Looking at those threads it seems that the endless battles are fought because people fail to understand that we are not all playing for the same reason.
Players who do a lot of quests and are not yet max level will have more then enough money.
Players who do not do a lot of quests and prefer to level up to be competitive in PvP will be broke.
Players who are max level will be broke regardless of their playstyle.
(Sure there are exceptions, but let’s think about the main groups now)
So assuming that the main influx of gold are quests, then obviously those who do not do quests either because they are not interested in quests or quests are no longer available to them, will lack gold.
Assuming that the game wants to keep all of those players, there needs to be a balanced solution that will make each of those playstyles viable. Telling to player to change his playstyle does not really cut it, if the game is marketed to him differently. Both PvE and PvP should be viable playstyles and no one should be forced to switch boats at any time. That was the premise.
How to solve this?
Shift money income from quests to kills. Both PvE kills and PvP kills. After that, all of our groups of players have a guaranteed income by doing what they enjoy in the game.
The ones that I didn’t mention are crafters and traders. That would be another group of players that do not want to kill at all, do not want to quest, but want to excel in dealing with resources and items and be able to profit from sales. Or those who want to profit from market itself for example by buying cheap and selling for more. Crafter are currently not happy because of the price deflation which is caused by too many item drops and the fact that items are never destroyed. That makes their crafted items have almost no value. Exception are top crafters that can sell top items before the rest of the crafter catch up. But even they will become obsolete once the majority of players get their desired equipment.
Luckily there is a solution for that too. All item drops (mobs, boxes) should be significantly nerfed. And items should not have infinite durability. Then the players who are not into crafting will need to turn to the market and buy stuff that is crafted. That will make the market economy alive so the traders will benefit too. And going back to issue #1 other players will have the money now and will be able to participate in the market.
This, please… this.
While high mob density now is a problem cause they are just there to be annoying, grinding would be nice if we could actually something from killing random stuff besides elites.
I am honestly confused about flint. Is it for leveling engineering? It’s so easy to farm and engineering is easy to level so I don’t understand how anyone could have so much extra gold to spare on something so easy to just grab while running around?
You could say that about any resource in this game. Some players just don’t have the patience to level that crafting slowly so they find the recipes that need the fewest resources and they grind away.
There is no competition for farming flint though. You can run to a starter beach and have hundreds of flint in 10 minutes. It’s literally everywhere and spawns so often. It’s not a resource that should be expensive, it only is because of its tedium to gather it (one at a time like you said).
Gold on the other hand is cheap because of flawed crafting design. You can level up Jewel crafting without ever using Gold Ore. It’s more cost effective and faster to just farm silver because:
No recipe forces use of gold to craft it. (outside of settings etc)
Using gold as a replacement for silver offers no additional exp benefit, only higher base quality.
Why these two things exist I will never know. Obviously to keep low tier materials relevant, but at the same time it’s completely killed off higher tier materials. Of course you need gold for plat later, but for the purposes of levelling it’s pointless. It should either provide substantially more exp per crafted item if you use gold over silver, or there should be a break where you can’t craft items with just silver ingots - let’s say after 50-100 JC.
It’s useless for levelling yes, it’s not useless for making decent jewellery.
I was just giving you the reasons why it doesn’t cost more, but why it should, like you asked.
However, flint is definitely not harder to obtain - it costs more purely because people are too lazy to farm a material that ironically is one of the easiest to get. They really do need to make some big changes to crafting so that they aren’t devaluing so many materials just to make tier 1 worth more.
To sidetrack from the flint vs. gold discussion (though several good points were made) and go back to the OP and economy, I would like some folks feedback on something. I was out last night, killing some time and practicing with my musket while chatting with a friend. During that time I just pretty much stood in one spot and shot Ancients in the head. I was getting coin from about every other one that I killed. Not a ton, 3-5 gold per. But in about half an hour, killing about 100, I made close to 200 gold. And these were not high level Ancients, around 23 or so in Windsward. For those in the know, do higher level humanoids drop proportionately higher amounts of gold? If so, I may have a thought on the rational behind coin drops from kills.
Beyond the realism approach of why humanoids drop coin and beasts don’t (that undead is still wearing the armour and carrying the weapons they had in life, so they probably have some coin on them too. That rabbit I just skinned probably doesn’t carry a few coins in case it needs to buy an emergency supply of carrots) there is a mechanics reason for it as well. I kill an animal. I can skin it, and get gathering XP. I get hides, and meat, and possibly even some arcana or crafting mod items. There’s a lot more I can do than just kill it, from selling stuff on the trade post to crafting, as well as levelling skinning. But I kill a humanoid, most of those don’t apply, except the chance they drop the odd item. So I can see why there would be decent coin drops from humanoids but nothing from beasts.
For anyone with experience about high level or endgame beast vs. humanoid kills, does this apply? If not, I would fully support increasing coin drops from humanoids, either PvE or PvP. But for the bears and wolves and cats and beasties, there is already an inherent reward for killing them in the mats they drop. Thanks for reading.
But i will say my answer to the in game gold shortage is to make a toon on my other account that i run till it’s level 20 then i dump all his shit to my main, pocketing the gold and dumping all mats i got on an AH on my Main.
It’s about 2-5k roughly for every 2-5hrs depending on my focus and how active the market is for raw mats.
None early levels i did some bows then i mostly did tools for people for the cost of mats only.
150-200 did with startmetal spear and tools for people also with their mats or for the cost of mats.
Back to the topic…
You will never make everyone happy. Someone will always be on top and someone will always struggle to pay the taxes and fees ingame.
Currently only the pure PvP focused players struggle as they get neigher gold or azoth from taking part in PvP events outside of wars (that are limited).
PvE focused players will be swimming in gold as they get all the resources, gold from doing pretty much everything that is not pure harvesting or logging and they get the option to obtain highend, high value drops that sell for an average weekly income of a player.
So yeah there needs to be a way to get open world PvP and PvP fraction quests to reward more gold. 15 Azoth on kill at 60 would be a good start and 5-15 gold on kill. That should cover repair, food/potions and traveling. Munition/arrows will probably still put people into negative balance, but this is the burden of a ranged class here - less repairs, less weight to drag around, less azoth cost, but no free ammo for ya.