mcdonalds on the way you could buy them out of pies just cause you got there first.
The moral of this is that we are not necessarily creating the most courteous of guidelines here when we are stating that harvesting from someone else's node is rude.
To be completely honest all of these people screaming about this reminds me of the old Daffy Duck/Bugs Bunny cartoon where they find some treasure and Daffy just keeps yelling "mine, mine, all mine"
The first problem is people keep assuming that all three harvest from one node should be treated as singular object. Since nodes are random spawns, you really can't camp them - so we'll use EQ 1 as an example with random mobs.
If you were a newbie character in EQ1 and you were trying to find "item X" to finish your newbie armor and you saw three mobs in the same general area, you would start to fight one.
Now if someone came up and attacked the one you were attacking - that would be KSing. in EQ2 they cannot do that - you are always going to have your chance with that one mob.
The other two are fair game - unless your fast enough someone else may come in and attack those two mobs.
Perhaps the easiest answer to this whole problem would be to make all nodes a single harvest - in this way they would constantly be rotating, and then it would be locked in to the one player and everyone's happy - no harvest stealing and everything is fair.