I'm with Solar on this. Timeouts are the lesser evil because you can actually do stuff while it is counting down. With map searching it'd be like before the wipe where rocks could be found 50/50 on a map so you just had to do the boring "enter, check, nothing, go out" until you found one rock and then repeated it over and over until overweight. But now it'd be 5/95 to find the rocks because you should be able to find one pile every 6 minutes, so it'd be really boring.
Sius, I can already find resources and explore the world. I just dig and then go move around to kill some plants or rats. It's essentially the same and with your maps we'll all be doomed.
Fun suggestion to mods:
Do a wipe *now* and get rid of gathering timeouts. Then make maps with resources appear only 5% of the time. In a few days there'll be wipe anyway and players will get to know how search -> reward is a pain in the ass too.
EDIT:
I didn't read through even half of the thread and just skimmed through to get to GM answers, so maybe this was noted before.
Huge flaw in your idea Sius:
Because timeouts are gone, resources are generated on maps sometimes, and factions don't give a damn about anything other than PvP, groups of people will enter location, see "interesting" rats or other stuff... And ignore it looking for items.
See, the faster they get to resources the more they'll get. And distractions such as "interesting" stuff are not interesting for them. So while a casual player can go investigate, they'll simply rush through the map, say "CLEAR" and rush through another. Again and again. Because the only thing limiting resources amount is luck and number of people searching. So big factions in two days will start saying "gay" and "this is stupid, remove searching," and, "why do I have to go through twenty maps to find stuff? this is lame."