I’d like to provide a different way of looking at azoth as a source of world-bending power (it defies the rules and restrictions we expect) rather than a required commodity.
Fast Travel
Towns and Shrines
Given you must unlock travel nodes, this should have no azoth cost associated with it IF you are NOT encumbered. If you know the node, you can travel node to node with no penalty. As you get bigger bags or use an encumbrance potion, you can travel node to node with more stuff. However, if you are encumbered, you can use azoth to bend the rules and pay 1 azoth per pound of encumbrance to still travel.
Inns and Homes
Inns and homes should keep the encumbrance restriction. In fact I think Inns should stay unchanged - it’s a free teleport with that restriction to anywhere you set it. Homes should also stay unchanged as they already have the rule bending concept of using azoth to reset the cooldown. This fits perfectly into the model and provides reasonable balance.
Storage Access
Town Storage
Currently there is a mechanic (if a town is owned by same faction) to pay gold to move items to your inventory. This concept doesn’t make sense in the world. Did you pay some other person to run it to you? Right now you can use anything in the current town storage when crafting. Why not add a rule bending mechanic with azoth here. You can spend 1 azoth per alternate town storage per recipe crafted to consume materials in that other town’s storage. Icons get a blue indicator showing your materials aren’t local. With the fast travel changes, it’s trivial to jump town to town to gather up your items, so this is purely an ease-of-use mechanic to spend azoth on to save you time.
Trading Post
Currently you can search all trading posts but only buy from the current town. Open that purchase option up to let you spend azoth to materialize the object across towns. You buy from your current town, no problem. You want to buy from another town, it costs 1 azoth but the item still appears in your inventory. With the fast travel changes, it’s trivial to jump town to town to buy items, so this is purely an ease-of-use mechanic to spend azoth on to save you time.
Crafting
The existing mechanics to use azoth to buff craft opportunity fits nicely here.
Additionally though a repurpose system could be added - spend azoth to remove or alter gems, attributes, perks. Want to switch from healing to dps? You can spend azoth to adjust your gear.
Character
After a certain level weapons already use azoth to reset their traits/skills. It should be the same for attributes. It makes no sense that you spend gold to change from being acrobatic to buff. Your attributes are the physical aspects of your character… you should use a physics bending mechanic to alter them.
Want to change your appearance? Easy solution to make that azoth based in the future.
Where I am going with all this?
Azoth is perfectly aligned to become a real-world money commodity. Right now; however, it is too interwoven into basic gameplay requirements for that to make sense. It presents a frustrating barrier to group play (the foundation of MMOs). Keep the current level of “free” generation and move the existing azoth systems to all be “ease of life” mechanics similar to what I’ve outlined above - tweak the cost as needed. Now you remove a lot of meaningless gold dumps and remove a lot of barriers preventing players and companies from being able to do things together… but you massively open up a system to let you spend more time doing the things you want to do and a way to bypass poor governorship decisions. We already have drops that allow players to sell azoth as a gold making mechanic…
What you end up with is a simple model to buy azoth or even a subscription system to provide azoth levels or remove azoth costs for a monthly fee. This becomes very similar to the ESO model allowing you to do everything in game but paying extra for ease of life rather than required mechanics (SWOTOR model). You end up with a really nice system of tokens or azoth for doing things.
Maybe a paid option isn’t required… I only point it out as I’ve heard others kicking around concerns with it. If it done right, allowing azoth packages/services/fees would not really be a problem at all.