Why would you sit and stare at the timer when you are free to move around your house and do other things, you are free to interact.
Yeah I missed that point and edited while you were answering I guess. Like I said I never really saw this used besides multitasking appliances that also have timers, its just micro-managing the timer which is fine and everyone does it but it is not what I was referring to.
When you are mining / gathering you are literally stuck in one position staring at the floor while occasionally moving 2 feet over cause the "resource depleted" has nothing to do with being aware of your surroundings, its probably one of the worst mining mechanics Ive ever seen.
Same goes for half of the plants in the world, you pick the same mushroom/flower 15 timers until it says "resource depleted" instead of grabbing the plant and.... idk, making it dissapear until its pickable again like every other game thats actually successful. Who even designs this crap
Well, the design decision seems obvious - they want to lock YOU (not your character) in place for enough time to allow player bandits to find you (not sure how well it works with the 6x map and we will only find out at release population levels). What many other games do for example is lock your character into an animation that takes an extended time and then you harvest the full flower and move on to the next node. I don't want my character locked in an animation in a full loot game and this is why you have mini-animations and multiple resources per node. Would anyone really prefer if picking up a flower would lock your character into an animation but you would get the full node output in one go to compensate ?
It is the same with mining, you are "locked" for the 2 minutes to maximize yield but if something happens or you hear footsteps you are completely free to stop the gathering process and respond in a manner you see fit. Now I am not saying mining is perfect in MO - I am just saying I don't want a minigame to make it worse.
So no, I don't think its the "worst" design ever seen, I think its a basic design adapted to a full loot game.