I agree that the amount of effort currently required is fine, and appropriate. I do think that there needs to be some balancing, but I think that making the skills actually sustainable (at all levels of progression) would go a long way towards making grinding less boring. Talking about crafting, for instance, there supply is much greater than demand, especially for novice crafters who want to improve, and must therefore create large amounts of common/standard quality weapons before they are able to consistently produce superior/exceptional/finest quality weapons. It also requires a large amount of raw material, which for the moment many players need to mine themselves because they cannot afford to pay other people to mine it for them. This problem is compounded by the fact that many (professional) miners prefer to mine platinum because they make much more from it than (even though it has no current use in the world) than mining iron and coal. Crafting also produces very few PPs compared to the amount needed to advance a level. Thus we see that to train crafting skills, is not cost-effective in terms of monetary cost and experience, which means that many will have to hunt mobs to get PPs, and maybe tria as well if they are strong enough to challenge loot-producing monsters. If not, they have to grind plat to pay for their training.
Currently, I believe that the only family of skills that produce enough PPs and tria to sustain continued training is (melee) combat. You are even able to train both your weapons and armors skills at once, and excess PPs can be directed towards training stats, which further improves your combat power. Mining does pay for itself, if you can get the PPs. Crafting could pay for itself, if demand were increased. Further reducing the weapons sold my NPC merchants will probably be a major way of achieving this. Increasing the amount that NPC merchants pay for crafted weapons, and the price of their own weapons, would also be appropriate -- players would be given more reason to buy a crafted weapon if the NPC alternative is comparably priced, and players can sell their crafted weapons to NPCs for something that at least covers the cost of the materials. Especially since the Settings says a sword's cost is equivalent to a year's earnings for a farmer. By that standard, every character in PS is very, very wealthy.
Character stats are the anomaly in that they aren't trained, they are bought. Which leads to the previous comment that You can go from a 47-strength weakling to a 150-strength hero in minutes if you have the tria and PPs -- the latter of which might be difficult since the greatest gains in PPs are found in combat, which you are going to find difficult if you have 47 strength. Here, I would say that more grinding IS needed, absolutely. Maybe apply the skills progression system to stats as well -- you buy some theoretical knowledge, then train it up. Experience in stats would come through doing activities that require that stat. If it lowers your stamina, chances are it should exercise Endurance. This doesn't really make it more difficult, since you can go on doing the same things you do, but it will slow the progression to something that makes much more sense.
I wonder if the calls to eliminate PPs altogether are not unfounded. But instead of replacing it with something complex, why not just eliminate the need for PPs, and leave it at that? You still buy theoretical training, it still costs tria. Afterwards you train it to get experience in that skill as usual. PPs to me are just a hold-over from the leveling paradigm of most RPGs, which PS is trying to shy away from. Remove them and the amount you can train a skill is still dependent on how much that skill is actually used, so I don't see it as losing much of anything, except an artificial cap. If the amount of PPs rendered by an activity were harmonized with the amount needed to train that skill, it would definitely be balanced, but would have the same end effect as removing them anyway.
I deliberately avoided talking about skills you can train but don't have any use yet (ie cooking/baking) since this IS in alpha/beta. RP also goes a long way towards making grinding more enjoyable. This is especially seen in cooking and baking, where although the products are useless as far as (current) game mechanics goes, they do find a use in the RP community. There are also a few people that have decided to mine iron and plat as a service even though it's not the quickest way to get rich in this game.
Poll