(cough) That all sounds nice and all, but right now... I have a couple thousand PPs and zero cash, thanks to glyphs costing $2k, one single rank in casting being $600, and a 10 stack limit on any item... which, coincidentally, directly results in a 5-fold increase in non-productive travel time.
Mining as an income source is simply not viable as currently implemented. Between failure rates, stack limits, and \"run times\" to sell and get back... well, you\'re an idiot if you persue it as anything other than a massive timesink while playing SubSpace or something. Personally, I\'d think you\'d have better fun with a ChiaPet... at least it would provide a faster sense of motion or progress.
With Tefs being the best stack-value I\'ve found so far, that\'s $160 per haul. Time spent gathering at the arena is (if you\'re alone) 2 or 3 minutes. If the Tefs are shared, it may be up to 6 minutes. Run time to the merch and back will be another 5. Basically, Arena tefs are good for about 22 tria per minute, in the better case. 18 tria per minute, average.
Wildland tefs are worse, since the run to & from is 11 minutes or so. The kill rate averages about 3 per minute, +/-. Need 10 to fill a stack, so... that\'s 3 minutes of farming, followed by an 11 minute run to/from the merch. 14 minutes per haul, that\'s about 11 tria per minute. Travel times can be cut down in all cases by using /spawn, but that\'s technically an exploit and defeats the game\'s intent. I used to be able to gather about $800 tria in well under half an hour with plenty of time for chatter and play, which made studying a skill progression somewhat trivial while playing. Now, we\'re looking at about 70 minutes... and I will *not* be in a pleasant mood while doing it, since I cannot easily type to people without my toon stopping dead in it\'s tracks. It\'s probably for the best anyway, since what I\'d have to say would not be very appropriate.
Rats won\'t be any better; I suspect they\'ll be worse unless /spawn is abused, since run times and mob competition are significant. You can easily nail the rats who\'ve fallen off the world, but that assumes you\'ve got the rank (and cash to achieve that rank) to pull it off, and also assumes that noone else has thought of it. After this post, you can assume that they have.
Abuse yields an interesting result, however: Scroll farming. Best time on scrolls is 100 in about 17:30, with heavy use of keyboard shortcuts and /spawn. 28 seconds to fetch 10 scrolls depending on server load and network latency, then a little over a minute spent on selling and returning. That\'s 22 tria per minute with the least effort, but you must ignore the constant /duel spam. If you found it interesting that the temple has become so popular as of late, now you\'ll know why... and it aint because they\'ve all found Jesus.
So, we\'ll pick a ballpark of the best case, which is about 20 tria per minute. One glyph costs $2000 - that\'s 100 minutes with no interruptions, no mob contentions, just non-stop, mash keys and go... don\'t stop, don\'t walk, don\'t talk. The bulk of the time will be spent running (or waiting for /spawn)... which is odd for a \"social\" game, since the game does not allow you to chat while running unless you perform various gymnastics with your mouse.
This would probably be great if there were other sources of income, though, but there aren\'t any. I\'d very much like to have all the glyphs, I\'d very much like to step through the various ranks in each \"way\", and I\'d very much like to see how they work (or not), so that the spell/rank behavior can be evaluated. Dumb things like DOTs that reset the mob\'s health when they complete, DDs that suck additional manna as \"power\" is increased with no actual benefit, things like these need a pile of cash to discover and map. And right now, it aint gonna happen, because even the most simple bounds checking is like having your teeth drilled. Tell me if some idiot would be dumb enough to study if training strength actually has an impact on anything. Or \"int\", or \"will\" or anything else for that matter... what retard would bother spending three days to pump a skill fully green, only to discover it isn\'t implemented yet. \"Body\", for example.
The game is early beta. This is not the time to start retarding the economy, especially when every freakin thing that needs evaluation requires cash.
