From what I've been told and experienced. Blues 100% are client side and refresh every Thursday. This goes for both crafting resources and fishing holes.
Golds are a bit more complicated and hard to test. Golds are both client side and also not client side in a way. Their demand is incredibly large right now and it's hard test things with them, but I did do testing with them in the beta when hardly anyone ever picked them. If a player has picked that respective gold node recently, they will no longer be able to see or interact with it after it refreshes. I found gold nodes my fellow tester couldn't see or pick, because they had already picked that node and many others in the area during that day.
As for the refresh time on golds? I think it can be an hour for the refresh, or maybe it was only an hour during beta. People say an hour, but you won't personally see that one again for at least a day if you were the one to pick it. Golds nodes you've picked are locked out on your end for a day, or for the week. My fellow testing compatriot said they are daily, but it could have just been different in beta than it is now, or they could have found different nodes after each day.
Blue ones in the open world are 100% player based. The only issue i found is the period before you become student as beginners seem to have different spawns.
Gold ones are shared and if another player picks it up they are gone for you as well. Don't know about the respawn time but locations are somewhat random per spawn. In some cases you need to unlock them if a heroic event creates another phase of the map that will overwrite the location. This phasing needs more testing. The nodes don't seem to have a lock out for the player anymore. While treasure hunting i came across the same nodes multiple times a day and at least one of the days i found a lot of them without seeing less nodes over time or towards the end of the SOLO-week. It seems to be more about other players in the area and how many of them look for resources.
I was also able to pick up the same gold nodes several times a day during beta and since release. If there is a lockout mechanism for gold nodes, it's more complicated than that.
The blue nodes having fewer/different spawns early on comes from an activity system according to the cn wiki. Some blue nodes will only appear after you have accumulated some kind of hidden activity.
One of the most noticable resources are Algal Crystals which are abundant in the grasslands for some players while others have trouble even finding one.
I was also able to pick up the same gold nodes several times a day during beta and since release. If there is a lockout mechanism for gold nodes, it's more complicated than that.
The blue nodes having fewer/different spawns early on comes from an activity system according to the cn wiki. Some blue nodes will only appear after you have accumulated some kind of hidden activity.
One of the most noticable resources are Algal Crystals which are abundant in the grasslands for some players while others have trouble even finding one.
Yesterday I picked up the same blue node twice, so it's not necessarily once a week. As you said, it's down to previous activity whether you see them or not.
I've learned a bit more about gold resource nodes and blues since the reset. I think Blues have a limit before they just stop loading in on your screen. Something like 10-20. It may vary depending on the area. After I got 10 or so tumbleweed spawns, I stopped seeing them in their usual locations where I know they can be on the weichaun highlands map. I usually get around 10 each week. I think this explains why someone claimed they harvested a blue in the same spot twice over a certain course of time. I usually go the whole map a once over until I stop seeing blues.
Initially, I thought golds behaved this way, and maybe they do to some extent because I know my fellow tester couldn't see a gold node I could. But who knows why anymore, it could be an unrelated factor, like them having 0 fortune. I say this because I had earned something like 70+ gold resource nodes over the course of a few hours right after Thursday maintenance. I checked the same 10 or so spawn locations and just kept getting rattan crystal and dust hearts over and over again. I even came back later that day and farmed these points just a bit more to see if they still worked. And they did.
What's more, I think spawn locations work more like a branch. One of several locations is possible for a resource node, it picks one. So when a node refreshes, it may not be the exact location, but a nearby one in the branch chosen instead. This is just a hypothesis though.
