From my understanding, the reason why we can no longer get a reasonable amount of gold is due to the dev's thinking that the economy was unbalanced with excess money. I would like to point out how badly flawed this idea is, and that drying up the gold mines has in fact shattered the economy in PS.
The few people who can be bothered standing around for hours to mine gold now, have to come back and charge more in auctions for their ore, sometimes up to 500T. This means smelters get less tria for smelting the gold and selling. The others are busy spending the little tria they have on training, which is ridiculously expensive, and then they have to mine again, which means they spend less time actually PLAYING the game. They have to train too, because the monsters are so difficult that newcomers can only barely kill rats, and no one is going to sit around and kill rats for several months before they can afford to train, so they will stop playing. Crafters will go out of business because not only is everyone too broke to buy their merchandise, but also their goods have to become even MORE expensive because smelters have to spend so much longer training to smelt stock for them, which means even fewer people will buy from them. People will be training less newcomers because they can't afford to fund them (and due to current flaws it's nigh impossible for a newcomer to get anywhere in the game without being handed weapons, armour or tria by someone else), so less new players will be wanting to play.
Apparently, the gold mines dried up to bring some "realism" into the game. Many players are considering leaving PS altogether because of these changes (myself included), and many more have already left. Yes, you brought some realism alright: you brought upon the Yliakum Great Depression!
