Flask of Supreme Power

[Ruvanal]

If, say, 3 (miner) characters are in range, the one whose timer shows "green" and who is approaching the node, will cause the RTV to spawn *IF* there hasn't been a spawn in that area within, say, the last 15 minutes. If the other two miners notice "your"  spawn and are quicker at the vein, i.e. with a faster epic mount, then bad luck for you who has "activated" the node :)
As I've said, this is pure speculation, but I think that there is indeed some "subroutine" that checks your character against the potential spawn points. I think it works like this: Some "main routine" prevents that a new spawn can appear in less than i.e. 15 minutes on any RTV point within a certain area, and a "subroutine" checks if you have been mining there within the last i.e. 30 minutes. If there hasn't been a spawn within the last 15 minutes AND if you haven't mined there within the last 30 minutes, then a RTV will spawn at one spawn point in that area.
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Far too messy to code and bother with. During closed beta they had made a point near the end of mentioning how they were changing the (mob) spawning routine to change it from a fixed interval (typically 10 minutes in outdoor areas) to a dynamic system based on the number of players in the area (presumably an area would be say Darkshore or possibly one of the sub zones in that area like the southern highlords ruins). This dynamic spawning meant that they could put a respawn factor onto whatever and that would be used to set the effective rate based on the number of characters in the area.

To give an idea of this, on the first opening of the retail game and lot of the starting areas had some insane mob respawn rates due to the number of players all trying to get started at once. When one of my characters was doing the last quest in the starting area of the humans in Northridge Abby, I needed to collect a head from one of the Defias there. Now I had played that out a few times in beta and it was usually a pain to do if there were others around and they did not want to group. One player tagged and killed and you waited about 6 minutes for the corpse to despawn and then another 4 to have him reappear (and a tag race then to see who could get him and move on). Pretty rough to get done with competition. On that first day of retail though, with the massive number of players all in the starting areas, that named mob was repawning about once every 45 seconds. His corpses were littering the area since they still had the longer decay time unaffected. Similar things could be seen with some of the other named mobs players had to gao after the early days. It could be very dangerous even with some of the normal mobs around since they could at times end up respawning before you even had time to loot the one that they were replacing.

On the flip side of that, I have had some chance lately to be on doing some quests in some areas where there might be only 4-8 characters in the whole zone (Stonetalon for example). The respawns were slowed down enough that I could clear a large enough area around myself in the Charred Vale that it could take me ~20 seconds or more to run back to a mob that had finally respawned from what I killed earlier. Apparently the respawns were down to the 20+ minutes mark due to the low player counts there.

Now, although they did not specifically mention that the dynamic respawning would affect nodes like ore and herbs, it would make sense that they too were handled the same or skinning and cloth collection would be too far off kilter from mining and herb gathering if they were not scaled in the same manner. I have seen the effect of this with some of miners at various times. Mining in Tanaris when the area was effectively dead of players (13 players including mine and I could account for 9 of them as being in Zul Furrak at the time from various chats). The mining virtually sucked then, I could do full circut sweep and get a reasonable amount of ore, but after that there was only a trickle since the respawns were pretty slow and I had used up all the ones that had spawned prior to my logging on at that time. Compare that to more active times of day when I could do the same routes and pull in a fairly consistant amount of ore per circut. And that was with 2-4 other miners competing for the ore also. From my observation the ore and herb respawns are also set to be using this dynamic respawning. The best time to really make a haul on some of this is when there are a lot of players in the area, but almost none of them doing any active gathering of the item you are going for (ore/herbs). Skinning would go similar except for the need to kill the mobs in many cases, but then again there is the possibility of skinning the kills left by others from their questing.

From having looked at what I have run into in doing mining, not all the nodes are set to the same factor for respawning. There are some nodes in an area that seem to be the ones on the shorter factors; they come up often and at really busy times you can almost always find them on a collection curcuit (if you do not have too much competition in front of you). There are some other nodes that appear to be on very long respawn factors. These I have gone for many days (or weeks) without ever having a spawn at them, or only showing a spawn when the area is a major hotbed of activity.

This is most likely one the stronger factors in what some are seeing of the long respawn timer on the Black Lotus. They are set up as a replacement node for something else and are on a rather long respawn timer. Some of the zones that have this herb as a spawning point are not exactly the areas that have a strong reason for the players to stick around for extended periods of time. This in turn will leave those areas with a fairly slow respawn rate.